So, when is that next “change” post coming?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve received a number of queries from readers as to just when the next “A mind is a difficult thing to change” post is coming up. They’ve all been very polite and careful not to pressure me.

Ah, but I pressure myself, and ask, “So, you [expletive deleted] old procrastinator, when is that “change” post coming, anyway? The last one was on 9/11, and it’s December already, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

My answer, both to them and to myself, is: soon. “Soon,” as in, “within the next couple of weeks.”

The trouble is that those things seem to take an unusual marshalling of energy. It’s not just the length of the “change” posts, it’s the reliving of the experiences–at least in memory–and the effort to process them in a way that would be relevant to more people than just myself.

But I’m not complaining. I, too, am eager to take on the task. After all, it’s a self-motivated and self-appointed one.

It’s just that it’s so easy to say “manana” (although it’s apparently not so easy for me to put that little ~ thingee over the “n” in “manana.” Anyone got instructions on how to do that? It’s probably something very simple and obvious, right?)

So, bear with me, the next “change” post will be coming–soon.

It’s a conspiracy

The New Neo Posted on by

Dean Esmay has a good post up about how the assumed failure of pre-war intelligence on WMDs is unlikely to have been the result of a conspiracy, but is very likely to have been an error. In it, he talks about the proliferation of conspiracy theories in general, including ones hatched by those on the right about Clinton’s murdering Vince Foster, and the like.

I’m in agreement with Dean here:

Of course, I can’t convince anyone who doesn’t want to be convinced. But just remember: the harder you strain to make weak evidence look supportable, the weirder the places you find yourself in. Apply Occam’s Razor and all of these speculations suddenly come into sharp relief: all things considered, the simplest explanation tends to be the most correct. The amount of assumptions you need to make before believing there was some big lie and coverup on pre-war intelligence are enormous; the number you need to believe that we–yes we, including people on all sides of the political spectrum–were simply wrong are quite small.

I’ve noticed how very popular conspiracy theories have become in my lifetime. In the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” the Jack D. Ripper character who thought flouride was a Commie plot to poison our precious body fluids was a joke. But if you stay up late some night to listen to “Coast to Coast,” you’ll hear an almost endless exchange of ideas that make that one sound positively mainstream.

In my lifetime, I really think it all began (well, not began exactly, but became popularized) with the Kennedy assassination. The vast majority of Americans believed–and still believe–that Oswald did not act alone. The polls have been fairly consistent over time: three-quarters of respondents think there was a conspiracy. Three-quarters is practically a unanimity in the world of opinion polling.

I’m not here to debate the merits of assassination theories–although my personal opinion, after doing a great deal of research a while back on the subject, (including reading Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, which I recommend to anyone interested), is that the evidence is overwhelming that Oswald was both the lone gunman and the lone planner, improbable though that may seem.

If the demographics here are representative of the population as a whole, my guess is that the majority of readers disagree with me. My real point, though, is that the Kennedy assassination opened the door to an almost kneejerk conspiratorial explanation for many subsequent events.

Why are conspiracy theories so popular? One reason, I believe, is the decline of general (not specialized) education in science, decried by Carl Sagan in his book, The Demon-Haunted World:

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

For “understanding of science and technology” I would actually substitute the more general “understanding and use of critical thinking.”

But whatever the cause, there’s little doubt in my mind that conspiracy theories have become more and more commonplace. One of my most chilling experiences was a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a good friend of mine. We were sitting having lunch and chatting when she quite casually mentioned that she believes Bush knew all about 9/11 beforehand and let it go forward for his own purposes. A lovely person (a therapist, no less–naturally!), up until that moment she’d never shown any indication of that sort of mindset. But she could not be dissuaded from her idea, and I must say I gave her a wider berth after that.

Along with Dean, I’m an Occam’s Razor person myself. I tend to think people are far more likely to be incompetent than cannily and successfully conspiratorial. And I’m aghast that so many people seem to think otherwise.

What’s the origin of the need to see a conspiracy behind every unpleasant event? One reason is the desire for order and control–even though, paradoxically, conspiracy theories posit a shadowy world out of the control of most of us. But, like children who want everything to have a reason and an explanation, conspiracy theorists can rest assured that at least someone (if only the conspirators) is in control and that there are few accidents, few random terrible and unpredictable events that we cannot control.

The same, I believe, is true for some of the demonization of Bush: better to believe he’s evil but in control than that the situation is inherently somewhat chaotic. Nature–and people–seem to abhor the vacuum of anarchy, and conspiracy theories rush in to fill the void.

Another New England tradition bites the dust: R.I.P., Governor Dummer Academy

The New Neo Posted on by

I always used to wonder about it, whenever I’d pass the sign on the highway near Newburyport, Massachusetts that said Governor Dummer Academy.

What was it like for the students when people asked them where they attended school? What endless string of lousy puns were they subjected too, and did they take it in good stride? When the movie “Dumb and Dumber” came out, did it get better, or did it get worse?

But it’s all over now, or at least it will be on July 1, 2006. From that day forward, the nation’s oldest independent boarding school (who knew?) will just be known as the Governor’s Academy. Pick a governor, any governor:

“The board of trustees believes the long-term interests of the Academy are best served by implementation of this change in the school name,” board president Dan Morgan said in a statement.

Morgan had told alumni of plans to change the name after a preliminary vote by the trustees in December 2004, drawing questioning letters and e-mails.

But you can’t please all of the people all the time:

To appease critics, trustees agreed to include the words “Established in 1763 by Governor Wm. Dummer” on the school’s printed name and seal.

The gesture wasn’t enough for Michael Smith, a 1954 alumnus who said he has made his last donation to his alma mater.

