Archidamus-on-the-Web

2004-04-08T15:17:00.001-04:00

WILL AND DEFEAT:

From Winds of Change:

Ultimately, the success or failure of the Iranian strategy with regard to the US in Iraq will depend on whether or not the United States and its allies retain the collective national will to defeat the insurgents. The question of whether or not Iraq will become a second Vietnam (i.e. a US defeat) is probably best answered, "No, and it won't be as long as we don't let it."

So whose will is stiffer, or, rather, stiff enough to win--Sadr et al or Washington? Washington has more raw military power, but its deployment is so blunted by political considerations that the superiority is to some degree degraded, although not entirely so. Nevertheless, sufficient will among the insurgents, depending on either the open or tacit support of the majority of Iraq's population, can make up for our preponderance in raw power.

The record of American "will" in war is quite mixed. Probably the most tenacious American military project was the Southern Confederacy, which in the end still lost, and which in addition doesn't bode well for arguments that the justness of a cause is somehow linked to the enthusiasm with which its advocates fight. This century, Germans, Russians, and Japanese seem to have show a far greater will to fight than the United States, which won WWII mostly through a preponderance of industrial capacity. Again, a willingness to fight and die has nothing to do with the benevolence of a cause.

Vietnam is an obvious example of American will collapsing, and recent history has been mixed, with a stronger pattern of lack-of-will than its presence. Mogadishu and our pre-9/11 conduct toward Al Qaeda can be described as at best criminally apathetic and at worst a tribute to cowardice; both wars against Iraq and the destruction of the Taliban are somewhat ambiguous since the opposing military forces were too overmatched to inflict enough casualties to test American political will. The Balkans and Haiti were less disgraceful than Mogadishu, but very much in line with American unwillingness to incur the shedding of blood in war.

Most right-of-center warbloggers seem to think our will sufficient; hence the argument that the current insurgency is an "opportunity" to face down and defeat the enemies of liberalism in Iraq.

We shall see.

2004-04-08T15:17:00.000-04:00

WAS OSAMA RIGHT?: I for one always thought Osama had a point in mocking our unwillingness to respond to extraordinary provocation. People like Sadr and the Baathists in Fallujah know all the American public's response to Vietnam and Mogadishu; they are predicting the same here. I for one think they may be right.

If Bush loses the election over Iraq, Kerry may attempt some version of Iraqification that involves immediate withdrawal of all or almost all US forces, which means Iraq will be a very unstable place dominated by very, very unpleasant people. Even keeping US forces in the North to influence affairs may be impossible; the Kurds may be left to their own devices. They may have enough military capacity on their own to retain possession of the North, but without our presence, the Turks become more of a wild-card. The problem will not so much be political instability in Iraq, which we should have expected anyhow, the problem will be that the non-presence of US forces will make Iraq more unstable than it would be if we were around in a limited capacity, and without a presence, we will have no influence on events on the ground. If, for example, we had not so aggressively argued for democratization as a war aim, then we might have already handed power to an Iraqi government which probably would have promptly fell apart. But Kurdistan would have still been secure, and we could have used it as a base to influence events in the rest of Iraq and the region, which probably would have ended up ike Afghanistan: very, very tenuous, but with no pretenses as to it being anything else, and with US forces much less exposed.

But now that we've committed so much prestige and resources to the democratization project, the more cautious half-measures we took in Afghanistan may essentially be off-the-table. If we leave now or shortly after the election, we may leave for good--completely defeated, our ability to influence events in the Middle East shattered.

We shall see.... The CPA may be in fact able to restore the situation. I've been VERY pessimistic as of late, but things can change very quickly in situations like this. And Kerry's conduct after his inauguration can't really be divined from his campaign; it's of course in his best interest to highlight the negatives in Iraq, but he's enough of an establishment figure that he may decide to try to save American prestige by withdrawing to the North and radically reducing our ambitions in the region. Or continuing a Bush policy that did exactly that. After building up our goals so high, that alternative would still be a strategic defeat in some ways, but an independent and successful Kurdistan might in the end prove a powerful rebuke to Sadr and his ilk, and a thorn in the side of our foes. Remember that Syria has a substantial Kurdish population. We could also influence events in Iraq with methods more subtle than our current attempts at full-scale governance, which might serve our ends just as well.

For the nation-builders, Afghanistan is an example of what not to do after defeating our enemies, and Iraq is a model of what we should attempt. I'd reverse it; I prefer our lower profile in Afghanistan and am increasingly frowning on our exposure in Iraq. The potential payoff can be bigger, even existential, in Iraq, but the potential losses can be severe, even catastrophic. Less is at stake in Afghanistan, precisely because we have chose to work through warlords and the like.

Anyhow, Osama might ended up being right about our inability to face down our enemies, but he still loses if our strategic dexterity can harness our material advantages while shielding our weaknesses. There are still ways of us rolling with the punches and finding a policy between over-ambitious nation-building and complete withdrawal.

Finally, perhaps most importantly with regards to the question, "Was Osama right that we're a bunch of decadent cowards?", as I've pointed out many times, strength-of-belief in a cause, at least of the sort Osama has, is no real indication of the cause's justness. I personally think an American unwillingness to recognize the frequently bloody moral pitfalls of statecraft will be costly in terms of both lives and treasure in the end, but I'd rather we be the laughingstocks of Baathists and Islamic extremists than trade places with them. Nevertheless, there is still a moral imperative for our leaders to have enough wisdom to craft as successful and efficient (in terms of losses--both human and strategic) as possible.

2004-04-05T22:10:00.001-04:00

THE PRICE OF PRINCIPLE: But the Bushies have hemmed themselves in with much-too-lofty goals, which makes failure all too possible. Strategic advantage hinges to some degree on prestige and perceptions of power, and a Iraq that countinues to spiral into chaos will rightly be seen as a defeat for a crucial portion of American foreign policy. It's by no means pre-ordained, but it can happen. The blame for such a defeat on the American side of policy making will go around aplenty--"realist" hawks (such as myself) for not having made a stronger effort to disassociate themselves from "neo-conservative" nation-builders; liberal (and neo-con) nation-builders for having created a tremendous pressue in favor of these sorts-of exercises in piety; the Bush Administration's almost-comic deference to legalistic questions at the UN which drove the heavy use of the WMD issue; faulty US intelligence dating back to the Clinton Administration which would have prevented the previous mis-step; whatever individual mis-steps policymakers on the ground have made; and most importantly, a general and long-standing belief among Americans that liberal democracy only needs at most benign well-meaning NGO-type organizations as midwives, regardless of pre-existing hostilty, historical circumstance, and military realities on the ground. Even liberal nation-builders who recognize the importance of security seem unable to tolerate the inherent messiness of military force.

I wonder if the Iraq War would have been impossible to wage purely on the strategic grounds I've cited; Bush did talk about the whole democratization issue before the war; the case was NOT purely based on WMD. If the political context in which American foreign policy is made has become one so infused with liberal democratic dogma that wars must be both painless and spotlessly Just in a manner that is totally incompatible with ANY form of military force, then perhaps a continued policy of containment vis-a-vis Iraq would have been more practical. The Saudis may not be our friends, but maybe friends like those are the price for our "principles."

