Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter (born June 18, 1942) is an American historian, investigative journalist, author and policy analyst specializing in U.S. national security policy. He was active as a Vietnam specialist and anti-war activist during the Vietnam War, serving as Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service International from 1970-1971, and later, as co-director of the Indochina Resource Center. He was widely criticized for his enthusiasm for the Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia. He has written several books about the potential for peaceful conflict resolution in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the most recent of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, an analysis of how and why the United States went to war in Vietnam. Porter has also written for Al Jazeera English, The Nation, Inter Press Service, The Huffington Post, and Truthout, and he was the 2012 winner of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, which is awarded annually by the Frontline Club in London to acknowledge reporting that exposes propaganda.

Education and Career

Porter graduated from the University of Illinois. He received his master's degree in International Politics from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies from Cornell University. He has taught international studies at the City College of New York and American University, and he was the first Academic Director for Peace and Conflict Resolution in the Washington Semester program at American University.

Porter was active as a Vietnam specialist and anti-war activist during the Vietnam War. From 1970-1971, he served as the Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service International, and later, he was the co-director of the Indochina Resource Center, an anti-war research and education organization based in Washington, D.C.

Vietnam

Gareth Porter wrote a series of articles and academic papers challenging President Richard Nixon's statement that there would be a communist "bloodbath" in South Vietnam if the U.S. withdrew its forces. In his 1973 monograph The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam’s Land Reform Reconsidered, he challenges the assertion by Hoang Van Chi, Bernard Fall, and others that North Vietnam's land reform program caused the mass execution of hundreds of thousands of people. His analysis stating that the real number of casualties was much lower is highly controversial and has been criticized by several historians, including Daniel Teoduru, Robert Turner, and Hoang Van Chi.

In 1974, Porter wrote a detailed exposé of U.S. Information Agency official Douglas Pike's account of the "Huế Massacre." Porter claimed that Pike manipulated official figures to make it appear that nearly 4,000 civilians were murdered by the Viet Cong, but the real numbers were much lower. However, later research utilizing Viet Cong documents supports Pike's account, indicating that at least 2,800 civilians were murdered and possibly as many as 6,000.

Cambodian genocide

In 1976, Gareth Porter wrote a book with George Hildebrand rejecting accounts of starvation and mass killings by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. This book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, was widely criticized for deriving its content mostly from Khmer Rouge sources. Testifying before Congress in May 1977, 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." He said that eyewitness accounts of Khmer Rouge atrocities by refugees were hearsay and second-hand information. Congressman Stephen J. Solarz called Porter's justifications of the Khmer Rouge "cowardly and contemptible" and compared them to those who denied the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Author [[William Shawcross commented that Porter's and his co-author's "apparent faith in Khmer Rouge assertions and statistics is surprising in two men who have spent so long analyzing the lies that governments tell."

Porter's views on Cambodia began to change in 1978, when he admitted that the "policy of self reliance" of the Khmer Rouge "imposed unnecessary costs on the population of Cambodia." In an appearance on The Today Show in August 1978, he agreed that the Khmer Rouge regime was guilty of mass killings and mass starvation, and he reiterated this view in articles in various news sources.

Writing

Porter has regularly reported on political, diplomatic and military developments in the Middle East for Inter Press Service since 2005. His writing has also been published in Al-Jazeera English, The Nation, The Huffington Post, CounterPunch, Antiwar.com, and Truthout.

Since 2006, Porter has been investigating allegations made by the U.S. and Israel about Iran's nuclear program, and he has done significant reporting on U.S. diplomacy and military and intelligence operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Porter is also the author of several books, including Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, Vietnam: History in Documents, Vietnam: The Politics of Bureaucratic Socialism (Politics & International Relations of Southeast Asia), Global Environmental Politics (Dilemmas in World Politics), Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, and A Peace Denied: the United States, Vietnam, and the Paris Agreement. His most recent book, Perils of Dominance, analyzes the role of the military in the origins of the Vietnam War.

Awards

In 2012, Porter was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, an award given annually by the Frontline Club in London to acknowledge reporting that exposes official propaganda, for a series of articles about U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Bibliography

• A Peace Denied: the United States, Vietnam, and the Paris Agreement (1975) – This book is an analysis of the negotiation and implementation of the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement on Vietnam.
• Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (1976) - This book challenges 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."

External links

• Antiwar.com Gareth Porter archives
• Stories by Gareth Porter for the news agency Inter Press Service
• Interview with Gareth Porter at Talk Nation Radio
• The Myth of the Hue Massacre, Herman, Edward and Porter, Gareth (1975), Ramparts (May–June 1975)