The Invasion of Cuba that Kennedy forestalled

In the early nineteen sixties, elements within the United States defence establishment came to believe that Cuba was a menace to the United States. The rhetoric of the ham-actor tyrant running that island encouraged them. They drew up plans to remove him.

I was very struck by the details of some of these plans whilst reading about them yesterday, and by the reason leadership at the presidential level and an independent media is important.

For instance, General Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered this document to Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962. It details a plan to destabilise Cuba, and to lay the groundwork for an invasion. Among the plans it details are attacks on US assets and foreign embassies in places like Guantanamo, Haiti, and Nicaragua which would have been blamed on the enemy. Attacks on civilian airliners would be provoked, and, chillingly, a terror campaign would be launched in Miami and other cities that would create 'international revulsion' and support. Attacks on Cuban refugees would bring on the left, and bombs would be set in Cuban areas and blamed on Castro.

I might point out that the other side was 'at it' too. The disclosures of the Mitrokhin archive of the KGB about bombing and attacks set in black areas designed to stir up african american communities to the belief that white racists were setting explosives are now old news. I think that the only thing stopping those whites was their cowardice and incompetence, but those were not attributes in general of the KGB.

Yet the opposite attitudes within the discussion are interesting. As David Talbot details, Sherman Kent, Chairman of the CIA Board of National Estimates, had already anticipated and set the suggestions in context so that president Kennedy could reject them. Conversely, and famously, Kent failed to realise the soviet threat to place weapons of mass destruction in Cuba was real, and dismissed it in an (latterly) embarassing way.

Kent noted that the US could expect Cuban army resistance to fade away within days; a puppet government 'representative of the people' could be installed quickly. But then insurgencies would begin; the people would gib at 'imperialism' as conditions worsened. A prolonged US occupation in the face of 'terrorism' would become necessary. American soldiers would be driven to 'arbitrary' retaliation. International support would disappear as the economy creaked.

Talbot's book, which made me think that there may have been plotting against Kennedy (which I've always thought), and that Robert Kennedy found out about it, is intriguing. But the near-certainty that Oswald killed President Kennedy independently and alone (which Vincent Bugliosi has convincingly shown, I think), is also, to my mind, established.

The asides in the book obviously leave the 2001-3 similarities to Iraq hanging in the air. Was the difference between a Cuban nightmare and the Iraq trap leadership, or had the entire culture of the American establishment's mind changed so much by 2003 that even a President Gore could not have resisted the Cheney-Lieberman group? Or is it that the US doesn't need an enemy so much as some sort of countervailing power to restrain it, as Khruschev's USSR was?

There clearly was a campaign of lying and disinformation on both sides of the Atlantic before the Iraq War. That war of choice has now cost trillions. Despite recent pacification, it seems to me to correspond to the worst parts of the Cuba plans.

That written, the Iraq war is nowhere near as much of a mess for the countries that launched it as operation Omega was. Omega set in motion a chain of events that boosted the Baathists and the Muslim brotherhood in the middle east, brought down the French fourth republic, ended the independence and then the activities of the British Empire and imperilled Israel. It could have ended the world.

Iraq, as yet, is not such a gaping wound. We have others, self-inflicted, which may kill the west, but Iraq won't. Will it matter if our civilisation lies in the rubble in a few decades time anyway?

Omega' consequences should be taught to everyone. What the Iraq war reminds me of now is nothing so much as the prelude to a sort of prolonged Suez, which ended the British Empire. What if, after all this hubris, the Chinese, the Russians and the Sovereign funds play the Dulles/Eisenhower roles and just pull the funds?

I wish that people would think. We pay them so much and give them so many honours and they turn their brains off, because we turn ours off at elections when we put them in.