Where Is the Voice of
Dissent?
As we weigh an attack on
Iraq,
we need someone like the
Vietnam era's Wayne Morse.
by Norman Solomon
As
prominent senators consider the wisdom of making war on Iraq, truly independent
thinking seems to stop at the water's edge. But I keep recalling a very
different scene: On Feb. 27, 1968, I sat in a small room on Capitol Hill.
Around a long table, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was in session,
taking testimony from an administration official. I remember a man with a push-broom
mustache and a voice like sandpaper, raspy and urgent.
Wayne Morse,
the senior senator from Oregon, did not resort to euphemism. He spoke of the
"tyranny that American boys are being killed in South Vietnam to maintain
in power." Moments before the hearing adjourned, Morse said he did not
"intend to put the blood of this war on my hands."
It's hard to
imagine the late senator going along with claims today that the U.S. government
has a right to attack Iraq because of the doctrine of "anticipatory
self-defense."
A fierce
advocate of international law, Morse had no patience for double standards. In
1964 he told a national TV audience: "I don't know why we think, just
because we're mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for
right. And that's the American policy in Southeast Asia--just as unsound when
we do it as when Russia does it."
Nor was Morse
at all tolerant of pronouncements about the necessity of saving face. He
bristled at the kind of logic advanced the other day by a top Pentagon advisor,
James R. Schlesinger, who asserted that "given all we have said as a
leading world power about the necessity of regime change in Iraq ... our
credibility would be badly damaged if that regime change did not take
place."
Members of
Congress are apt to focus on the efficacy of taking military action, the
hazards of getting bogged down, the need for a clear exit strategy. But such
discussions did not preoccupy Morse. He directly challenged the morality--not
just the "winnability"--of the war in Vietnam. And from the outset he
insisted that democracy requires substantial public knowledge and real
congressional oversight rather than acquiescence to presidential manipulation.
Appearing on
the CBS program "Face the Nation," Morse objected when
journalist Peter Lisagor said, "Senator, the Constitution gives to the
president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of
foreign policy." The senator responded sharply: "Couldn't be more
wrong. You couldn't make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have
just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy
belongs to the president of the United States. That's nonsense."
When Lisagor
prodded him ("To whom does it belong then, senator?"), Morse did not miss
a beat: "It belongs to the American people.... And I am pleading that the
American people be given the facts about foreign policy."
When his
questioner persisted--"You know, senator, that the American people cannot
formulate and execute foreign policy"--Morse became indignant. "Why
do you say that?" he demanded. "I have complete faith in the ability
of the American people to follow the facts if you'll give them. And my charge
against my government is, we're not giving the American people the facts."
Today there
are ample reasons for similar concerns.
During the
early years of the Vietnam War, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee functioned
as a crucial venue for dissenting perspectives, but in its current incarnation
the panel is notably less independent. The witness list for this week's
hearings about Iraq prompted Scott Ritter, an ex-Marine and former U.N. weapons
inspector in Iraq, to charge that Chairman Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and most of
the congressional leadership "have preordained a conclusion that seeks to
remove Saddam Hussein from power regardless of the facts and are using these
hearings to provide political cover for a massive military attack on
Iraq."
Transfixed with tactical issues, none of the senators on
television in recent days would dream of acknowledging the current relevance of
a statement made by Morse a third of a century ago: "We're going to become
guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world.
It's an ugly reality, and we Americans don't like to face up to it."
With war and peace hanging in the balance, I miss Wayne Morse. He insisted on asking tough questions. He fully utilized a keen intellect. And he spoke fearlessly from the heart without worrying about the political consequences.
Norman
Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and
most recently the author of The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media.
Email: mediabeat@igc.org