“Why give money to a school that has no respect for history?” asked Smith, a retired federal government official who lives in McLean, Va.

They won’t be getting a penny from me.

The will to fight

The New Neo Posted on by

Blogger Dan Melson is new to me. His blog, Searchlight Crusade, (which sounded vaguely evangelical, but is not) seems to be mostly about consumer and financial issues. He’s currently employed as a real estate loan officer and agent, and has past experience as a financial planner.

No doubt Mr. Melson writes great articles about insurance and investing and real estate and all that stuff. But I wouldn’t really know, since I haven’t read them. Actually, I’ve only read one post on his blog, and it’s most decidedly not about any of those things. It’s this one, entitled “Recent US Political and Military History and the War on Terror.” It was recommended to me by a reader, and he certainly didn’t steer me wrong.

If I were to summarize what that post is about, I’d say it’s about the importance of the will to fight.

I suggest you read it. Warning: it’s long–but my guess is that anyone who’s been a reader of my blog doesn’t really mind long too much.

Melson’s post is one of the best summaries of the entire post-9/11 situation that I’ve ever seen. As such, despite its length, it’s actually rather compact, compressing an impressive amount of military and political history and combining it with logic and just plain common sense.

The post is one of those things that–if any of my liberal friends were still reading anything I might forward to them on the topic of politics/world affairs–I’d send to every person on my list. But alas, no.

As it is, I’ll just recommend it to you. And if you’ve got anyone to send it to who might still listen, you could try forwarding it.

How the left lost its way

The New Neo Posted on by

As so often happens, I want to take up a question posed in the comments section of a previous thread. Reader “kcom” expressed puzzlement at the lack of condemnation of Saddam’s regime from the left and their failure to see him as a serious problem:

“It is amazing to see such self-proclaimed progressives on the side of preserving totalitarian regimes.”

This is the one point that has had me stumped from day one. I just can’t for the life of me understand it. I can see being disturbed by or even opposing the war as a solution to the Saddam problem. But what makes my head spin is how many people don’t honestly seem to believe there was a Saddam problem.

I’m going to do something I rarely do, which is to recycle part of an old post (Well, it’s Saturday, after all–plus, this post was originally written way back in March, when my readership was relatively low, so I think it bears repeating.)

The post was originally called “Dancing in a ring,” and it was a response to a similar query posted by Norm Geras, a thinker on the left who did loudly condemn Saddam and support his overthrow, and who was later puzzled by the failure of so many of his colleagues to take a similar position (you may have noticed that in my blogroll, I refer to Geras as a “principled leftist.” That, he is).

The following excerpt from my post in response to Norm can also serve to answer the query “kcom” posed, which is essentially the same question:

[Norm asked]: Why do so many “of liberal and left outlook” focus on Bush’s supposed crimes, making the Nazi comparison at the drop of a metaphor, and ignoring the far more terrible tyrants around the world for whom the Hitlerian analogy would be more apt? Why indeed have many on the left functioned as apologists for Saddam Hussein, a man whose downfall they should be applauding? When they said they were against tyranny, didn’t they mean what they said?…[M]ore deeply, the failure involved in these de rigeur responses, the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters, is hard to comprehend.

I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer. But I do have a response.

First, I offer this quote from Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

We all want to dance in a ring, to a certain extent. It’s wonderful to be part of a coherent movement, a whole that makes sense, joined with others working for the same goal and sharing the same beliefs. But there’s a price to pay when something challenges the tenets of that movement. When that happens, there are two kinds of people: those who change their ideas to fit the new facts, even if it means leaving the fold, and those who distort and twist the facts and logic to maintain the circle dance.

Now, you might say that leftists didn’t have to compromise their beliefs to have applauded the downfall of Saddam Hussein and to have realized that he and his regime were worse (and far more Nazi-like) than George Bush. Indeed, there are many leftists who have consistently said these very things. But there are others—and their numbers are not small–who have not, or who have done it with so much “throat-clearing,” as Chris Hitchens calls it, that their statements become virtually meaningless.

What is the difference between these two types of people? I think it has to do with the extent of their devotion to the circle dance, and the hierarchy of their belief system. The former group–what Norm Geras calls “principled leftists”–truly do believe what they say about hating tyrants and tyranny, and this is one of their highest values. They apply it irrespective of where the tyranny originates. But the second group, the terrorist and Saddam apologists, the relentless Bush=Hitler accusers, are quite different. It seems that they feel that their membership in the circle of the left requires them to elevate one particular guiding principle above all else, and that is this: in any power struggle between members of a third-world country and a developed Western country (especially the most powerful of all, the United States), the third-world country is always right.

Once learned, this very simple and reductionist principle makes the world easy to understand, and dictates all further responses. If one believes this principle, then oppression and tyranny can go in one direction only, and all evidence to the contrary must be ignored, suppressed, or twisted by sophistry into something almost unrecognizable. But once that price is paid, one can go on dancing in the old circle.

In the quote with which I began this essay, Norm Geras refers to “the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters.” I think the key phrase is “which matter more than just about anything else matters.” To those intent on dancing the circle dance above all else, the priorities are different. Apparently, other things matter more.

[You might also want to take a look at this recent post by Sigmund Carl & Alfred on a different aspect of the same subject.]

Comment here on previous post?

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, Blogger rides again. It seems that comments for the previous post today (Part II of the two-part series on planning for the Iraq War and its aftermath) are not working. Comments on the other threads seem to be fine.

So, here’s a new post to provide a place for those who want to comment on the previous post to do so. Hope it works!