As for Saddam's totalitarian state, well, I may feel a sort-of abstract discomfort at my government's total indifference to what has occurred and is occuring in place like the Balkans, Rwanda, the Congo, the Sudan, Chechnya, but statecraft is about what one DOES as opposed to what one thinks or feels, and adding Saddam to the list of tolerable despots might not be such a big deal. That's a problem for all the Left/liberal critics of Bush; I make no pretensions of caring enough about misery in the aforementioned parts of the world that I'd actually be willing to DO something about it. And I doubt the American public would be willing to see 60,000 US troops deployed to the Congo, with a trickle of bodies being sent home. There's not much to feel guilty about there, I think, since pious Europeans turn out to be as practically indifferent as Americans.

As for the possibility of a profoundly dangerous link between Baathist Iraq and anti-American terrorists already existing and coming into being in the future: well, if current American principles demand that only a catastrophic attack against American citizens (as opposed to just fighting a war and shooting at US servicemen/women as Iraq did in the fifteen years before last year's invasion) is considered a legitimate reason to classify a state or discrete group as an enemy worthy of elimination, no one said principles don't have a price. [After all, before] 9/11, Osama blowing up an embassy here and there, killing a few dozen sailors and airmen--all that wasn't really considered serious enough to actually being impolite enough to topple the Taliban, or even to violate its sovereignty with infidel American commandos. Maybe after the trauma of 9/11 has faded, Americans are [still] as a whole so committed to such a high standard of enemy provocation that the de facto result is we have to wait for something like 9/11 before we can respond.

I honestly don't know.

Anyhow, on a more practical level, as I said before, the game is still up. Sadr might prove to be a yahoo only a small minority of the Shia support, and maybe Sistani himself wil decide to sell him down the river before he wreaks too much havoc. The recent lynching in Fallujah may prove to be the temporary and purely symbolic moment of triumph before Baathism's final collapse in Iraq. Lots of things can happen, but make no failure about, abstract ideas like "democracy" and "freedom" do not guarantee us success; they may even be an important cause of failure.

2004-04-05T22:10:00.000-04:00

STAYING POWER: Will this Sadr's attempt at a revolt succeed? How will things play out in Fallujah? Who knows? Only time will tell.

Things look very bad for the CPA right now, but the game is anything but over. Sadr's forces seem to be fighting in the open, which is not necessarily a smart idea, considering American advantages in firepower. However, even if they're crushed, which they probably will be, the amount of death and destruction inflicted on civilians caught in the middle could irreparably damage both US and Iraqi public opinion. At the same time, excessive sensitivity to this political problem may hinder an adequately vigorous response.

A lot will also depend on Sistani. Who truly represents the Shia--relatively moderate clerics willing to help the United States, or folk of Sadr's ilk? Is there a regional difference; are Shia in Baghdad different from their coreligionists in the South? Dunno enough about Iraqi politics to have any plasible opinion on that.

A reinvigorated Baathist insurgency combined with a widespread Shia revolt with popular support could potentially push US forces out. The fatal flaw of all of Bush's democratization rhetoric is that removes a lot of options of the table--for example, even if coalition forces leave, the result is not as inimical to American interests (as opposed to our oh-so-pious self-image) as having left Saddam in place. Neither Sadr nor the remaining Baathists are strong enough to truly suppress the other party, much less assert control over the Kurdish North. With Iranian support, Sadr et al might be able to bring the Sunni triangle to heel, but I doubt the Kurds will be amenable to pacification, however undecorous the methods of Sadr and his ilk might be. The Baathists seem better armed and more militarily sophisticated--benefits of their previous background--but they're minority status is fatal I think, even with support from Sunni extremists like Al Qaeda. There are also questions about whether or not the Shia might end up fighting among themselves; if there is a regional distinction in Shia political loyalties, Sadr et al might not be able to bring Basra under their control. A fully independent Kurdistan will cause problems with Turkey, but a truly hard-headed policy would force Turkey to acquiesce, assuming that assurances are made with regards to Turkey's own territorial integrity.

In the end, a fractured Iraq with the Shia and Sunni's bloodying each other and a fully independent Kurdistan is still a better situation for the United States than Saddam leading a unified Iraq. It is also probably a far better outcome on humanitarian terms for the Kurds, although that may not be the case for the rest of the country, depending on how one wishes to judge the importance of state-enforced order, whatever the means might have been used to enforce that order. The whole humanitarian calculus is so fuzzy that it should probably be ignored.

But in raw strategic terms, this is still a situation better than that before Saddam's toppling. The new Kurdistan plays the role Saudi Arabia once played as the linchpin of American influence in the region, and the rest of Iraq will be so fractured as to be a poor vehicle of influence for Tehran. The United States could still continue to support indirectly friendly elements in an Iraq riven by civil war, giving it as much an influence in the rest of Iraq as Iran. If Washington had NOT made Iraq's democratization as a unitary state one of its primary war aims; if it had focused on questions of strategic advantage; then pulling a Pilate and leaving everywhere but the Kurdish North to fend for itself would be a viable option.

Democracies are supposed to derive their legitimacy directly from the people; if large and influential segments of said people want no such thing, one wonders if there is really a point to investing as much blood and treasure as we have in trying to make something work that the supposed recipients of our efforts don't actually want. When analyzing such a failure, it would be best to recognize the "agency" of those in Iraq who disagree with Washington; if our current efforts at democratization fails, people like Sadr and the remaining Baathists deserve at least as much, probably more, of the credit/blame/whatever for that failure as does the CPA.

2004-04-01T15:33:00.000-05:00

THE MARINES RESPOND: There's a reason why they're making the decisions, and I'm not. It seems that the restraint may have been wise. The NYT reports that local clerics in Fallujah are unhappy with the mob's behavior after the initial attach. The elaborate mutilation seems to have violated Islamic ideals about proper treatment of the dead:

"All the Falluja people accept this incident but they did not accept the dragging of bodies," said Mohammed Khalifa, a trader of spare parts who closed his shop during the disturbance in a sign of disgust. "All men are creatures of God. The clerics will not tolerate this."

American officials said they met today with local leaders, including Falluja's mayor and several clerics. American officials said the clerics committed to issuing a fatwa, or religious edict, at Friday prayers condemning the attack. The clerics also helped American authorities recover three of the four bodies, which were dragged from burning vehicles by a jeering mob and then taken to a bridge over the Euphrates where at least two charred corpses were strung up by a rope and dangled over the water.

The military also seems to be planning its response:

"We will be back in Falluja," said Brig. General Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations director for the occupation forces. "It will be at the time and place of our choosing. We will hunt down the criminals. We will kill them or we will capture them. And we will pacify Falluja."

US military forces can afford to be restrained; the people who attacked those contractors yesterday want the Marines to leave; if in a few months it's clear that they aren't leaving, then the insurgents have not fulfilled their primary objective, which is not so much to mutilate bodies, but to get US troops out of there so the Baathists can run the town again.

2004-04-01T05:40:00.000-05:00

FALLUJAH: Shortly before the Marines went into Iraq, many seemed to make a big deal about how they would use different methods than the Army. Well, the USMC now has its chance to live up its generally high reputation as fine practitioners of counter-insurgency warfare. Our response to seeing several of our citizens being strung up has been far too passive as of yet; I would like to think the local commanders will realize that they need to make some sort-of show-of-force in response, if for no other reason than to recover the bodies. US forces look awfully cowed right now, which is not the right message to send. The Marines have said that they've been more aggressive with patrols as of late; it's clear they'll need to ratchet up the volume now.

