Conflicting reports continue to appear about the future of the National Accountability Bureau, the organization dreaded by errant politicians, bureaucrats and defaulting businessmen.

Earlier it was reported that two wings of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) were to be merged into NAB. However, FIA officials were reluctant to join NAB because of its uncertain future. Subsequently, it was reported that NAB, which is still directly under President Musharraf’s control, is to be strengthened and restructured, and its chairman is to be given sweeping powers. He can now appoint any number of advisers and consultants, and those who provide information to NAB would be given handsome rewards.

Following a new amendment in the NAB ordinance, the chairman of this body, equipped with long tentacles, would be appointed by the president, not in consultation with the Chief Justice of Pakistan but in consultation with the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly. This move is politically more advisable given the current image of the judiciary in the country.

Simultaneously, it has been announced that the Asian Development Bank will give the government 120,000 dollars as technical assistance for reforming and restructuring NAB within a period of six months. A great deal has to be achieved with the relatively small grant. The president has now amended the ordinance to provide for a four-year term for the chairman of NAB instead of the three-year term stipulated by the Supreme Court. The amended ordinance also states that the term ‘simple imprisonment’ should now be read as ‘rigorous imprisonment’.

Meanwhile, in a surprising development, Interior Minister Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat has said that he would sue NAB for putting him behind bars on baseless charges. He has also rejected the Exit Control List which includes his name as well as those of many politicians. A military spokesman of NAB has been quoted as saying that NAB would continue to pursue a loan case of Rs 241 million against the minister, as the Supreme Court has given him only temporary relief.

The outcome of the tussle between the interior minister and the military-led NAB remains to be seen. Judging by the manner in which the cases against the MQM’s Dr. Ishratul Ibad were withdrawn before he was sworn in as governor of Sindh, the loan default case against the minister is not likely to continue. Some sort of a compromise is likely to be reached to avoid embarrassment to the key minister.

NAB’s role has steadily diminished over time. When it was set up initially three years ago, it was stated that it would not investigate the role of the armed forces or the judiciary, which was already too large an exception. In December it was reported that NAB would not look into any new case against politicians, but continue investigating old cases. However, these too are being dropped one after another or simply shelved. Instead NAB would focus on the role of the bureaucracy, it was stated.

Soon after, Javed Burki, former chairman of the Pakistan Automobile Corporation and one of his managing directors, Muzammil Niazi, were arrested. They have been charged with causing a loss to the exchecquer of Rs 1.765 billion.

Taking action against officials for acts of corruption in isolation from political leaders may be a smart step, even if the move can be criticized on ethical grounds. It could prevent officials from acting in collusion with their ministers or other politicians in committing illegal acts and prevent corruption to that extent.

In fact, what the country now needs to prevent corruption is an increasing number of whistle blowers.

The fact is that businessmen or industrialists who deal with the government on a regular basis will not expose corruption. They continue to bribe the officials as they have always done and benefit from that. They do not want to rock the boat and get into trouble unless the demand of the officials becomes excessive or too arbitrary. Hence external intrusion in the form of the FIA or other anti-corruption elements is essential to detect corruption.

In the US, three women have been honoured for exposing corporate crimes as well as critical official lapses. Time magazine has named the three women as Persons of the Year 2002. The women are vice-president Sherron Watkins of Enron and Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom, who exposed the absolute rot in their companies, and Coleen Rowley of the FBI who exposed the failure of the agency to act on earlier tips and prevent the colossal tragedy of 9/11. Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom had exposed how her company had covered up losses of 3.8 billion dollars which finally led to its collapse.

We need such upright and diligent whistle-blowers in Pakistan to expose the massive corruption in our midst. Such persons must be handsomely rewarded for that by an independent agency such as NAB. But NAB’s record has not been too good so far. Out of Rs 92.73 billion it has helped to recover, only Rs. 2.61 billion is made up of direct recovery from the corrupt. According to the recoveries made until December 1, Rs 80.89 billion consists of recoveries of bank loans. NAB also helped PTCL to recover Rs 5.75 billion and the Capital Development Authority recover Rs 248 billion. A lot of money made through corruption or dirty deals, however, remains to be recovered.

Following Zafarullah Khan Jamali’s succesful vote of confidence as prime minister, he had stated that corruption is an issue and he would deal with it. Hiowever, given the government’s slender majority and fragility, he may not be able to act tough, particularly when ruling party politicians are the beneficiaries of such corruption.