[ADDENDUM: I decided to try republishing the previous post to see if it would fix the glitch with the comments, and lo and behold–it did! I’ll leave this up, though, just in case-]

Iraq: planning for war and its aftermath (Part II of two)

The New Neo Posted on by

[The first part of this two-part series can be found here. Some of the comments on that thread were so excellent and that I almost jettisoned Part II in favor of advising you all to just read the comments and call it a day, since they were probably more informative than my post would be. But here it is anyway–although please read those comments, too.]

I mentioned that it was predicted the Iraq war would be a “cakewalk.”. But I also remember hearing an awful lot of predictions made by members of the administration that the war would be rough, and explicitly disavowing the “cakewalk” designation. For example, see this one from December of 2002:

I would just say there’s nobody involved in the military planning … that would say that this sort of endeavor — if we are asked to do it — would be a cakewalk,” said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday.

Myers was joined by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a news conference. Rumsfeld emphasized that any possible war is risky and that battlefield analogies to the 1991 Gulf War wouldn’t apply this time around.

“Any war is a dangerous thing, and it puts peoples’ lives at risk,” Rumsfeld said. “Second, I think that it is very difficult to have good knowledge as to exactly how Iraqi forces will behave.”

So, did someone actually say the war would be a “cakewalk?” Absolutely. His name was Ken Adelman–not, as so many seem to remember, Don Rumsfeld.

Who is Adelman? He does have an association with Rumsfeld; he was his assistant way back in the ’70s, in the Ford administration. But at the time he wrote the “cakewalk” piece, which appeared in the Washington Post of February 2002, he was neither an official member of Bush’s administration nor the Defense Department. Rather, he was one of a group of thirty policy advisors on the Defense Policy Board, an outside advisory panel charged with the task of making recommendations to the Pentagon (Adelman originally had been appointed to the Board by Rumsfeld, however).

I think Adelman’s original column was offputting and almost ridiculously cocky; calling any sort of war a “cakewalk” shows a sort of creepy frivolity about the whole endeavor. My guess is that his relationship with Rumsfeld, as well as Rumsfeld’s own tendency to swagger (and his own statments that the war might well be short in duration), caused many to attibute Adelman’s remarks to Rumsfeld.

Of course, Adelman was wrong in his prediction–right?

Well, take a look at what he actually says in his column. If you read it, you might even come to the same conclusion I did, which is that–hold onto your hats, folks, Adelman wasn’t so very far off, after all.

Please hear my explanation before you decide I’ve taken leave of my senses.

It has seemed to me for quite some time that the Iraq war had two distinct stages. The first was the war itself–the formal war, the conventional war–in other words, war as we traditionally know it, with armies and battles and gaining and losing ground. The other stage was what we can loosely call the “occupation”–that is, everything that came after.

The first war had to do with defeating the Iraqi army and deposing Saddam. The second war had to do with what might be called the reconstruction. And reconstructions–such as that which followed our own Civil War, or the Marshall Plan in Europe, or MacArthur in Japan after WWII–are notoriously long and difficult. They also have always (at least, so far as I can determine) been the end-point of long and vicious wars in which the enemy had fought desperately and was now depleted of men and arms with which to fight further. And the populations in those regions were, for the most part, weary and bitterly defeated.

As I read his “cakewalk” column, Ken Adelman seems only to be referring to the first part of the war, the overthrow of Saddam and the liberation of Iraq from his official reign of terror:

I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk….Gordon and O’Hanlon say we must not “assume that Hussein will quickly fall.” I think that’s just what is likely to happen. How would it be accomplished? By knocking out all his headquarters, communications, air defenses and fixed military facilities through precision bombing. By establishing military “no-drive zones” wherever Iraqi forces try to move. By arming the Kurds in the north, Shiites in the south and his many opponents everywhere. By using U.S. special forces and some U.S. ground forces with protective gear against chemical and biological weapons.

Well, it turns out he was right as far as his prediction went (and yes, he–like nearly everyone else–was apparently wrong about WMDs). The formal war was quick and relatively easy, as wars go; Saddam was deposed and the country was liberated from his tyrannical rule in less than one month (see this timeline to refresh your memory).

The trouble, of course (in addition to his flippant tone) was that Adelman’s prediction didn’t go nearly far enough. He failed to talk about the all-important second part of the equation, the difficult task of transforming a now-liberated Iraq into a functioning and free government and society.

If the first part of the war was indeed a cakewalk, it’s clear that the second part most decidedly was not.

So, was the planning for this second part of the war deficient? Should the Defense Department have realized it was going to happen this way, and if so, could they have done anything to stop it? How do we judge?

Well, one way not to judge it is by the standard of perfection. The fact that things went wrong is not enough.

In an attempt to answer this question, I’m going to ask another: why did the first part of the war go so quickly and with such relative ease, and the second so slowly and sloppily? I believe that the ease of the first war was directly responsible for the difficulty of the second one.

The majority of the Iraqi people, as well as Saddam himself, made a choice in the first war–and that was to not fight hard to keep the US forces out of their country. This is highly unusual in a war, as far as I know; ordinarily the whole idea of the thing is to repel the invader. But the fact that the Iraqi people and army didn’t put up much of a fight, initially, means that some of them (we don’t know how many, but my impression is that it was a sizeable number) reluctantly welcomed the war as the only way to get rid of Saddam.

Another number (and Saddam was definitely among them) didn’t fight because they knew they didn’t stand a chance in a conventional war. So they were busy planning the next stage–the second war–and they had plenty of time in which to do so. Their only hope was to go underground and set up a postwar insurgency like the one we’ve faced. And, because the first part of the war was so short and relatively easy, they had plenty of men and material with which to do it, as well as fresh reinforcements from neighboring countries untouched by any war at all. This seems quite unprecendented in the annals of war, and it seems to have been a conscious strategy on their part.