Another comment. The recent episode in Fallujah is yet another reason why I always found the "humanitarian" justification for the war in Iraq so dubious. Much of that rhetoric rested on the premise that the vast majority of Iraqis want liberal democracy. Although recent polling data actually supports that assertion in many ways, it's also clear that a sizable group of Iraqis quite frankly liked the Baathist regime. Or, at least, they liked it more than the current American occupation, and they're willing to commit acts of violence to make that point. The images from Iraq point to the fact, I think, that glibly believing that everyone in the world wants to live the way we do and shares our values is patently absurd. The large angry group of Iraqis who strung up those Americans are not the romanticized resistance-fights of Left-wing fantasies about national determination in the Third World, nor are they the isolated deviants of a society made up for the most part of people who share our values--they're something altogether different; they're Iraqis, who come out of a specific cultural and historical context.

With all that said, so what? Saddam Hussein was an enemy of the United States in a very strategic part of the world; he forcibly violated long-standing rules of international order by invading Kuwait before the First Gulf War in a region of the world that matters a great deal to us (and a whole mess of other people; why do you think Tokyo foot such a big chunk of the bill for Gulf War I); his response to international demands to cease and desist was war. After fighting the United States government, he agreed to an armstice to end hostilities, which he continually violated in the interim between the end of the First Gulf War and the beginning of the Second, going as far as to lob missiles at United States aircraft, and perhaps even plot the assassination of Bush the Elder. George W. Bush decided enough was enough, with heightened post-9/11 concerns about terrorism and WMD focusing our attention on a problem we should have dealt with long before, so the United States military invaded.

Remember the significance of the invasion of Kuwait. Countries all across the world disagree on the nature of political legitimacy: a few continue to have constitutional monarchs, some use scarcely-concealed strongmen, others like China use a authoritarian one-party state, there are the liberal democracies, etc. Some countries consider abortion immoral, others do not; some sanction capital punishment, others do not; the list is endless. But all nation-states agree, for self-interest if nothing else, that you can't invade another country and swallow it whole on a whim. There are of course ambiguous situations--protean "nation-states" whose existence is questionable: Chechnya, the PA, Tibet, Taiwan, etc.--but Kuwait was NOT one of those ambiguous situations. In an arena where rules are notoroiusly fungible, Saddam's infraction was so severe that it was beyond question. To make matters more serious, he was in a part of the world where his conduct could translate into substantial power for himself, which could then present serious threats to our own security.

After much dithering, we decided that prudence no longer need to restrain us from taking the actions we always had the RIGHT to take--and I don't mean "right" in a legalistic sense of the term. I mean it in a much more common-sensical sense; Saddam made a deal after Gulf War I to preserve his power, he violated it, deal's off, if we want, we can break that power. If anyone wants to give me a pious lecture about the UN and international law, I'd like to point out that I fail to see the justice in a system that deprives Taiwan, with its messy if functioning liberal democracy, of official nation-state status, but gives the PRC, with its vaguley authoritarian one-party state, pride of place in enforcing the norms of international order.

In terms of "moral" obligation in the humanitarian sense of the term, the US is only obligated to do due diligence in minimizing civilian injury, death, and property damage; and to return sovereignty to some kind-of Iraqi government within a reasonable time frame. One must of course balance the inevitable civilian deaths against Saddam's potential threat to ourselves, and what our own losses would potentially be, but in my view, the calculus justified war last year. As for post-war issues, If we could have found a General by now who could keep the country from falling apart, I wouldn't have really minded all that much to have given him the government. As it stands, post-Saddam Iraq is a giant power vacuum filled with people who seriously disagree with one another, so a ramshackle "democracy" seems the best bet. Whatever works...

But that does nothing to change my basic assertion that the Iraq War is best justified not by reformist charity, but by blunt justice. Saddam picked this fight; we fought back; he lost.

2004-03-14T17:20:00.000-05:00

POLITICS, 3/11, AND DEFEAT: Over at Oxblog, Belton writes:

Aznar's government is seen as having played politics with the investigation, which if true would have been unworthy both of the commitment to principle which brought his government into Iraq and of the continued trust of his nation.

I find it curious that Belton makes no comment on how odd this accusation is. There was plenty of evidence pointing to ETA, and in the last few days, the Spanish government has done a pretty poor job of hiding the possible links to Al Qaeda. Sure, the Popular Party clearly would have preferred that the attacks be ascribed to ETA for political reasons, but weren't the socialists also playing politics with this whole issue?

Belton's willingness to give credence to this conspiracy theory in order to qualify the opening assertion in his post that "the terrorists got what they wanted" (note the "But to be fair, on the other hand" in the post) just seems to ignore the simple fact that the Spanish want no part in our little "project" in Iraq. And the strange end of the post, which implies that the Spanish need some leeway from their recent troubles to somehow excuse their votes today (note the use of the term "forgiving"--Belton's syntax is a bit muddled) seems to ignore accounts I've read which indicated that Spanish public opinion was always opposed to helping us in Iraq. Indeed, it's my impression that a majority of Europeans even in the central and eastern european countries that have supported Washington were and are opposed to the Iraq war.

Anyhow, I don't understand Belton's whole stream of qualifiers to his original statement, namely that the terrorists got what they wanted. I think we need to face the simple fact, without qualification, that Al Qaeda has detached Spain from the "Coalition of the Willing" by making participation too painful. And if it turns out ETA was responsible, it'll be truly ironic because it'll mean that Al Qaeda has achieved some of its war aims by simply taking credit for other people's dirty work.

As I said before, Spanish foreign policy is up to the Spaniards to decide. They have their own cost-benefit calcuation, just as we have our own. If they decided 3/11 was a price too high to pay to support our ventures in Iraq and elsewhere, that's fine. We do not and should not make excuses for that simple fact.

2004-03-14T16:46:00.000-05:00

SOLIDARITY SHAKY?: The comments section on Tim Blair's thread on the Spanish elections seem to indicate that the socialist party has won. Assuming the results are correct, it would appear that we now have one fewer member in the "Coalition of the Willing."

Oh well--the Spanish electorate can make its own choices as to its foreign policy, just as we can make our own. On the practical level, I think the Defense Department should begin to make contingency plans to take into account Spanish troop withdrawals from Iraq, which may be taking place soon.

I'm sure law enforcement cooperation will continue, just as it has continued with the Franco-German bloc.

One final comment directed to my fellow hawks: We DO NOT need to appeal to grandiose visions of ourselves as the defenders of civilization to justify our actions so far with regards to terrorism. If someone swings a baseball bat at you, you don't need to be a saint to be able to clunk the dude on the head with a brick.

The Spanish have their dead to bury and if they want our help in hunting down those responsible, we should provide it as long as those efforts are compatible with our own security interests. But if the elections do turn out to be repudiation of our foreign policy, those results should have no bearing on our own conduct. If it has any effect, it should only impress upon us the fact that different countries have different situations and different interests, and that worrying too much about other people's opinions is ultimately pointless. Their condemnation should be ignored just as their solidarity should be taken with a grain of salt.

2004-03-12T22:24:00.000-05:00

SOLIDARITY? II: Sullivan has an interesting quote from Le Monde, but from the NY Times:

"I feel angry, not at Bush but at my own government for saying yes to war," said Josefa Carretero, 41, an administrative assistant. "If it turns out to be Al Qaeda, you don't have to be a genius to realize that it was because we participated in the war in Iraq."

Stratfor (full story requires subscription) claims that there is strong evidence that this is the work of Al Qaeda. However, the NYT article above has information indicating otherwise. It still seems to be an open question.