In exceptional cases the courts can initiate suo moto action, but that has not been a hallmark of our judiciary or our approach to rooting out corruption.

In fact, Benazir Bhutto has accused the government of using NAB cases as a tool against her party members to force them to form forward blocs in the assemblies and make them join hands with the government, as the interior minister has done.

The government has been boasting that there is no corruption at the top, which is an admission of corruption at the broad lower levels. This was stated during the Nawaz Sharif period and continues to be repeated by the military rulers. The people have become increasingly sceptical of such claims.

As far as the broad mass of the people are concerned, they are critically affected by corruption at the lower levels, beginning with the policeman and the tax-collector. This corruption stems from the assumption of those officials that doing one’s duty is some sort of a favour to the people and should come at a price.

International aid agencies, like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, are concerned about corruption at all levels, particularly at the lower level,which hits the poor. They are interested in fighting poverty, and are aware poverty and corruption go together. Hence they are ready to fund activities aimed at fighting corruption at all levels. One example is the Asian Development Bank’s funding for the reform of NAB.

The prime minister believes that corruption is due to poverty or the low pay of officials. That is distorting the picture or seeing only a small part of it. Senior officials, including the well-paid and provided with all the costly perquisites too, are also prone to indulge in corruption in a big way. If the former chairman of the senate has outstanding telephone dues of almost Rs 3 million that is also a form of corruption. In the first place, how did the telephone come to be used to that extent or allowed to be used by others sofreely?

We are told by the chairman of the task force on CBR reforms that the proportion of money paid by the tax payers which goes into the pockets of the tax collectors is 40 per cent. The tax collectors are not poor by any means and the amount they extract from tax payers is not small either. So corruption should not be approached from the old angle that the poor official indulges in it but not the well to do or well provided for. It is a disease which can afflict anyone if there are no checks, no punishment and no effort at recovering ill-gotten gains.

We are now also seeing many cases of sales tax or tax refunds to exporters though no exports have taken place. The deviousness of the exporters combined with the collusion of senior tax officers makes such illegal refunds possible.

The fact is that we have a record of being declared the second, third, and fifth most corrupt country in the world by Transparency International in the 1990s. At a time when we are going all out to seek foreign investment we cannot afford such a perception to remain.

Can NAB rise to the occasion and play a far larger role in rooting out corruption? Not if its role is constantly being reduced rather than being enlarged. Large sections of officials and representatives are being excluded from its ambit , including the military, judiciary as well as politicians.

A strong anti-corruption drive needs strong leadership and great political will. Otherwise, the corrupt will know how to get around the rules and regulations and avoid the tentacles of NAB.

The central question now is: can we separate corruption from our political life or reduce it to an absolute minimum? It is not enough to increase the pay of policemen and a few other groups of officials. The pay of everyone else, too, has to be increased at the lower levels in particular.

That would mean more inflation. If that has to be avoided there has to be heavier taxation. But that will add to the the hardships of the people and the benefits may come too late. The role of General Musharraf as the president is crucial in this regard. He is the appointing authority for NAB and its monitor. And since the chairman of NAB has to be appointed by the president in consultation with the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly the opposition can play a major role in monitoring the work of NAB. It will be worthwhile for NAB to submit not only an annual report to the National Assembly but also quarterly reports, as is being done in the case of listed companies in Pakistan. If the companies need such vigilant watching, the government needs far more attention; more so in a key area such as corruption. That is how the fear of punishment can be put into the hearts of officials as well as political leaders who misuse officials or let them indulge in various malpractices. Only constant vigilance will pay dividends and not a casual political approach or simply repeating that there is no corruption at the top.

Darn, but those weapons of mass destruction keep turning up in the wrong places.

Forward air bases, army infantry units, a hospital ship and docile yet combat-trained reporters are all being readied for a “regime change” war against Iraq promoted as a way to rid the world of an arsenal Saddam Hussein doesn’t seem to have.

That United Nations inspectors, even after American intelligence briefings, are coming up empty-handed is embarrassing enough, but then North Korea had to steal the show by taking the wraps off its far more advanced nuclear weapons programme.

That’s pretty scary because American intelligence agencies believe that bizarre, unpredictable North Korea already has enough plutonium and tested bomb technology for one or two functioning nuclear warheads that can easily be lobbed at our ally South Korea, home base of 37,000 US soldiers. Pyongyang in 1998 fired one of its long-range Taepodong missiles over Japanese territory. American intelligence officials believe that the regime is working on missiles capable of reaching Hawaii and beyond.