I’m not sure those homegrown Baathist-type insurgents expected to be joined by so many “visitors” from other parts of the Arab world, interested not just in attacking the occupying American troops, but intent on killing many innocent Iraqis just going about their business and trying to live their lives. But I’m not sure the homegrown insurgents much cared; the more mayhem, the merrier.

At any rate, the ease of the war allowed the insurgents to create a nasty problem afterwards, because they were able to melt away into the night and implement an urban warfare based on terrorism and sabotage that had been planned for quite some time.

And it’s very hard for me to see how any sort of planning on the part of the US could have prevented that. More troops? Keep the Iraqi army intact? I’ve read many arguments both pro and con on whether either would have made a difference, and my conclusion is: it’s not at all clear that anything would have.

Strangely enough, that’s the exact conclusion of this long and complex article by Tucker and Hendrickson, two professors (Johns Hopkins and Colorado College, respectively) who were against the Iraq War in the first place, and continue to be so, so they certainly can’t be considered neocon Bush apologists. In summary, their position is that neither keeping the Iraqi Army intact nor having more troops, nor a host of other decisions made in the conduct of the war, would have made things better.

Of course, they consider the whole enterprise fatally flawed. But that’s the part of their analysis I find flawed, and the reason is that I expected this war–and every other war–to be messy, difficult, and full of errors. There is something inherent in the act and art of war, the characteristics I discussed in Part I of this essay, that dictates that it is the rare war that isn’t fraught with error and tragic miscalculations. The Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and of course Vietnam, all followed an exceptionally difficult course.

Sometimes I think the template for war that many of those opposed to this one were following was the Gulf War. That was, essentially, a war with part one, but no part two. It was easy in the same way that this war would have been easy had we not been intent on regime change, the ufinished business of the Gulf War.

But regime change and nation building was exactly and precisely what this war was about. And where Tucker/Hendrickson and I differ is that I considered this necessary, given the evidence we had before us about Saddam, and they thought it unnecessary.

It’s way beyond the scope of this essay to go into detailed arguments as to why I thought this war was necessary, but suffice to say I thought (and still think) that violations of UN resolutions and weapon inspections protocols, humanitarian reasons, and the need to try to change the political face of the region all combined to make it something that needed to be done.

But, paradoxically, I always thought it would be difficult. Very very difficult, very risky, and very possibly unsuccessful. For me, the Afghan War and/or the Vietnam War were the conflicts I feared this endeavor would resemble, even before it began: years and years of terribly bloody house-to-house fighting and guerilla warfare. And when these things failed to materialize in the “first” war, I hoped they wouldn’t happen in the second, but I feared they might. Therefore, in fact, what has come to pass in the second war so far is a good deal better than what I feared–and half expected–might happen, rather than worse.

Perhaps that’s why I’m puzzled by the cries that this war is a terrible mess. I see it as a war that undertook something almost impossible: the rebuilding of a nation whose modern history was of sectarian strife and tyrannical dictatorship, in an area with no tradition of democracy, by an outside force with little experience of the culture and people of the region. The casualty rates are much less than I expected, not more; the speed with which the beginnings of a democracy and functioning government have been implemented has far exceeded my expectations.

I guess I’m a child of the Vietnam era after all, because to me this looks so much better in comparison that I cannot help but be cautiously optimistic. Some will say I’m not hard enough on the administration, and that my expectations were ridiculously low to begin with. But I would answer them by saying that I consider myself to be a realist.

At this point what’s needed is time to combat the insurgents and terrorists, and patience, too, as well as the slowly growing cooperation of the Iraqi people in giving us intelligence and in building their own effective defense forces (as Bush stated recently in this speech).

Did the President and key members of his Administration foresee how exceedingly difficult it would actually be to accomplish this? I don’t think so. Should they have? Perhaps.

But what really matters now is: do they have the patience, intelligence, will, and determination to get it right? My answer: they do–if we do.

Iraq: planning for war and its aftermath (Part I of two)

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr. Sanity has a fine rant up about how the defense mechanism of denial can serve to keep a person’s belief system intact and help avoid the difficult and threatening task of changing one’s mind in the face of evidence that contradicts that worldview.

Something tangential to her main point happened to catch my eye, and started me thinking about a different issue: how to plan for war.

Dr. Sanity writes about the buildup to the Iraq War:

It is true that the U.S. planners did not anticipate a delayed and fierce resistance from the dead-enders in Iraq. Everyone did expected a humanitarian disaster and refugee problem–which did not materialize as it turns out. But that is one one of the messy things about war –and reality. Things are not perfect. The unexpected happens.

That got me to thinking: just what did military planners expect would happen in the Iraq war? Do we really know, or do we just think we know? How does one plan for a war and its aftermath?

I have no military experience, much less military planning experience. But it’s my understanding that military planners usually try to plan for any and all eventualities in war. Some scenarios are more likely than others, of course, and that’s the tricky part–choosing the most likely.

It is often said, for example, that generals prepare for the previous war, the one already fought, rather than the one facing them. I doubt that’s because generals are so stupid. It’s just so easy for them to seem stupid, because preparing for the war you are about to enter is notoriously difficult, for the very reasons Dr. Sanity cites: the unexpected happens. Always.

But still, military planners can–and must–try to anticipate all realistic possibilities, and to have a plan for how to deal with each one. Then they have to choose which are the most likely of the lot to happen, and get the people and material in place to meet them. The best they can do if (and when) they happen to guess wrong is to try to adjust as soon as humanly possible, and to implement the alternative plans. If something happens that was totally unforeseen and unplanned for (and it will, it will!), then they better be able to scramble and quickly assemble a force that can deal with it.