I make no claim to special knowledge about Spanish politics, but my own instincts think that the American blogosphere is overplaying the theme of some new unity between ourselves and western Europe with regards to terrorism, whoever was behind the attack. After all, such a thing was supposed to exist after 9/11, and it seems to have evaporated fairly quickly. And unlike liberals, I don't think it was simply because Bush didn't play nice at the UN.

A unity of sympathy and common condemnation of mass murder DOES NOT translate into agreement on how to deal with said mass murder.

2004-03-12T16:05:00.000-05:00

SOLIDARITY?: My sympathies toward the victims of the recent terror attacks in Spain can of course be assumed, but I'm not sure that, to use Andrew Sullivan's words, "the citizens of Spain stand together against Islamist terror" (Sullivan) [LATER EDIT: This was a bad choice of words--it's clear that the vast majority of Spaniards are opposed to Islamist terror, but as I point out in the more recent post above, the issue is what TO DO about it]. If you read the AP article Sullivan links to, you find this:

If ETA is deemed responsible, that could boost support for Mariano Rajoy, Aznar's hand-picked successor in Sunday elections. Both have supported a crackdown on the violent separatist group. However, if the bombing is seen by voters as the work of al-Qaida, that could draw attention to Aznar's widely unpopular decision to support the U.S. war in Iraq.

In the WaPost:

However, if Islamic militants are believed involved, some analysts have said there could be a popular backlash against the Popular Party, for aligning Spain so closely with the United States and siding with the Bush administration in the Iraq War, which is still deeply unpopular here.

There was some initial evidence Friday that at least some people were ready to blame Aznar's pro-American policies for Thursday's tragedy. Outside the Atocha train station, where about half the people died, a group of demonstrators gathered around noon with some holding signs opposing the war in Iraq.

Assuming that this really was the work of Al Qaeda, and my current inclination is to believe that this isn't an ETA job, then the Spanish electorate may decide that a prominent, and thus exposed, role in our war on terror is something they'd rather not have.

The WaPost might with great sincerity proclaim:

The terrorists who struck yesterday, whether from ETA or al Qaeda, no doubt hoped to punish Mr. Aznar for his firmness and persuade Spaniards to abandon his policies. "This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader, and America's ally in its war against Islam," said a purported al Qaeda statement received by an Arabic newspaper. But the early signs were that the crime would rally support across Europe for Spain, and for resoluteness in an ongoing war. "Democracies must be -- and will be -- united in combating this without weakness," said French President Jacques Chirac. The horror of Madrid only confirms that a broad and determined alliance is the only answer to terrorism. It reminds us that the United States neither fights, nor suffers, alone.

But the WaPost's own reporters see something other than "resoluteness." I'm sure no respectable people in Europe actually approve of these attacks, but there can be significant difference of opinion as to how exactly to respond to it.

And I wouldn't really hold it against them. Both the Iraq War and the campaigns against Al Qaeda in Central Asia are pre-eminently our fights. Oh, sure, it's possible that if we entirely withdrew, the Europeans would then be "next," but there's a reason why Madrid was targeted and not Paris or Berlin.

I've never been persuaded that the current war is a conflict between radical Islamic terrorists and "civilization," much less the "West," I think it's a conflict between certain Islamic radicals and the United States, with those states who are directly in the theaters of conflict (Israel, every Arab state, many Central, South, and Southeast Asia states) playing various roles. I personally think that a total American collapse would in the end cause the Europeans problems, but bin Laden types simply don't have the numbers to "conquer" Europe. We're not talking about a second coming of the Turks to the gates of Vienna in the heart of Christendom.

If, for example, terrorists were to try to coerce France to allow for real radical Islamic control over the French state by nuking Paris, the French could just as well retaliate in kind with nuclear weapons against Osama's new Caliphate in the Arabian peninsula. Or, if there are scruples about using nukes, the Europeans could raise the necessary conventional forces to reconquer the Middle East if they put their minds to it. But that's all in a future that may or may not happen--in the here and now, the United States is the prime target, and it may be in the best interest of countries like Spain to let us deal with our own problems. In this sense, the Spanish support should be all the more appreciated (although I think it should be recognized that supporting the Iraq War is one way for countries like Spain to resist Franco-German domination in the EU), but if the price of this gift becomes too high, I don't think a withdrawal of support should be at all resented by Americans. But neither should it be taken as a reason to change our strategy in the current conflict.

BTW, I will make no guarantees about my frequency of posting. I've got a dissertation which must get done, and I must admit, much of my free time has been pre-occupied with baseball. Nevertheless, I may attempt to appear every so often.

2003-11-23T21:03:00.000-05:00

RESPONSE TO FENCE: First off, I just want to make a few points. My primary objection to Pax’s post was its implication of a moral obligation that I simply repudiate. The United States has a moral responsibility to make good faith efforts to achieve as desirable an outcome as possible in Iraq for all interested parties. The rub comes in how to define a “good faith” effort. I see the American military stretched to the breaking point; I see the commitment of tens of billions of dollars and huge amounts of political capital; I see a war that had gotten rid of Saddam in the first place waged with an unprecedented concern for civilian casualties, and conducted with a dramatic willingness to risk American lives in a way never even contemplated by the previous administration during its humanitarian ventures in Bosnia and Kosovo. All these measures fit with what I consider to be within “reasonable” bounds of what one can expect from an American administration.

What else is the United States supposed to do? Pour a hundred thousand more troops in? Where are they supposed to come from? The mysterious international community? I’m not even sure the Europeans even have a hundred thousand troops to send, even if they wished to do such a thing. Why European fathers and mothers would be more willing than Americans to send their children to far-off country to die for nothing more than an ideal escapes my mind. Would you prefer the under-trained rent-a-peacekeepers provided by various Third World countries? The United States has other security commitments to worry about, and our supply of young people willing to serve is distinctly limited. In sum, I would like to know what exactly Bush has to do to show himself to be “serious”? Does he have to call for a draft? Ask Congress for a 200 billion dollar supplemental? Beg Chirac to give him troops by inviting him to Crawford for wine and cheese?

In sum, the United States does not have a responsibility to guarantee the creation of a just and benevolent Iraq. First off, the Iraqis themselves disagree on what is a just Iraq, to the point that some are willing to kill others over the issue, but even if a solid majority were to agree on such a thing, the fact remains that we are not acting without our own constraints in Iraq. Disregarding the not-important issue of domestic politics, the United States will have the most say less by virtue of its justice and more by its sheer power, but so will the remaining Baathists, the various ethnic/religious groups in Iraq, the Exiles, regional powers, and, as is usually the case, dumb luck will deal out the cards according to its own rules.

Or to approach this in another way, I guess I just have to respectfully disagree with Josh’s use of the term “liberation.” When I think of liberation, I do not think of nation-building, I think primarily of the absence of totalitarian constraint. In the case of Iraq, the United States has already liberated it in the sense that Saddam et al no longer run the country. Under Saddam, Iraq was essentially doomed to a miserable existence. Now, without Saddam, it may still end up quite miserable, but there is at least the possibility for a more positive outcome, depending on a whole host of circumstances, not of all which are under our control.

And I think this administration clearly thought of liberation as primarily a lack of totalitarian restraint, as opposed to proactive nation-building. And its arguments for war clearly implied as much. Real advocates of nation-building picked up on this long before the war—the hostility of major policy-makers in the administration to humanitarian intervention in places like Kosovo, the constant emphasis on Iraq paying for its own reconstruction with indigenous oil revenue, the Pentagon’s long-standing desire to remove troops as quickly as possible, the whole flap with Shinseki over the size of the post-war force, the obvious unwillingness to take on too much responsibility in Afghanistan, all the arguments about how Iraq’s well-educated middle class could constitute a civil society, etc.