Yet we have made it clear we are not planning to go to war with North Korea.

“We have no hostile intent toward North Korea, and we hope they will come to their senses,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday. He later added that “nobody is mobilizing armies, nobody is threatening each other yet.”

Powell went on to say: “Let’s take this patiently. Let’s take it with deliberation. Let’s work with our friends and allies.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s the one proven warrior in the Bush White House who seems to understand that peace is worth fighting for and that diplomatic finesse is not a sign of weakness; war is.

Were it not for Powell, the chicken hawks in the administration — warmongers who have not themselves experienced battle — already would have us invading Iraq without giving U.N. inspectors a chance.

Led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, these strident cheerleaders for so-called preemptive action are obviously disappointed that the Iraq inspections have turned up nothing more then the rusting remnants of a deadly weapons programs originated — and used — with the full knowledge of the US government to punish fundamentalist Iran.

Now, however, Iran, still in Bush’s putative “axis of evil” along with Iraq and North Korea, may have a much more advanced nuclear weapons programme than Iraq.

In fact, the Shiite fundamentalists must be high-fiving in Tehran over the costly American makeover of Central Asia. These fundamentalists would be the biggest benefactors of any takedown of neighboring Iraq, as they were when the US installed Iran’s longtime puppets, the Northern Alliance, as top dogs in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the nuclear non-proliferation regime is a shambles, with President Bush publicly derisive about existing arms control pacts. Bush insists that we will be just fine relying on a cockamamie missile defense fantasy that is arguably the biggest defence contractor boondoggle in the nation’s long history of such deals.

Feeling safe yet? You shouldn’t be.

Washington’s foreign policy is now less logical than Pyongyang’s. A starving dictatorship’s clumsy blackmail attempts at least make some twisted sense in that the Bush administration has refused, from its very first days, to even discuss North Korea’s persistent request for a non-aggression pact with the United States.

The administration plan is to isolate this paranoid excuse for a nation, as if it isn’t already the most isolated place on Earth.

If we can’t make peace with an utterly defeated nation like North Korea, we’re in trouble. From Columbine to Weimar Germany, humiliating those with nothing to lose is always a recipe for disaster.

South Korea and Japan understand this, and both countries are making major moves in an attempt to bring the North Koreans back into the world community.

The United States, which unleashed the nuclear monster and is still the only nation to have used this deadliest weapon of mass destruction against innocent civilians, should also understand why other nations want one.

It’s a sick and ultimately suicidal obsession, but who are we to talk when we are designing ever more efficient nuclear weapons for preemptive use, underground “bunker busting” and God knows what else?

We are the ones who continue to give legitimacy to the weapons of mass destruction, threatening devastating preemptive strikes, including possible use of nuclear weapons, against those who defiantly refuse to bend to the will of Washington.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration remains detached from the destabilizing Israeli-Palestinian nightmare, is struggling to gain footing against Al Qaeda and is apparently indifferent to the successes of Muslim fundamentalism in Chechnya, Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine and Pakistan.

Instead, we are mobilizing our massive forces against a weakened secular dictator 6,000 miles away who doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with a series of devastating terrorist attacks.

What is happening here? Certainly not the construction of a coherent foreign policy aimed at increasing the security of the United States or our allies.

This is an administration that in two years has so mucked up our approach to the world that merely applying the demands of logic is made to appear unpatriotic.— Los Angeles Times

(Sealed off as ‘Top Secret’ by the State Department and CIA, now after three decades, 46 declassified documents — some ‘sanitized’ — and an audio clip of Nixon-Kissinger offers a compelling peek at President Nixon and his security adviser Henry Kissinger’s machinations during the 1971 India-Pakistan crisis)

Inside the Oval Office, August 2, 1971, an exasperated President Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger curse India for wanting to pick up a fight with Pakistan. Actually, the timing is skewed. Nixon and Zhou Enlai have clandestinely taken a shine to each other facilitated by President Gen.Yahya Khan. But the “god-damn Indians”, as Nixon and Kissinger call them, are giving the Americans a run for their money by refusing to sit and watch silently the two siblings — East and West Pakistan — slug it out with each other.