We who ordinarily plan for nothing more complex than a vacation or a business start-up or a move may find it difficult to believe that war is different. But it is–although planning for those things is difficult enough!

I think this general lack of knowledge about planning for war comes from our general lack of knowledge of history, combined with the happy fact that, with the end of the draft (an end which I support, by the way), it has become the exception rather than the rule for Americans to have served in the military themselves.

Outside of war buffs, I think there’s widespread ignorance about the way wars work, and the difficulties inherent in them. I may be a good example of the typical student in this regard. When I was in school, I wasn’t all that fond of history, especially its military details. My eyes would glaze over when we’d come to the war part. I had some interest in what might cause a war (what I seem to recall they divided into “underlying causes” and “immediate causes”). But the conduct of the war itself was just a blur of dates and campaigns and battlefield names, to be memorized and forgotten, with no understanding on my part of the strategy involved, and no attempt on the part of the teachers to teach it.

One of the things I’ve learned since that time is the old saying that in war, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. We civilians, the ones who read the newspapers and try to judge the course of a war, find it frustratingly difficult to listen to those words and to truly understand what they mean.

That famous quote about plans not surviving contact with the enemy is actually part of a longer passage, quoted more extensively here:

It was Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the Prussian general staff during the wars of German unification, who observed that “no plan of operation extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force. Only the layman thinks that he can see in the course of the campaign the consequent execution of the original idea with all the details thought out in advance and adhered to until the very end.”

The commander, wrote Moltke, must keep his objective in mind, “undisturbed by the vicissitudes of events….But the path on which he hopes to reach it can never be firmly established in advance. Throughout the campaign he must make a series of decisions on the basis of situations that cannot be foreseen. The successive acts of war are thus not premeditated designs, but on the contrary are spontaneous acts guided by military measures. Everything depends on penetrating the uncertainty of veiled situations to evaluate the facts, to clarify the unknown, to make decisions rapidly, and then to carry them out with strength and constancy.”

Yes, war is a series of decisions on the basis of situations that cannot be foreseen. And it’s with that understanding that this war–and all wars–needs to be evaluated.

The politicians who feel a war is necessary, and the military they rely on to plan that war, do have a duty to explain the reasons why that war needs to be fought, and what will likely be involved in fighting it (and I think, by the way, that Dr. Sanity’s post makes a good case that the reasons given for fighting the war in Iraq were actually many and varied, although the left may be in denial about that fact). They also have a duty to explain that, nevertheless, the unforeseen and unexpected will happen, and that the course won’t be easy. And yet they have a concommitent duty to show a resolute and stubborn optimism about the endeavor as a whole (Churchill, for example, was the absolute master of that sort of thing). They also have a duty to be basically honest in carrying out all of these prior duties (which, by the way, is what the anger concerning the failure to find WMDs is about on the part of those who truly believe that Bush lied about them–although those people may also be in denial about the fact that most of the world agreed with Bush that Saddam had them).

One of the most common arguments against the administration’s planning and conduct of the war is that it underestimated the resistance that would be put up, saying that it would be a “cakewalk,” and that later events proved them utterly wrong. Is this true? Who made the “cakewalk” prediction? And to what aspect of the war was he actually referring? And why was that resistance or insurgency (or whatever name we give the terrorism and sabotage that has gone on in the aftermath of the war) seemingly worse than anticipated?

(Part II can be found here.)

The approach of winter

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s coming; I can feel it. A week or two ago it suddenly turned quite cold, and the grass, so recently green, is starting to show brown in patches. The autumn colors have become even more autumnal and muted.

But in its winter-is-fast-approaching slumber, the garden retains a certain spare and faded beauty. One has to get into a certain frame of mind to appreciate it–it’s not immediately accessible as in spring and summer, or early fall.

Here, take a look:

For me, the worst thing about this time of year is the early sunset. Now if I want to take my three-mile walk outside, I have to start by 3:15 PM–any later and I end up stumbling home in darkness. There aren’t as many other walkers as there used to be; just a few intrepid dog owners and the grimacing grim-faced runners who never quit, come ice or snow or sleet or wind.

Yesterday on my walk I heard a strange cacophonous cry that sounded like a bunch of small atonally yipping dogs. It took me a moment of looking around and seeing nothing to realize I had to look up, and when I did, there was a flock of Canadian geese in ragged V-formation. They sounded different from any other geese I’ve ever heard, and when I got home and did some research, I discovered that different-sized varieties of geese have different calls. These must have been the smaller ones, described as having “high-pitched cackling voices.”

The day had started out cloudy to begin with, but now that it was getting to be twilight it was even darker. Since Thanksgiving is over, people have begun to put up their Christmas lights, and there was a family–father, mother, and two-year old boy–stringing their bushes and trees with glowing colors, looking for all the world like some sappy holiday greeting card, only real.

I searched for a poem appropriate to the season, and came up with this one, Robert Frost’s “Reluctance:”

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ”˜Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Yes, we’re reluctant to embrace the end of fall and the beginning of the long cold winter. But it’s always good to remember that in the coldest darkest time, when there are so many more months of winter ahead, the days start lengthening and the sun begins its slow but inevitable return.

Site timer on the blink–scroll down for new post

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah Blogger! Although I shouldn’t complain; perhaps it’s something about my computer, known for its many glitches.

But my site timer is on the fritz, and I can neither see it nor set it properly, because it’s not displaying.

I just posted a fairly lengthy article that is somehow appearing below the “Literary leftists” one of yesterday, with the wrong time on it. So just scroll down a bit to find the latest: “Ramsey Clark rides again.”