As Americans, the administration naturally assumed that freedom would automatically lead to a positive outcome. In the end, this may have proved worse than naive, but that’s an error of judgment, not an implied moral obligation for the commitment of unlimited resources. The Bush team promised to expel Saddam, which is what it did. If it misjudged the difficulties the Iraqis would have in mastering their own destiny, then the Bushies should be criticized for foolishness, not for being unwilling to commit a level of resources to Iraq that would be politically impossible, and perhaps utterly futile anyhow.

And this sort-of liberation-lite shouldn’t be seen as a matter of course. The only reason Saddam Hussein is gone is because the American military removed him. Just because we’ve become perversely used to lightning campaigns where the United States pounds its adversary, doesn’t mean we should take it for granted. And presumably Bush deserves some credit for the war’s relatively low amount of destruction (as wars go).

Anyhow, my point with Pax is just that he has no moral standing to call for an absolute commitment that never really was made, which as best as I can tell he implies, just as I’ve never been comfortable with the pious nature of this administration’s rhetoric at times. That post was as much a criticism of the increasing use by hawks of the humanitarian argument, which I see as both unnecessary and foolish. I do not think, for example, that my heavy emphasis on self-interest corresponds very well with Lileks’ demand for gratitude. But more importantly, an excessive emphasis on humanitarian motives raises expectations to levels that cannot be possibly met, and it further obscures the fact (in my view) that the United States government should be allowed to take our enemies’ rhetoric and actions seriously.

2003-11-23T21:02:00.000-05:00

STABIILITY AND STATE SUPPORT: Second off, my support for the war centers less on WMD than on state support for terrorism writ large. And it depends in no way on the stability argument, which Josh uses, and which presumably separates me from what I understand to be one of the tenets of “realism” among IR-types. I haven’t actually read any of their stuff, so I usually don’t appropriate the title, and when I do, I usually imply a certain type of realism grounded in Thucydides, the republicanism of the Federalist Papers, and idle speculation, that may or may not be similar to real "realists."

To return to the subject at hand, I would prefer a confused situation where American troops are on the ground and can influence matters in some ways, than a stable one where all the levers of powers are held by hostile powers. Iraq was very stable for the most part under Saddam—everyone in most of Iraq (excluding the Kurdish areas) knew who exactly was in charge. Saudi Arabia was also more stable than it is now, with the monarchy looking the other way. As was Afghanistan—it might not have been a nice place to live, but most of the country was under the sway of the Taliban, with fewer free-lancers than the situation we have now. And the recent increase of fundamentalist attacks on Turkey might still have happened without the American war. The secular governing elite and army of that country has had long-standing problems with Islamic politics, which might have brimmed over at a future date.

More importantly for me, the crucial issue for me is state-support for terrorism. And I mean terrorism as a whole—I don’t think we should only worry about Al Qaeda. We’ve had problems with terrorists before Al Qaeda, and we’ll have problems long after Al Qaeda as an organization is gone. Iraq had a record of supporting terrorism in other contexts; who’s to say that it wouldn’t at one point support a terrorist attack against the United States? If Saddam was willing to lob missiles at American planes, and before that, to fight a war against a giant, UN mandated force with an American core sitting across the border in Saudi Arabia, who’s to say he wouldn’t have tried his luck in the future? In light of Saddam’s record, this is hardly a hypothetical question, or unreasonable in my view. Various African dictators and warlords are unpleasant fellows, but none of them shoot missiles at American planes, none of them are in areas of strategic significance with access to large amounts of power, and none have fought the United States in an all-out shooting war. State-less terrorist groups provide a convenient aura of deniability. What use is deterrence if it’s totally mysterious as to whether or not the trigger has been pulled? MAD worked, because only one other country in the world could nuke us to smithereens, so it was pretty obvious who to shoot back at. The same thing applied to the Soviet side. Terrorism is the tactic of the weak, but it does have the advantage of anonymity.

Saddam already made it clear he was an enemy of the United States; why not take his word for it? Why forbear? 9/11 was pulled of by a bunch of terrorists operating with only the resources of a wealthy magnate and a crack-pot state in Central Asia which derived most of its income from heroin. What do you think a bunch of terrorists can do with the support of a state as well developed as Saddam’s that the only way to get rid of it was to deploy a giant army to do the job? And even then, pieces of it are still running around blowing people up. Why do you think the current Intifada is so much more lethal? One reasons is because the Palestinians have a state. Why do you think the arc of Al Qaeda before it lost its state sanctuary was bomb US embassies, bomb US personnel overseas, bomb an actual US warship, bomb a high value civilian target in New York City; now after it lost its state sanctuary, kill westerners at a resort in a Muslim country, attack the Saudi government, components of which seemed to be sympathetic beforehand, attempt destabilize the country it used to actually control, help kill US personnel in relatively small numbers in Iraq, etc. I’m sure Al Qaeda or a successor group will eventually get its act together and blow up a soft-target in New York or some other US city, but I think it astonishing they still haven’t managed a major attack on American soil since 9/11. Judging by the information available at the outbreak of war, WMD added another exponential worry, which I was fixated on as much as anyone else, but note that plenty of people have already died without access to WMD, and the biggest attack of them all occurred not with access to WMD, but the support of a nation state.

2003-11-23T21:01:00.000-05:00

PRECEDENTS AND INITIATIVE: We can debate over the imminence of Iraqi threat, but, to use Josh’s query, “Can we go in and overthrow them all [hostile regimes] without conclusive evidence that they really are about to attack us?,” I think it dangerous to rely on “conclusive evidence” as our standard of action. If you think as I do that the war against terrorism is fundamentally a war, then one must take into account the Clausewitzian friction inherent in war. I have very little faith in the ability of our intelligence service’s to predict every imminent threat; I think that both unreasonable and overly passive, in an arena of life that requires initiative and proactive action. Saddam’s historical record should be enough to show his hostility in my view—I’d rather not wait and see whether or not the CIA really knows what’s going on.

9/11 set a very dangerous precedent—a very large attack on American soil killing thousands of Americans was shown to be very possible, with very little technological and organizational support. That precedent can be used by anyone—terrorists, crime-lords, anti-American nuts, right-wing American nuts, anarchists, whatever—it can even be used by states, if they’re smart enough to use a terrorist group as a proxy to hide its involvement. There were three states in the world I think might have recognized that precedent and attempted to exploit it—the so-called Axis of Evil, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Iran seems the most open to negotiation of the three, and my understanding is that Khatami has actually endorsed the recent American timeline for sovereign transfer in Iraq. North Korea already has a nuke, and will need to be appeased—the task there is to keep the bribery at a minimum with high-stakes poker playing on our part. Iraq had a regime more rigid than Iran’s, if perhaps less so than North Korea’s, but one in the same strategic region as Al Qaeda’s base, and one that was strong enough to be dangerous, but not so strong as to be immune to destruction. It’s gone, and as far as I’m concerned we’ll be better off for it.

2003-11-23T02:11:00.000-05:00

LILEKS VS. PAX: A few points with regards to this controversy (via Sitting on a Fence). First off, I think both parties did not credit to themselves—Pax’s letter comes off as sneering and overly flippant, while Lileks just lost it. Totally lost it. I can see where both are coming from, but both parties need to get off their high-horses on this.

