PARTISAN REVIEW
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this question of technicism? Is it an inevitable sort of outcome of
what you put forth or something more?
MORGENTHAU: I think we have mentioned this before. You are entirely
correct in your reference to an entirely mechanistic approach to policy–
making. The fundamental questions are never raised. The question,
for instance, of why a million men are not willing to fight and die
for Thieu while two hundred thousand men would rather fight and
die for the independence of their country than live under Thieu,
which is really the basic issue, is never raised. But the point I made
before is that such questions cannot be raised in the kind of fictitious
world which the policy-makers have erected and in which they live
and operate. They cannot destroy it without risking their own collapse.
CHOMSKY : I'd like to put a s],ightly different slant on it, although I
don't basically disagree. I also think that the major questions are
rarely raised , although I don't say never, because I think in the docu–
mentation from 1945 to 1960 they are raised , and a very definite and
clear assertion is made about them. But the general question of
whether it is right for the United States to control another sooiety,
of course that is not raised. It's just taken for granted. But I think
the real contribution of technology to this is ... well, is somewhat
different.
If
you can succeed in formulating the problems in tech–
nical terms ; if your problem can be reformulated, as it is, let's say, by
Leslie Gelb in the section that I quoted, as a problem of the adequacy
of counterinsurgency theory in practice in the absence of effective
laboratory controls, or some other gibberish of that sort ; if that's the
kind of formulation you can pose for yourself and others, then for one
thing you don' t have to worry about, say, the absolutely imbecilic
hypothesis that the Vietcong are agents of China, the hypothesis that
he says makes the p roblem so difficult. You can just sort of take that
for granted. That comes from somebody else's department. You are
the technician who comes from outside to solve the problem. You
accept the hypothesis; you don' t have to worry about the fact that
you are fighting the Vietnamese from this point on. You can say,
well, yes, I'm fighting the agents of China. And similarly, you can
exclude the public, which is a very important thing. There is one very
revealing comment in the Pentagon Papers, about November 1964,
I think , by William Bundy, if I'm not mistaken, where he's talking
about the options being considered . They're all various techniques of
aggression that they are planning. And he says it's very hard to carry
out these calculations under the klieg lights of a democracy. And
that's quite right. It's very hard to plot aggression in a democratic
soc iety under the klieg lights of a democracy. It's much better to be
able to solve technical problems, where only the expert is allowed
