Gareth Porter (born 18 June 1942, 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 Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, 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.
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 reports and news analyses on political, diplomatic and military developments in regard to Middle East conflicts for Inter Press Service since 2005. 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.
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 suggested that 800 to 2,500 would be a more realistic estimate. His analysis was disputed by a non-academic critic, Daniel Teodoru, whose critique was entered into a hearing record and published by the Internal Security Subcommittee of the United States Senate. Porter replied to Teodoru point by point, and his response was entered into a separate hearing record published by the subcommittee.
He also wrote a detailed exposé in 1974 of an account by U.S. Information Agency official Douglas Pike on what has been called the "Hu? 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 Hu? 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 Hu? 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 documented the deaths from starvation of thousands of people in Phnom Penh in the last months of the war in Cambodia and argued that there was a legitimate basis for sending most of the population of Phnom Penh -- much of which had been refugees from rural areas -- back to rural areas. Critics have argued that the book's sources included official statements from Khmer Rouge media about the availability of food in rural areas. 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." Congressman Stephen J. Solarz compared Gareth Porter to those who denied the murder of 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. Gareth Porter rejected this comparison and cited reporting by reputable news outlets in support of this position.
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 other publications. He also wrote articles and op-eds criticizing the Reagan administration and congressional supporters like Solarz for a U.S. policy of collaborating with Thailand and China to strengthen the military forces of Pol Pot in Cambodia.
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."