First off, Pax seems to portray himself as something of a sophisticate. Well, to go into the format of addressing the letter-writer directly, geez, Mr. Sophisticated, with the condescending reference to “Georgie” and “Rambo,” is it Bush’s fault that you actually thought that this war was entirely about liberating the Iraqi people? Bush himself never premised his whole case on simply that point—and I at least still continue to refuse to use the humanitarian justification for this war. As people like Andrew Sullivan have pointed out, the case for war was a complicated one, with different people emphasizing different points, but I at least didn’t go to war to simply make you and your countrymen’s lives better. And even people like Wolfowitz never used a purely humanitarian justification BEFORE the war (I personally thinking the increasing [but still not exclusive] post-facto use of that argument by hawks to be mistake in many ways).

I supported the war for a simple reason—I considered Saddam Hussein a threat to the security and interests of the American people. Other people have rehashed all the arguments over WMD, regional stability, containment, blah, blah, blah, and any reader of this blog can easily find those arguments in other places far more competently done than what I could do. And my stance on those arguments is already self-evident. But the point I want to make is that I don’t support the commitment of not inconsiderable amounts of American blood and treasure to the continuing conflict in Iraq as a pure act of disinterested charity.

Every nation-state has its hands full keeping its own citizens from being murdered en masse while going about their daily mundane existence, a task so difficult that many states can’t even manage that, while other states are doing the murdering themselves. As far as I’m concerned, the United States government has a moral duty first and foremost to protect the lives of its own citizens—that does not mean we should actively harm other nations and peoples for simple mercenary advantage—but it does mean that the principle I advocate is to try to protect one’s own while doing no harm abroad.

If another state decides to threaten the United States, and it is clear that Hussein’s regime considered itself an enemy of the United States, then Washington has both the right and the obligation to do something about it. It is up to statecraft to determine the proper measures, which will of course vary depending on the situation, and will always be debatable, but there’s NO REASON in my view why we should practice perpetual forbearance with people who see themselves as our enemies, and wish us ill-will.

If you believe as I do (and this is of course debatable) that Saddam’s Iraq posed back in the spring a plausible enough threat to the UNITED STATES to justify taking decisive action, especially in the context of a larger war on terror, then that in-and-of-itself is justification enough for the war.

The Iraqi people are of course not to blame for having a despot as their leader, but every people is captive in some ways to the caprice of its government, and sometimes must pay for the government’s sins, even when such an outcome is manifestly unjust. For example, I do not think the Germans or the Japanese “deserved” totalitarian dictatorships (don’t get me wrong, I’m not absolving the publics of either of ALL responsibility), but that is no excuse for other governments to simply stand aside and let their own charges become new victims. And if that means that innocents in a country with a hostile government have to suffer so that there are not even more victims in countries under threat, then that’s simply the harsh choice that good governments must make.

Now, of course, in the process of protecting its interests, any government should do its best in setting up as benign a set of circumstances as possible, but “possible” is the operative word here. The United States, by virtue of its giant military, could afford certain moral luxuries, such as a historically unprecedented concern with limiting civilian casualties, but there are limits. Those limits are in the end founded in many ways on human selfishness—only so many Americans are willing to travel to far-off parts of the world to try to put other peoples’ countries back together again, and only so many taxpayers will tolerate the deductions from their paycheck from not staying at home.

2003-11-23T02:08:00.000-05:00

THE MOST IMPORTANT WORK DONE: For me, the most important task of the war has been done—depriving international terrorist groups of any possibility of access to the resources of a modern, functioning state, which was what Iraq was under Saddam. It certainly would be better from a security standpoint if Iraq had a new, stable state, less threatening to American interests, but even a far higher level of chaos and anarchy than we see now in Iraq would be preferable to a functioning state that could (at least in the future) give aid and safe-harbor to groups like Al Qaeda.

I know some argue that terrorism breeds in chaos; I think there’s much truth to that, but I also think it understates the importance of state support. Al Qaeda has its greatest achievements (9/11, but also the embassy bombings and the USS Cole attack) when it had state sponsorship in the form of the Taliban. It was a weak state, but it was a state, and although the Northwest Frontier province and pieces of Afghanistan are still pretty chaotic now, Al Qaeda has obviously seen better days. Of course, I should point out that if an area is in chaos, it’s best if have some input and presence in the midst of the anarchy to make the confusion as much a hindrance to one’s enemies as it is to oneself, which is what’s happening in both the chaotic parts of Iraq and Afghanistan/NW Frontier Province, but my main point remains focused on depriving our enemies of STATE support.

And that’s been done in Iraq. The most self-interested aim of the war—self-interested but still justified in my view; the two are not necessarily in conflict—is completed, and for that reason, there will be much less public support for resources dedicated to what are (for Americans) essentially luxuries.

2003-11-23T02:07:00.000-05:00

SELF-RIGTHEOUSNESS ALL AROUND: This is of course a horrible injustice in many ways, but Mr. Pax (I assume the second name is your surname), I’m sorry to say that despite your sophistication, you seem to have forgotten that Americans are not saints; they’re people, and there are limits to what they are willing to give up to help other people who are thousands of miles removed. As a tremendously wealthy people, we have more surplus than most, but only so many of our young people wish to join the military, and after the usual slew of middle-class entitlement programs and other cushy domestic benefits, only so much money can go overseas. “Georgie” has an election to worry about, and if too many of our soldiers die in Iraq (I’m sorry, but Americans pay more attention to American deaths than Iraqi deaths, although I’m pretty sure it’s vice versa on your end), or if all our seniors lose their social security checks to make sure you’ve got running water and power, a few American soldiers will hang around to pound terrorists, but you can forget about much help with anything else.

Or, to put it another way, if America was placed under the control of a totalitarian despot, would Iraqis be willing to march to free us, unless there was something in it for all of you? Neither of our peoples can claim complete moral sanctity, so let’s avoid the moral grandstanding, eh?

I certainly don’t expect you to be grateful and neither will I cast unjust blame on you for being stuck with Saddam before—which is my biggest beef with Lileks’ piece, along with the unnecessary rudeness, which was even more off-putting than your condescension—but I won’t shed any tears over how dissatisfied you are with our “service.” I didn’t support this war for your sake, I supported it for my own. I wish you no harm, and honestly hope things work out for both you and your people, but I care more about myself more than I do about you, more about my family and friends than I do for your family and friends, and more about my countrymen than yours. We all have our own responsibilities, and the only reason my country is intruding itself in your country’s affairs is that you had the misfortune of having a dangerous thug as Crazy Dictator, who looked like he was going to continue to cause my country problems. Otherwise, my country’s soldiers wouldn’t be in yours trying to put humpty-dumpty together again.

I know my government ginned expectations too high up—a really quite horrible mistake, I think—but I should also point out that without all the pious rhetoric, even fewer resources would probably be devoted to nation-building in Iraq that what we are now sending. And if you think we made a mess getting rid of Saddam (by the way, it was my impression that the carpet was hardly spotless before we showed up, especially for your countrymen in the South), you should look at our handiwork in Germany and Japan—one of the reasons the Baathists are giving us so much grief is that we were so quick with our “Rambo-in-Baghdad” war, in large part to reduce the number of politically problematic civilian casualties, so that we didn’t get much of a chance to kill off large numbers of Baathists. We had no such problem in Germany and Japan, but I assume you might not have wanted a longer and far more painful war, with more civilian casualties, but which would presumably have made a post-war guerrilla phase much less likely than the scenario that actually occurred.

