On Feb. 21, journalist and policy analyst Gareth Porter came to the University of Massachusetts Boston campus to give a talk called “A Citizens Movement to End the Permanent War State.”
The guest lecture was hosted by the Honors College at UMass Boston.
Porter, who has published multiple book over the years, is viewed as an expert on the Vietnam War and other international conflict in which the United States have been or are involved. While he initially focused his research on the background and mechanism of the US military actions in Vietnam, he later also investigated US policies in the Middle East in the most recent decades.
Over the course of his career, Porter has developed a strong anti-war stance and has conducted research for various organizations and publications regarding this issue. In 2012, Porter also received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, which is awarded annually to reporters whose effort and work “challenges secrecy and mendacity in public affairs“ and “ raises ‘forgotten’ issues of public importance, without fear or favour,” according to the official website.
In his latest book “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare” Porter discusses how the Bush administration, in collaboration with Israel, has created a campaign to seemingly prove that Iran was engaging in a nuclear weapons program.
During his talk at UMass Boston, Porter recalled that already in 1967, he decided that he “had to become a specialist on Vietnam.” In his explanations, the journalist referred to the Vietnam War as a “transformative experience” in how Americans saw US military interventions abroad.
During his many years of research, Porter came to the conclusion that Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were both initially opposed to any military actions in Vietnam. However, “both were subjected to enormous pressure by the military and intelligence agencies.” Therefore, Porter concluded that “the real reason we went to war was that institutions urged the president to go to war.”
According to Porter, this pattern repeated itself over and over again in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries when it came to military interventions abroad. The author suggests that many times in the period from the Cold War to the present, intelligence agencies have put pressure on the president to agree with certain policies and engage in warfare.
The reason behind that was not necessarily that there was a legitimate threat present, but rather that the institutional interest prevailed. By initiating a war or responding militarily to a situation, the various institutions were able to maintain their power, their budget, their prestige, and their status.
Since these pressure tactics used by these institutions have proven to be successful in maintaining their interest, Porter claims that these powerful, bureaucratic agencies now “represent a threat to the democratic interest of the US.”
Because of this, Porter sees the need for a citizens’ movement to oppose this ongoing trend. Furthermore, Congress has to put limitations on wars of intervention and roll back the current “permanent war state” to a normal state such as under President Eisenhower, as Porter suggests.