Gareth Porter

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Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter (born June 18, 1942 in Independence, Kansas) is an American historian, investigative journalist and policy analyst on U.S. foreign and military policy. A strong opponent of U.S. wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, he has also written on the potential for diplomatic compromise to end or avoid wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Korea, Iraq and Iran. He is the author of a history of the origins of the Vietnam War, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

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[edit] Career

Porter graduated from the University of Illinois, received a master's degree in international politics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian politics from Cornell University. During the Vietnam War, Gareth Porter served as Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service International and later co-director of the Indochina Resource Center, an anti-war research and education organization based in Washington, D.C. He taught international studies at the City College of New York and the American University during the period 1982-90.

Porter has written regular news analyses on political, diplomatic and military developments in regard to Middle East conflicts for Inter Press Service. He was the first journalist to provide a detailed account of the alleged secret Iranian diplomatic proposal to the United States in 2003], and has published an in-depth analysis of an exit strategy for Iraq.

[edit] Controversies

Gareth Porter challenged the main rationale offered by U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1969 for continuing the Vietnam War, and argued that there would not be a communist "bloodbath" in South Vietnam after the U.S. withdrew its forces from Vietnam. He wrote a series of articles and monographs on the bloodbath argument.

His first monograph was The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam’s Land Reform Reconsidered in 1973. He challenged the account of mass killings in North Vietnam's land reform (see Land reform in Vietnam) by Hoang Van Chi, Bernard Fall and others. Instead of tens or hundreds of thousands killed, Gareth Porter claimed that only a few hundred people died. His arguments were disputed by several critics in special hearings before the United States Congress.[1] [2] Gareth Porter replied to these critics in another hearing. [3]

He also wrote a detailed exposé[4] in 1974 of an account by U.S. Information Agency official Douglas Pike on what has been called the "Huế Massacre" by Vietnamese Communists during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Porter alleged that Pike manipulated the official figures for civilian deaths in the destruction of Huế during Tet, primarily by U.S. bombing and artillery, to arrive at his figure of nearly 4,000 civilians murdered by the Viet Cong, and that Pike’s hypothesis about the Communist policy during the occupation of Huế was contradicted by captured Communist documents and other evidence.

In 1976-77, continuing his challenge to the bloodbath argument, Gareth Porter rejected early accounts of the mass killings by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. With George Hildebrand he wrote a book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, which accepted the Pol Pot regime's rationale for the deportation of millions of people from Phnom Penh and other cities. Critics have argued that the book's sources included official statements by the Pol Pot regime.[5] Testifying before Congress in May 1977, Gareth Porter said that "the notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy of physically eliminating whole classes of people" was "a myth fostered primarily by the authors of a Readers Digest book."[6] Senator Stephen J. Solarz was so shocked by this testimony that he compared Gareth Porter to those who deny the murder of 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. Gareth Porter rejected this comparison.[7]

But in an appearance on The Today Show in August 1978, Porter agreed that the Khmer Rouge regime was guilty of mass killings and mass starvation. He reiterated that view in articles during the 1980s in The Guardian, The Nation, and Foreign Affairs among others.

[edit] Publications

  • A Peace Denied (1975) – An analysis of the negotiation and implementation of the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement on Vietnam.
  • Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (1976) - This book challenged claims that mass killings were being carried out by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
  • Vietnam: A History in Documents (1981) – Porter originally edited this documentary history of the war in a two-volume hardcover edition published in 1979, and it was reissued in paperback under the above-mentioned title.
  • Vietnam: the Politics of Bureaucratic Socialism (1993)
  • Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (2005) – This book challenges the liberal interpretation that the Vietnam war was the result of exaggeration of the Communist threat, and emphasizes the role of overconfidence that came with a decisive U.S. power advantage over the Soviet Union and China. Historian Andrew Bacevich, reviewing Perils of Dominance in The Nation, called it "without a doubt, the most important contribution to the history of U.S. national security policy to appear in the past decade."

[edit] References

  1. ^ 0720213019a.pdf
  2. ^ 0720213019b.pdf
  3. ^ 2390718001.pdf
  4. ^ The 1968 'Hue Massacre', Indochina Chronicle 33 (June 24, 1974), 2-13
  5. ^ http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~sophal/romanticize.pdf
  6. ^ 2391202002B.pdf
  7. ^ http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/239/2391202002C.pdf


[edit] External links


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Vietnam War correspondents
Print journalists
Photojournalists
Broadcast journalists
(Television and radio)
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