In sum, Mr. Pax, I don’t want your gratitude, I don’t even really want your respect. I just want to make sure a terrorist has as few weapons as possible at his (and now, her) disposal in his quest for killing Americans, because that’s all I think my people can in the end manage the resources to ensure, because it's an issue that directly touches our lives. I know we’re not doing as much as you’d like to give you a stable, liberal-democratic state, perhaps not even as much as you would deserve in an ideal world, but just as the average Iraqi care most about the security situation on his or her street, the average American will naturally worry the most about his or her son or daughter in the service, or his or her taxes coming out of a paycheck. And even with unlimited resources, the gods always have their say, whatever mice and men plan. Anyhow, just as I don’t blame average Iraqis for not picking up rifles and somehow overthrowing Saddam before the war, I don’t blame the average American for worrying more about the life outside his window than distant images on his television screen. And that’s that from this American.

2003-11-17T22:39:00.000-05:00

WHY BASEBALL'S SO AMERICAN: Eghads, I didn't realize I had been this remiss with the blog. This is what happens when you've got a dissertation to work on and job letters to write. Anyhow, on the suggestion of a friend, I'll put this edited list (they were originally in an e-mail I sent) of a few reasons why baseball is so American on my blog:

1. The sport was "invented" in the States. This may not amuse Europeans, but since the sport is so relentlessly American, we seem to be somewhat indifferent to what other people think of it. For example, US pro players can't play in the olympics, because it conflicts with the MLB season, which is why the United States did not even for the upcoming olympics. I think the Netherlands will have a baseball team in the olympics, while the United States will be represented. And you know what, no one really seems to care all that much about it here. In contrast, when a US basketball team in some international competition was recently upset, there was a huge outcry among American fans. Although there are active baseball leagues in Latin America and the Far East, Americans tend to see the sport as their own, and see no reason to "compete" against other countries to validate our possession of baseball.

2. Of all the professional American sports, it has the longest and richest history. Baseball columnists regularly pull out stats from a hundred years ago. And in a country infamous for its lack of moorings to tradition, baseball is steeped in them--everything from players' bizarre superstitions to the attachment of "curses" to some of the game's most prominent franchises to the elaborate ritualization of fist-fights between pitchers and batters.

3. To use an argument of George Will, baseball's emphasis on a pitcher-batter duel reflects the American strain of individualism--batter vs. pitcher is almost like a show-down in a western, sort of the American version of the aristocratic duel, but transmogrified for the common man.

4. The sport, unlike football, which is the more "popular" pro sport of the moment, is extremely diverse in the ethnicities and even nationalities of its players, another "American" thing. Large numbers of players hail from much of Latin America, and an increasing number come from the far east. The NBA has more and more European players (it seems that if you want someone to be able to hit a jump shot, you have to get a player from Europe), but there's no "second" continent serving as a major source of players, and I think if you broke down the stats, I think there are still probably more foreign players percentage-wise in baseball than in basketball. And the NFL doesn't seem to have any players from overseas at all.

5. Baseball has its own statistical science with its own name, called "sabermetrics." There are fans who go to great lengths to crunch numbers on everything from defensive fielding prowess to adjusting hitter's statistics to take into account the different layouts of ball parks. I've always thought quantification a peculiarly American obsession with "scientific" forms of management.

6. Baseball players have the most dignified uniforms in pro-sports. Unlike NASCAR drivers who are walking billboards, football players who look like human wrecking balls in their body armor, basketball players with their ludicrously baggy shorts and gazillions of tattoos, baseball players only wear their team's logo and a few other baseball related patches. And a few teams still even follow the old practice of leaving the names off jerseys and only having a number, to emphasize the importance of the team, as opposed to the individual. And the best, most classic uniforms of some of the most storied franchises--esp. the Dodgers with their white home uniforms with the blue lettering for the Dodgers script, and a touch of red in the team number, and the Yanks with their famous pinstripes--are by far the best uniforms in all of American professional sports.

So, that's a few reasons why baseball's so American.

******

If I ever find the time, I also wanted to write a post about why I supported the Iraq war, which as far as I'm concerned has little to do with all this recent emphasis on post-war nation building. I think it's high time conservatives made it clear that our tenuous alliance with liberal interventionists was one of expedience, that we look at the world in profoundly different ways, and that much of their recent criticism of the war's conduct is simply irrelevant to what I consider to be our objectives.

2003-10-25T19:55:00.001-04:00

BASEBALL REDUX: As usual, my blog posts are about a week too late. And I have no real excuse. I spent last weekend wasting time on a hobby so frivolous I won’t mention it here, in order to preserve some semblance of dignity, and part of this last week has been preoccupied with the computer gods’ decision to zap both my floppy and ZIP drives. I just bought a removable floppy drive today, and Iomega’s sending me a replacement ZIP, so at least now I have some form of functioning removable media on my laptop again. For someone who needs to print job material at a Kinko’s or Staples (I don’t consider my portable inkjet up to snuff, and I also don’t have good stationary), this is something of an issue.

But forgot the computer gods; it’s time to talk about a much crueler manifestation of the divine—the gods who rule baseball.

2003-10-25T19:55:00.000-04:00

THE DECREED ROLES OF BASEBALL TEAMS: If the Cubbies are the lovable losers of baseball, the Yankees her golden boys (admirable but obnoxious all at the same time), the BoSox are her tragic heroes. They were so close, but came up just short. Although I’ve seen a few people defend Grady Little for leaving Pedro in too long, I really do think that was a truly epic post-season blunder, mostly due to the fact that Boston had such a great bullpen throughout the entire post-season. I will never forget the look Pedro had on his face as he was being taken out—it was like getting a punch in the gut, and I’m not even a Red Sox fan. He pitched a great game, and I’ll always think that his line for the night did him no justice. It was Grady Little who failed him, not the other way around.

I don’t believe in “curses,” and I think Boston’s demise can be traced more than anything else to one bad decision, but I do think baseball teams end up taking on certain odd character traits. Boston has a lot to be proud of this year—that team of theirs showed heart; they didn’t lose because of some defensive error, or because any one of its players choked, but because Grady Little forgot that his job was to manage with both his heart and his head, and to realize that there are limits to what even Pedro’s pure grit can accomplish. And they had that epic comeback against Oakland, the great come-back in game 6 of the ALCS; it was a great team to watch, and that team had a great run, even if all that swagger sometimes went a bit too far. Boston fans I know will see it as poor consolation, but they know that their players at least ended this post-season with the right to hold their heads high. We can worry about what to do with Little later.

Chicago did choke, however. Kerry Wood just fell apart on the mound. One can excuse Mark Prior, because of all the weirdness of Game 6 and his youth, but Wood was pitching when the slate had been wiped clean. But what lets Chicago evade contempt is all the weird background to its team choking—the hapless Cubs fan deflecting that foul ball (although I firmly believe that the game was lost on the field), the ensuing media circus, the bobbled double-play ball that might have been just one of those things happening at the worst possible moment, etc.—even the supposed curse of the goat is more farcical than anything else, as opposed to Boston’s curse, which is marginally more serious. Lovable losers, eh?