I hope this problem corrects itself shortly.

[ADDENDUM: Well, it’s not exactly fixed; it’s still not displaying automatically. But I figured out a way to get it to display temporarily and to set the times correctly, so I guess all is well. Thanks for the suggestions–they gave me an idea for the solution.]

Literary leftists (Part II): Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Spanish Civil War

The New Neo Posted on by

[The first part of this series on literary leftists can be found here.]

The Spanish Civil War was famous for many things, including attracting the participation of some of the most well-known literary lights of the day. The October 31 New Yorker features George Packer’s review of a new book by Stephen Koch about two of those lights, one greater and one lesser (although, as you will see, the review may change your mind about which is which): The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles.

Hemingway’s involvement in the war is extremely well-known; he mined the experience to create the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. But does anyone recall Dos Passos? Most of us have only vaguely heard of him; few read his books any more.

In his day, however, Dos Passos was no unknown. Quite the contrary, as Packer writes:

It’s hard now to remember that, several generations ago, the trio of great novelists born around the turn of the century””Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner””was a quartet, with the fourth chair occupied by Dos Passos…Dos Passos was, to the core, a political writer, whose radical vision was crystallized the night of Sacco and Vanzetti’s electrocution, in 1927…Though Dos Passos’s characters had some resemblance to the downtrodden figures of the proletarian novel of the thirties, his technical brio belonged to the defiant, avant-garde twenties, when radicalism had more to do with art than with politics.

Prior to the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway was not known for being an especially political man, but Dos Passos’s works always had a political agenda, a leftist one. Both were drawn to the Republican cause in Spain, although for somewhat different reasons.

The Spanish Civil War itself is a topic far beyond the purview of this short essay, and I’m certainly no expert. But if you’re interested in a comprehensive look (and in making your head spin with confusion), see this. Suffice to say that the war was a violent mess, with each side a loose coalition in which the moderates were dominated by power-hungry extremists eager to take control and force Spain into totalitarianism of the left or the right, respectively.

Here’s Packer’s summary of the war’s beginning:

In February of 1936, Spanish voters elected by a narrow plurality a center-left coalition government of Anarchists, Socialists, Communists, and Republicans. It was the third democratic election in five years in a country that had not yet shed its feudal and clerical past. Some factions in the elected government had revolutionary goals, with those on the far left calling for “democracy of a new type,” meaning a prelude to the dictatorship of the proletariat; after five months of chaos, two of the Spanish institutions that had long exercised repressive power under the old monarchy””the military and the Church””were ready to overthrow the Republic. The civil war began on July 17th, when General Francisco Franco launched a rebellion from Spanish Morocco that quickly cut Spain in half. The Western democracies imposed an arms embargo on both sides, but Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy began giving troops and matériel to Franco’s rebels almost immediately, even as the Soviet Union advised and armed the Republic.

Because it attracted so many writers, the war was extensively written about almost from the start. Packer again:

Spain became the cause celebre for the left-leaning intelligentsia across the Western world, and many prominent artists and writers entered the Republic’s service (as well a larger number of foreign left-wing working class men, for whom the war offered not only idealistic adventure but an escape from post-Depression unemployment). Among the more famous foreigners participating on the Republic’s side were Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, who went on to write about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell’s novel Animal Farm was loosely inspired by his experiences, and those of other Trotskyists, at the hands of Stalinists when the Popular Front began to fight within itself, as were the torture scenes in 1984.

Orwell found his metier and Hemingway found his novel in Spain; what did Dos Passos find? Like Orwell (and unlike Hemingway, who was relatively apolitical and already cynical when he got there), Dos Passos encountered profound political disillusionment. The details are too lengthy to go into here, but I encourage you to read Packer’s entire review, which is extraordinary.

Koch’s book is somewhat fictionalized, in more ways than one–he fills in some of the blanks with incidents from the fiction writings of the men involved. So not every scene can be taken as strictly true (for example, there are some scenes which reflect poorly on Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s wife at the time, in which Koch seems to have taken particular artistic liberties).

But, at least according to Packer, the basics seem to not be in dispute, partly because the men involved wrote some nonfiction about them, as well. And the huge role that Moscow played in the Spanish Civil War comes straight from the horse’s (that is, bear’s) mouth, since it’s based on information acquired since the opening of Soviet archives after the fall of the USSR.

In turns out that Dos Passos was, without realizing it, a pawn of those Soviets. He had actually been wooed by the Communists to come to Spain in order to convince his friend Hemingway to lend his name and his fame to make a propaganda film in favor of the Republican cause. Dos Passos’s main contact in Spain was to have been a good friend of his named Robles, a left-wing intellectual who seems to have angered Moscow at some point and who was “disappeared,” apparently shot by the Communists after being accused of being a Fascist spy.

Dos Passos tried to discover what had actually happened to his pal Robles:

Dos Passos…made the rounds of Spanish officials, only to encounter an unctuous series of bureaucratic lies and brushoffs””now that they had Hemingway, they didn’t even need to be polite to Dos Passos. Still, Dos Passos’s response to his friend’s disappearance reflected his sense that progressive politics without human decency is a sham. Hemingway, in a thinly disguised magazine article about the episode published in a short-lived Esquire spinoff called Ken, described these scruples as “the good hearted naiveté of a typical American liberal attitude.”