“We have already given 100 million dollars to India for the refugees (pouring in from E. Pakistan),” Kissinger informs Nixon who is convinced the US is “making a terrible mistake” by heaping dollars on New Delhi. “India is economically in good shape, but no one knows how the god-damn Indians are using this money. They are not letting any foreigners enter the refugee areas. Any foreigners, and their record is outrageous!” says Kissinger.

The White House conversation comes a day after the Beatle George Harrison and his soul mate Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitar player, hold a “Concert for Bangladesh”(months before its birth) to raise money for the refugees escaping the reign of terror unleashed by the Pakistan army after Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League has swept the polls in East Pakistan during the 1970-71 general elections but is now being outlawed.

“So who is the Beatle giving the money to — is it the god-damn Indians?” asks a frustrated Nixon. “Yes,” says Kissinger flatly, adding that Pakistan has also been given $150,000 food aid but the major problem “is the god-damn distribution.” Nixon jumps in, “We have to keep India away”. Kissinger couldn’t agree more: “We must defuse the refugee and famine problem in East Pakistan in order to deprive India (read Indira Gandhi) of an excuse to start [a] war with Pakistan.”

“We have to avoid screwing Pakistan that outrageously. It could blow up everything,” concurs Kissinger. And the solution, according to him, is: “We should start our god-damn lecturing on political structures, as much as we can and while there will eventually be a separate East Bengal in two years (he says it so very casually) but it must not happen in the next six months.”

The man accused of throwing a monkey wrench in Nixon’s and Kissinger’s plans is Joe Sisco, the distinguished assistant secretary of state for political affairs, famous for his bluntness.

“He’s a maniac and needs to be stopped,” says an obsessed Kissinger. “Whose side is Sisco on?” questions Nixon. “He’s on the side of Pakistan,” answers Kissinger. “His department is also on the side of Pakistan, but he has his own ideas...” The audio clip gets inaudible at this point.

But the 46 documents continue to tell it as it was.

As early as May, Sisco sent a memorandum to Nixon warning of a war between India and Pakistan because “(1)continued military repression in the East, (2) the refugee flow into India, and (3) Indian cross-border support to Bengali guerillas (the Mukti Bahini).”

In the widely-circulated ‘Blood’ telegram, American Consul-General Archer Blood in Dhaka angrily condemns his country for failing “to denounce the suppression of democracy”, “to denounce atrocities”, and for “bending over backwards to placate the West-Pakistan dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them.”

The US ambassador to India, Keating (who is pro-India) insists that, “military aid to Pakistan is just out of the question now while they are still killing in East Pakistan and refugees are fleeing across the border.” He tries to convince Kissinger: “We are on the threshold of better relations with the one stable democracy in that part of the world (India). They are making real progress and want to be more friendly with us.” But his urgings fall on deaf ears. [Nixon’s infatuation with Yahya is too strong to stop the Pakistan army from killing, raping and looting innocent people in East Pakistan.]

“In all honesty, the president has special feelings for Yahya. One cannot make policy on that basis, but it is a fact of life,” Kissinger shuts up Keating on June 3, 1971.

Meanwhile Kissinger , in his memo Military Assistance to Pakistan and the Trip to Peking (Beijing), July 19, reinforces, “It is of course clear that we have some special relationship to Pakistan.”

Nixon assures a Pakistani delegation hastily dispatched to Washington DC, “Yahya is a good friend.” He appears to condone the military repression by saying, “I understand the anguish of the decisions which (Yahya) had to make,” and that the US “would not do anything to complicate the situation for President Yahya or to embarrass him.”

White House telephone conversations of December 4 and 16, 1971, show Nixon and Kissinger’s knowledge of third party transfers of military supplies(Iran and Jordan) to Pakistan as the war rages. They also show them following the advice of TV celebrity Barbara Walters, who decides to put out a White House version of the facts involved in the South Asian crisis and “get some PR out on the ... put the blame on India. It will also take some blame off us,” in the words of Nixon.

A summary by George H. Bush, December 10, 1971, US ambassador to the UN, describes in detail the meeting between Kissinger and the Chinese ambassador to the UN. Kissinger tells the Chinese ambassador that the American position on the issue (supporting Islamabad) is “parallel” to Beijing’s. However, Bush in his memo does not mince words about the “two State Departments”(Kissinger and Sisco turf battle) and also takes issue with Kissinger’s style, in one instance calling him “paranoid and arrogant”.

