Notes on Benazir Bhutto’s Comments Regarding Indonesia

[johnkarls]

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In Benazir Bhutto’s survey of the recent history of the Islamic World (pp. 81-156 of “Reconciliation: Democracy, Islam and the West”), she omits many important points.

First, by way of background, Indonesia is the largest Islamic country in the world. Its population of 234 million now ranks 4th (right behind India, China, and the U.S.) – though before its break-up, the old Soviet Union used to out-rank it (Russia’s stand-alone population is only 142 million).

Second, Indonesia is the Islamic world’s second country to be headed by a female (Benazir Bhutto and Pakistan were first).

Indeed, one of the major ethnic groups in Indonesia (Sumatra if memory serves) is a matrilineal society – meaning that not only do females rule in almost every situation, but property is traditionally owned by females and passed through the female line.

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Benazir Bhutto’s Error on Oil Ownership Before World War II

Benazir Bhutto’s erroneous belief that oil was largely discovered and owned by the Netherlands’ East India Company is addressed in the Essay on the Marshall Plan for the Middle East.

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Indonesia and World War II

World History in America usually teaches that Japan decided to attack the United States in response to the decision of President Roosevelt to stop exporting scrap metal to Imperial Japan.

The actual reason is that President Roosevelt’s decision also involved an embargo of American crude oil. The United States was a net exporter of petroleum until 1961. As noted in the Essay on the Marshall Plan for the Middle East, much of Japan’s petroleum supplies came from Texaco’s Spindletop field in Texas and, following the merger of the Eastern Hemisphere operations of Texaco and Chevron in 1933, from Caltex-Indonesia.

Roosevelt’s cut-off of petroleum supplies meant that Japan’s domestic economy could not even function, much less its program of “raping China” which had been underway for almost a decade before the European Theater of World War II opened.

Accordingly, Imperial Japan decided that it was essential to occupy Indonesia and commandeer its oil production.

However, the War Cabinet in general and Navy Commander Yamamoto in particular believed that the Japanese Navy could not expose its flank to the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the effort to capture and exploit the Indonesian oil fields without fatal consequences.

Even though they believed, as did U.S. intelligence, that there were six insuperable reasons why the Japanese Navy could never succeed in attacking Pearl Harbor.

However, Yamamoto advised the War Cabinet that the chance of success in attacking Pearl Harbor was approximately 1%, but the chance of Japanese survival without the Indonesian oil fields was approximately 0%, and 1% was greater than 0%!!!

IT WAS LITERALLY THAT GRIM!!! Though, interestingly, the Japanese never considered “throwing in the towel” on their “rape of China” and becoming a peaceful nation!!!

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Indonesia and the Vietnam War

The Vietnamese, unfortunately, were pawns in the Cold War.

Vietnam had been, with Laos and Cambodia, part of the colony of “French Indochina” prior to World War II.

Following World War II, the Truman Administration decided to return the French to French Indochina even though Truman decided NOT to let the Dutch back to Indonesia!!!

But how could the French physically return to French Indochina???

After all, immediately following the French surrender to Hitler who permitted self-rule to Southern France from Vichy, Churchill gave French Fleet Admiral Darlan an ultimatum that Britain would sink the French fleet, which was at anchor in the Mediterranean, if it did not immediately set sail for England to avoid Nazi capture. And Churchill had made good his threat!!!

No problem!!! The U.S. Seventh Fleet transported the French back to French Indochina!!!

So imagine the plight of the Vietnamese who thought they had gotten rid of their French colonial oppressors, and had survived their Japanese oppressors for many years, only to have their French colonial oppressors return!!!

From their viewpoint, the struggle against colonialism and oppression would have to continue.

And by 1954, with more than 100,000 French deaths in a single battle at Dien Bien Phu, the French had had enough.

But Eisenhower partitioned the country with promises of immediate control of the North by the communists and prompt elections in the South to determine its fate. Eisenhower promptly reneged on the promise of elections.

Nevertheless, relations remained fairly calm between North and South until the Kennedy Administration.

Kennedy is often blamed for the Vietnamese War. In one sense, such blame is eminently fair and in another, it isn’t.

Right up through the Kennedy assassination, the U.S. only had non-combatant military advisers in Vietnam and, if memory serves, they still numbered no more than about 25,000.

However, Kennedy did decide from frustration to have President Diem assassinated. And lived long enough to rue his decision to do so!!!

Lyndon Johnson decided that the Democratic Party could not accept blame for “losing Indochina” the way it had been blamed during the McCarthy era for “losing China”!!! So the Gulf of Tonkin attack was fabricated, resulting in a Congressional resolution that Johnson treated as the equivalent of a Declaration of War, and within 2-3 years we had 625,000 troops in Vietnam!!!

In all fairness to Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. and its NATO partners had decided on a worldwide policy of containment of “international communism,” Western intelligence (as discussed in the Essay on Chinese Turkestan) still did not believe in the “Sino-Soviet split” of 1959, the U.S. had only 10 years earlier fought to a stalemate a nasty War in Korea to protect from "going Communist" Japan which had been so painstakingly nursed back to economic and political health; AND NOW SUKARNO AND INDONESIA HAD GONE COMMUNIST!!!

And there was a serious Huk rebellion in The Philippines. And one did not have to be at all imaginative to visualize how economic/social conditions appeared to be producing a collapse in the face of “monolithic worldwide communism” all the way from Singapore up the coast of Indochina to Hong Kong with no back stop in Indonesia or the Philippines and Japan still very fragile.

By the end of Nixon's first term in 1972, Suharto had killed most of the Indonesian communists in a very bloody put down and Marcos had been extremely brutal in putting down the Huk rebellion in the Philippines – neither of which conventional wisdom had thought possible.

And Nixon believed in the Sino-Soviet split, so just like he amputated the Southern Segregation wing of the American Democratic Party and grafted it onto the Republican Party (the Democratic Party has never really been a majority party without its Segregation wing), he amputated the Peoples Republic of China from “monolithic worldwide communism” and attached it to The West beginning with his famous “Opening to China.”

Meanwhile, his new China policy rendered Vietnam expendable in Cold War terms, and he simultaneously brought the war to an unceremonious end (that is exaggerating a bit since there were a few “bare bones” ceremonies in Paris).

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Nonetheless, I am a bit surprised about how Benazir Bhutto’s perspective of the Islamic world in general and Indonesia in particular largely ignores the Cold-War lens through which the Soviet Union, China and the U.S. viewed each other (and everything else!!!)!!!