Suddenly these characters seem familiar: Dos Passos is what Norm Geras has called a “principled leftist,” concerned about preserving democratic values and basic human rights. Dos Passos worries about too many eggs being broken when those proletariat omelets are being made. Hemingway, on the other hand, is the literary type who uses politics to tell us something about himself. Much less politically aware or astute, he is mainly interested in pose and style, his politics a tool to show how hard-boiled he is (there are those egg metaphors again!), and to solidify his rep as one tough dude. To him, Dos Passos’s principles make him a hopeless softie, and Hemingway is having none of it.

In his detestation of Hemingway, Packer writes lines more critical of the literary wartime dilettante than any I’ve ever seen appear before in the New Yorker. Unless there’s something I’ve missed, Packer (and/or the New Yorker editors) seems unaware of the irony of the publication therein of passages such as the following:

Koch’s story illustrates, among other things, the danger of writers plunging into politics and war, and it offers an unlovely portrait of the engage artist as useful idiot…The reasons for Hemingway’s partisanship were entirely personal and literary. The imperative to hold the purity of his line through the maximum of exposure, which in 1931 made him an aficionado of bullfighting and in 1934 a crack shot in Kenya, in 1937 turned Hemingway into a willing tool of Stalin’s secret police. It was a rough brand of radical chic that also created a new type: the war correspondent as habitué of a particularly exclusive night club, who knows how and how not to act under shelling, where to get the best whiskey, what tone to use when drinking with killers. He’s drawn to violence and power for their own sake; war and the politics of war simply provide the stage for his own display of sang-froid. The influence of this type helped to mar the work of successive generations of war writers up to our own.

Hemingway set the new template for war correspondence, but Dos Passos was unable to respond adequately, because he was so undone by what happened in Spain that he appears to have lost the ability to write effectively about it (he did try his hand at a failed novel, as opposed to Hemingway’s successful one):

As for Dos Passos, Spain seems to have killed something in him. He had gone there to see what he had given up on seeing in America””workers and peasants struggling to create a more just society””not to drink anis with Russian commissars in range of enemy artillery. The betrayals he experienced in Spain, personal and political, were so devastating that he could not bring himself to write an account of what happened to his murdered friend José Robles and his former friend Ernest Hemingway. (Hemingway, meanwhile, was spreading the news back home, in person and in print, that Dos Passos was a coward and a traitor to la causa.)

I can’t help but quote extensively from the Packer article, so astoundingly important some of it seems to be, so relevant to what is happening today. Here is Packer again on the subject of novelists and other artist types, and what seduced–and seduces–so many of them into becoming “useful idiots”:

Spain was where the twentieth century’s great lie, the totalitarian lie, flowered. And yet for decades the Popular Front line that the war was a simple black-and-white struggle between democracy and fascism remained one of the century’s most stubborn myths. In 1984, when I was in my early twenties, I saw a documentary, narrated by Studs Terkel, called “The Good Fight,” a direct descendant of “The Spanish Earth”; and the heroic testimony of those aging survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, sitting on neatly made cots in narrow furnished rooms, overwhelmed me. I knew that most of them were Communists, under Party discipline, and I knew (having read “Homage to Catalonia” earlier that year) that Moscow-backed agents had engineered the violent betrayal of the independent worker movement in Barcelona in May of 1937, just after Dos Passos left the country. Somehow none of this mattered in the face of a struggle in which neutrality seemed impossible. The whole point of Spain to several generations of left-wing intellectuals was the need for people ordinarily disposed toward equivocation to take sides. Auden, who contributed a statement to a pamphlet on Spain called “Authors Take Sides,” expressed the reluctant longing in “Spain,” the poem that he wrote just before the street fighting broke out in Barcelona, and later repudiated: “What’s your proposal? To build the Just City? I will, / I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic / Death? Very well, I accept, for / I am your choice, your decision: yes, I am Spain.”

Hemingway fully accepted that suicide pact. Dos Passos rejected it and never was the same again. Orwell somehow found a way to reject it and yet use it artistically to write his classic works, although he remained an economic socialist to the end of his days.

Packer offers the following caution:

Intellectuals can hardly keep away from politics any more than other citizens, and probably less, especially in decades like the nineteen-thirties (or this one, for that matter). But, because they typically bring to it an unstable mix of abstraction and narcissism, their judgments tend to be absolute, when nothing in politics ever is. This is why a writer as devoted to the visible, concrete world as Hemingway could nonetheless stumble so badly during his time in Spain: he lacked a sense of politics. The writer forever in search of one true sentence ended up accepting a whole raft of lies.

Ramsey Clark rides again

The New Neo Posted on by

It isn’t often that a dream comes true, especially at the ripe old age of 77. But that’s what’s happening right now for Ramsey Clark: he’s going to be on Saddam’s defense team.

Here’s Clark himself, stating why he wants to defend Saddam. And it’s no surprise, given Clark’s history, delineated quite nicely here by Varifrank, who has saved me the trouble of going into all the “interesting” things Clark has done in recent years.

One can argue that even dictators need defense attorneys, and that is most certainly true. It’s a nasty job, but somebody has to do it. And yet someone is already doing it; Clark’s lamentably eager services are hardly needed.

Yes, Clark never met a dictator he didn’t like, and this has been the case for decades. And yes, Clark is probably the most extreme leftist alive today who actually held a position of power in a Presidency–in his case, that of Lyndon Johnson, under whom he served as Attorney General.

Why am I interested in all this? It’s what so often grabs me, intrapersonal political change. So my question about Clark is: how did what originally seems to have been a relatively mainstream guy end up esposing views that put him in the running with Noam Chomsky? Did something happen to change him? Or was he always like that, despite having served in the Johnson administration?

After doing a bit of research, I’ve got some ideas about it, and my answer is “yes” and “yes.” Yes, he was always more or less like that; and yes, he became even more so as a result of his experiences during the Vietnam era.