Six years ago, at the Rawalpindi home of Ali Yahya, son of the late unlamented general, I spent a whole day inside the soot-lined, dust-laden rooms, converted into a shrine by an adoring son who had laid out his father’s handwritten diary, Nixon’s letters, Kissinger’s correspondence and Aga Hilaly’s (our ambassador in DC then) secret demarches — all classified then. It was the 25th anniversary of the fall of Dhaka.

In a bid to re-establish his father’s lost legacy of Yahya Khan having had the White House eating out of his hands and a hot line buzzing between Nixon and him, Ali told me the same story that these declassified documents testify today. He said that it was his father’s personal friendship with President Nixon that prevented India from invading West Pakistan during the December 1971 war.

He showed me the letter Nixon had written (now declassified by the State Department) personally thanking Yahya for bringing America and China together: “Those who want a more peaceful world in the generations to come will forever be in your debt.”

But at whose door should the senseless deaths of thousands lie and why East Pakistan left us forever and who is responsible for the humiliating defeat India dealt us are questions we ourselves have to answer.

Crystal clear is the fact that America has and will always do what is in its interest. China was its top priority, nothing else mattered then.

E-mail address: anjumniazusa@ yahoo.com

FROM afar, and even inside the US, it is all too tempting to believe that Americans have fallen completely under the sway of the Bush administration’s relentless propaganda campaign to invade Iraq, whether Saddam Hussein complies with inspectors or not. In the first frenzied year after the 9/11 attacks, dissent in America was muted out of shock, confusion, or simple prudence.

Some prominent leftists, like Christopher Hitchens, even rallied to a Republican president whom, on September 10, 2001, they depicted as a dim-witted, mean-spirited, short-sighted, over-privileged and unelected opportunist. It was as if Osama bin Laden transformed Bush junior into the image of a shining, if not necessarily crusading, knight.

So the right joyously pounced on this chance to intimidate citizens who balked at their shamelessly self-serving agenda: militarism abroad, authoritarianism at home, and oodles of corporate “welfare” (tax breaks, subsidies, fat public contracts and deregulation). Yet, despite a heartily pro-Bush corporate mass media, polls consistently show that two-thirds of Americans support armed force against Iraq only with UN approval, which means that they do not entrust such a momentous decision to the White House. That is an astonishing vote of no-confidence in Bush’s judgment, which US pundits have been reluctant to point out.

But isn’t the president popular? All the polls say so. Yet we all know it is possible to like someone despite their disagreeable ways. In an age of intensive media manipulation, which Noam Chomsky aptly calls “manufacturing consent,” a gap often opens between the popularity of a president and approval of his policies — a gap which mainstream reports gloss over. In times of peril Americans will rally round a cocker spaniel if it were president. Ronald Reagan, a trained actor whose business it was to seem likeable, was personally popular but, by all poll evidence, a majority consistently opposed his policies. Bill Clinton spoke as a liberal but behaved as a conservative, with a similar split in polls of people liking the man far more than they liked his activities or, indeed, his enemies.

The hypocrisy afoot is just breathtaking. European newspapers (Sunday Herald and Die Tageszeitung) recently disclosed US government records confirming that Reagan’s and Bush senior’s administrations licensed hundreds of “dual use” technology exports to Iraq, including chemical and biological weapons agents such as anthrax and VX nerve gas. These sales continued well after the Gulf War. “The disclosures put the United States in the uncomfortable position of possibly having provided the key ingredients of the weapons America is considering waging war to destroy,” remarked Senator Robert Byrd. It gets odder still. One dual-use machine is a medical device designed to dissolve kidney stones that also allegedly can act as a trigger for a nuclear weapon. By US criteria, as wags point out, a wrench is a “dual use technology.”

Hence, from Morocco to Indonesia, from Pakistan to Nigeria, and from Italy to Britain (despite Blair) huge demonstrations were mounted against America’s increasingly reckless policies. Almost 40 per cent of Canadians Deem Bush a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Majorities in France, Germany and Russia, and nearly half the British, according to a Pew (a respectable organization in US) poll, don’t believe that even America thinks that Saddam is a danger. Oil is the true lure. French, Germans and Russians see the Palestinian question as the bigger Middle Eastern problem. Yet all too often demonstrations abroad were misunderstood as being directed against the American people, not its ruling elite.