Clark was born and raised in Texas. He enlisted in the Marines shortly after the close of WWII, at the age of seventeen. It seems to have been an extremely formative experience, in which the very young Clark felt overwhelmed by viewing the suffering the war had wreaked.

This Spectator article from March of 2005 quotes Clark on the subject:

In China in 1948, I saw people dying where they could not bury their own. They had to drag bodies out to the edge of the road where carts would come and pick them up. In Western Europe in 1949, people were still emerging from the destruction. All this informed me in a way I could never escape: the enormity of human misery on the planet; the enormity of poverty and suffering; the contrast between raw power and the vaster poverty of the impotent.

His course was set–to alleviate that suffering. Afterwards, Clark attended the University of Chicago and its law school, and found his real calling as a champion of civil rights, describing himself as “extremely aggressive…intensely involved and focused” in that cause.

Lyndon Johnson’s great dream as President was also civil rights. As it turned out, the appointment of Ramsey Clark as his Attorney General promised to kill (or rather, feed) two civil rights birds with one stone.

Clark’s father, Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, was a Truman appointee who had written the unanimous opinion upholding the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But his son was appointed Attorney General as part of a scheme by Johnson to nominate the first black Supreme Court Justice:

[Tom] Clark’s retirement from the Court was engineered by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a fellow Texan. Johnson was determined to appoint the first black person to the Court, but he needed to create an opening on the Court. Johnson appointed Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach undersecretary of state, which made Tom Clark’s son Ramsey the acting Attorney General. He then nominated Ramsey Clark to be Attorney General, assuming correctly that Tom Clark would retire from the Court to avoid any conflict of interest. Clark did so on June 12, 1967, and Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall to the Court.

So Ramsey Clark’s appointment paved the way for Marshall’s elevation, as planned, and gave Johnson an Attorney General deeply committed to the civil rights agenda. Ramsey Clark was a prime mover of that cause during the 60s, and it was undoubtedly his finest hour.

Clark turned against the Vietnam War–if in fact he’d ever supported it, and the evidence of his statements about his Marine service indicates a strong possibility that he had not–towards the end of his term, which lasted as long as Johnson was President. In fact, according to the Spectator piece, Johnson had earlier removed him from the national security council because of his opposition to the war. When Johnson’s administration was over, Clark immediately became a prominant peace activist, even traveling to Hanoi in 1970. Since then he’s never wavered from the most extreme leftist positions.

So it seems that Clark was always pretty far to the left, and just went further in that direction after finding success and a home in the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era. It’s probable that this tendency was compounded by feelings of guilt over his participation in the administration that escalated the war, and the need to expiate that guilt in his own mind (according to the Spectator, Clark “is clearly pained by the fact that he was in the government during the Vietnam war”).

A curious incident in Clark’s life was his prosecution of the so-called “Boston Five,” despite his antiwar sympathies. Here’s a possible explanation of what was going on with Clark when he prosecuted the Five:

…for “conspiracy to aid and abet draft resistance.” Four of the five were convicted, including fellow winner of the Gandhi Peace Award pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. (who would later officiate at the wedding of Clark’s son). Clark believed since Coffin and Dr. Spock were respected, if controversial, public figures who could afford legal counsel to fight back for them, their cases would take a long time and would “focus attention on the problems of the draft.” Clark says that he hoped to show Johnson that opposition to the war wasn’t limited to “draft-dodging longhairs” but included the most admired pediatrician in America, a prominent and revered patrician minister, and a respected former Kennedy Administration official (Marcus Raskin, who had been a special staff member on the National Security Council).

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article in which this astounding information appeared fails to give any source for this story, and I couldn’t find any independent information confirming it. If true, however, his own role in their conviction might be the source of even more guilt for Ramsey to try to undo–although how defending Saddam would atone for that guilt I can’t quite wrap my mind around.

Clark seems to have sympathy for any suffering he personally witnesses. He didn’t see Saddam’s victims, so perhaps they are not real to him. But he sees poor old Saddam now, and it just about breaks his heart:

The United States, and the Bush administration in particular, engineered the demonization of Hussein…Hussein has been held illegally for more than a year without once meeting a family member, friend or lawyer of his choice. Though the world has seen him time and again on television ”” disheveled, apparently disoriented with someone prying deep into his mouth and later alone before some unseen judge ”” he has been cut off from all communications with the outside world and surrounded by the same U.S. military that mistreated prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo…The United States has already destroyed any hope of legitimacy, fairness or even decency by its treatment and isolation of the former president and its creation of the Iraqi Special Tribunal to try him.

Clark’s sympathies are activated by the suffering of old Nazis, as well, according to the Spectator interview:

He has defended Lithuanian and Ukrainian exiles accused of Nazi war crimes, and he felt strongly for them. “It is terrible to see the fear which such indictments strike into men’s hearts, and the shame they feel before their families,” he tells me. “I have seen defendants being spat at in the face during trials.” Perhaps he just believed that his own clients were innocent, but his pity extends even to the Nazi leaders themselves: he thinks it ”˜terrible’ that eight of them were executed at Nuremberg, and that Rudolf Hess was sentenced to solitary life imprisonment in Spandau.

This goes far beyond the amount of sympathy one would need to have in order to do a decent job defending someone. In some strange and dreadful alchemy, it seems that those suffering peasants of postwar China, those blacks who were disenfranchised (and worse) in the American South, and those who died in Vietnam, have morphed over the years in Clark’s mind into the dictators and war criminals who arouse his sympathies now. It’s quite a journey.

[NOTE: There’s something wrong with my site timer, and I can’t seem to change it at the moment. This is actually being published at 1:30 PM on November 29).