Since 9/11 Bush junior has displayed no more love of cherished American civil liberties than the foreign enemies he paints as evil incarnate. The indecent haste with which he pushed through Homeland Security legislation with highly fascistic features alarms more and more Americans as they begin to understand it. The dubious White House exertions to prove a “smoking gun” link between Al Qaeda and Iraq is not playing well either. As a result, according to a Los Angeles Times poll (December 17), “In the absence of new evidence from U.N. inspectors,” 72 per cent of Americans, including 60 per cent of Republicans, said Bush has not come up with a case to justify a war. Indeed, only 26 per cent endorse war if the United States should act alone.

During the Vietnam war President Richard Nixon liked to brag that, despite massive domestic protest, there was a ‘silent majority’ of passive law-abiding Americans who supported his every move, who mindlessly obeyed his crooked government which, in turn, was so highly responsive to corporate donors. Even after cronies went to jail and Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment in 1974, 25 per cent of Americans persisted in viewing him as an admirable chap. So it seems there is a quarter to a third of the populace anywhere who echo whatever elites say. That still leaves about two-thirds to uphold democratic practices.

Contrary to the myth of a “hard hat” silent majority backing Nixon, a majority of the working class opposed the war. They were the ones expected to bleed in that awful folly. (It was, as Bruce Franklin points out in ‘Vietnam and Other Fantasies’, the so-called educated classes who more readily swallowed government propaganda.) Yet Vietnam left a healthy legacy of distrust.

People outside it rarely understand just how complex American society is. It may appear easy to manipulate public opinion, but this process produces a very shallow and short-term adherence. Authorities, meanwhile, downplay dissent. An anti-war march of two hundred thousand protesters in Washington DC on October 26 was misportrayed as a “few thousand” malcontents even in The New York Times, which later was forced to upgrade its derisory estimate. Dozens more demonstrations occurred around the US in mid-December, and were similarly ignored. Another nation-wide demonstration is scheduled for January 18. About 20 major American cities passed resolutions not to cooperate with provisions of the misnamed Patriot Act that conflict with constitutional rights.

Despite controversial sponsors, anti-war organizers, Not In Our Name and THE ANSWER coalition staged highly successful events. A wider coalition is forming, including labour and environmental groups. Former president and Nobel Peace prize winner Jimmy Carter warned Saddam Hussein to open his facilities, but also advised against launching an unprovoked attack on Iraq. So there is a different kind of “silent majority” today. Because of slanted news coverage it is rather difficult to discern underlying feelings and ethical concerns, but once the American people are aroused, they go to the street, and other venues, to protest against wayward policies. The media cannot ignore it forever. Recall that the Vietnam War was ended not only on the battlefields but also on the streets and campuses of the United States.

Through the 1960s and early 1970s one of us made extensive tours for teach-ins at universities across the US. In 1964 at the Berkeley campus students and scholars began the fabled free speech movement while, on the East coast, a group of academics started an open university in Greenwich Village, where critical courses were conducted on American foreign policies to inform the general public what was really going on in distant places where American forces operated. While many academics collaborated with the Pentagon aims in their research projects, such as Project Camelot (a US govt project which engaged scholars to advise secret police and counter insurgency forces in Latin America) , a minority was fighting for justice. Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, and Chomsky became near-cult figures, as did Dr. Benjamin Spock. Professor Hans Morgenthau, the supreme realist, told the America government that they were snared in unrealistic anti-communist delusions in Vietnam. Norman Mailer’s ‘Armies of The Night’ is still a splendid chronicle of early anti-war protests.

People appealed to values which transcended the state and short-sighted realpolitik. A draft resistance movement gained strength as did resistance and desertions inside the military. Dissenters believed that moral or religious principles justified the violation of the state laws, if they were willing to pay the price. The British new left and French philosophers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, despite their own differences, influenced a new community which grew up in affluent America. Students for a Democratic Society (of which one of us was a member) was in the forefront of the anti-war movement. SDS leader Carl Oglesby poetically summed up the goal as “we want to create a world in which love is more possible.”

Students, and sympathetic elders led an assault on a closed society and spoke truth to power. (Today many of those students are “sympthetic elders.”) This movement was nothing if not pluralistic, and spontaneous to a fault, which baffled secret police agencies which could not conceive of resistance that was home-grown, patriotically motivated, and not centrally directed. It played out differently from city to city and campus to campus. Anarchists, socialists, and pacifists came together in different proportions with a nonviolent religious movement originating in the Southern civil rights movement, to help end the war. Will it come again? It is already forming.