2003-10-25T19:54:00.000-04:00

THE PERVERSITY OF THE DIVINE: But what’s truly perverse in all this is the success of the Marlins, who I think will win the World Series, although I believe pitching Beckett tonight on short rest is a mistake. Here’s a team that has a very weak fan base—the joke is that everyone in Miami is a frigg’n Yankees fan. Its premier player in the first half—Dontrelle Willis—has basically disappeared since, and although he’s pitched well in his relief appearances during the World Series, his disgraceful performance in the NLDS hardly lives up to the Rookie of the Year hype around the All-Star break. The team obviously has some great gamers—Pudge, Conine, Cabrera, and even Lowell, who’s had big home runs, even though his overall numbers reflect the fact that he hasn’t had time to get his timing back—but I’m sorry, the fans in Florida don’t deserve this team. Boston has wept and wailed for so many epic post-season games where redemption seemed so close, but never came close enough; even Chicago fans were weeping in the stands at Wrigley; and who gets to go to the World Series? The frigg’n Marlins?

The team which bought its first World Series with a rent-a-team of stars, and then immediately put them all on the block (an object lesson in the downsides of free agency, even though I think a lot of fans complain about free agency too much)? The team which along with the Tamp Bay Devil Rays represented the greed and folly of baseball owners going on a binge of excessive expansion, and which continues to plague the league? No offense to any of you Marlins fans out there, but THE MARLINS? If it were the Dodgers, I’d of course be on cloud nine, but even to the objective observer, at least the Dodgers have their own storied history, and a fan-base waiting for 15 years—nothing compared to BoSox and Cubs fans, but still a longer period of time than what all 15,000 Florida fans who’ve stuck with their team through thick and thin have experienced. RIDICULOUS.

2003-10-14T23:14:00.001-04:00

BOSOX AND THE CURSE: I was in Boston this past weekend, partly to take a look at a fantastically obscure French military work, and partly to visit a few friends. One could literally feel the buzz over the possibility that these Cowboy-Up BoSox might be able to finally exorcise the curse, a possibility that is still very well alive, even after tonight’s loss to the Yanks. Pettite has pitched well this post-season, but if the BoSox’s bats wake up against him, and Burkett comes through, they can stave off elimination and give the ball to Pedro in Game 7. This is a team with a lot of heart and with no fear, and I’m still calling a Red Sox win in the series.

Anyhow, I’ve always thought that the term “curse” is more-than-a-little misleading for describing Boston’s storied (and agonized) relationship to its baseball team. Curse gives too much of a purely negative connotation and really obscures the positive elements of the relationship. I’ve always thought that the better analogy to New England and its Red Sox is either unrequited or doomed love.

It’s my impression that this is the sort-of thing troubadour fellows used to sing about, and if I remember correctly, Tristan and Isolde was a sort of doomed romance, although I hardly remember much of it from reading it in High School. If any of you are Tolkien fans, I suppose the Beren and Luthien story in his earlier work, and even to some extent Aragorn and that-elvish-princess-whose-name-I’ve-forgotten would also work as analogies. Unrequited love is of course a different sort of thing than the doomed variety, but I can’t think of any good literary examples right now.

The power that comes from the doomed or unrequited love story comes precisely from the fact that it never goes beyond the stage of longing and sometimes-hopeful, sometimes-hopeless anticipation. If the Yankees represent the arrogance of habitual excellence that still compels admiration, the Cubs the lovable loser (although that may change this year), and the Dodgers graceful dignity (Jackie Robinson’s entry into baseball and Vin Sculley are what I’m thinking of here), the Boston Red Sox represent the besotted boy or girl dutifully waiting for the consummation of a love that can never be. Or, rather, BoSox fans are in that situation.

2003-10-14T23:14:00.000-04:00

BASEBALL THE HEARTBREAKER: And there’s a certain special dignity to that status—a certain grandeur that comes from hopeless yearning that goes on in defiance of despair. I’ve also always thought that true baseball fanship must involve having one’s heart broken more often than not. Only one team every year can win it all, and even the Yankees have had their dry spells. If you’ve never felt the depression and frustration of seeing a season frittered away, of opportunities lost, of raging jealousy at the team that does win it all, the you’re not a baseball fan in my book.

BoSox fans maybe take this principle a bit too far, and although I have a great friend who’s a huge BoSox fan, I would admit that there is a certain unhealthy cast to the attitude of some Boston fans. But one must take the bad with the good, and just as romantic love sometimes involves inappropriate behavior worthy of condemnation, it can also have its own special charms.

With all that said, unrequited love makes for a good story, precisely because the poor victim is entirely dissatisfied with that status. And although some have said that the “romance” of Red Sox fanship will evaporate if they really do win it all, a point which I can see, as far as I’m concerned—and saying this as a Dodgers fan—I still invoke and implore the baseball gods, COWBOY UP AND GO RED SOX!

2003-10-04T19:07:00.000-04:00

EDITORIAL POLICY: I've finally gotten around to laying out an official editorial policy on how I go back and revise posts. One of my friends thought I was over-scrupulous before, trying to put even typographical corrections in brackets, and I think he's right. I will now exercise my common sense to make typographical changes and even some stylistic ones with no special notice, assuming that the changes do not (in my view at least), change the original meaning and intent of the post. If more substantive changes are made, or if I wish to comment later on a previous post, the additions/changes will be clearly marked in brackets; I will not follow the Kausfile practice of pretending that an editor is going over the posts.

Now, I just need to remember how to get the above connected to a link in the side-bar.

2003-10-03T22:50:00.001-04:00

HISTORY AND THE YOUNG: Before I state my case as to why college-age young adults are at the wrong time of life to learn what I see as the lessons of history, I’ll say some positive things about late-adolescents.

First of all, undergraduates, not being totally beholden to the arts-and-letters Establishment, have very good BS-detectors, to use a rather indecorous but apt enough term. Smart undergraduates may have an irritatingly affected cynicism, a sort of shallow sophistication, but those same vices help give them a certain immunity to academic cant. Left-wing academics like to see themselves as especially friendly to the young, as the Youth Movement’s natural leaders, but I think a lot of undergraduates see them as they are—simply a new version of the Establishment that refuses to call themselves such. Undergraduates may not have a very well thought-out rationale for repudiating the worse varieties of university nonsense, but simple indifference may be really what that sort of thing deserves.

Second, there are also clearly some fields where only youthful genius makes the greatest strides. My understanding is that this is the case with things like theoretical physics or mathematics—all the great discoveries come early in one’s career. There, youth is perhaps inseparable with intellectual advance, and must be fostered and encouraged as much as possible.

2003-10-03T22:50:00.000-04:00

HISTORY AND MORALITY: But history is fundamentally, in my view, about the cultivation of a certain sort of wisdom. I think college-age students are ready for training in the most important issues of methodology—or “source-criticism” to use a term borrowed from the Germans. The basic distinctions between primary and secondary source; recognizing the degree to which perspective will distend a piece of evidence; how to put together different sources for a more complete picture; etc. All this can be done with undergraduates for the most part. Some more subtle issues of dealing with sources only come with long experience in documents, but that I think is more an issue of spending time with the sources, than one directly linked to the time-of-life of a student.

But history is more than just about the cataloging and evaluation of sources to list a purely factual account. It’s also to some extent about interpretation, and interpretation with some kind of moral premise. I remember once sitting in a class of Donald Kagan where he made the argument that history was a place where lessons in practical ethics (not the term he used, but the best I can come up with) can be found, especially in light of the decline of organized religion. I remember sort of snickering/chuckling at that—I’ve always been too prideful of my dry indifference, a vice I’ll never entirely be rid off I think. But I think I only now understand the significance of that statement.

Historians invariably end up making implicit judgments about the virtue or vice of their subjects—whether they be individuals or groups of people. Some historians even compromise standards of evidence to prove those moral points, which is certainly beyond the pale, but I personally see no problem with moral standards of evaluation, as long as no evidence is mangled in the process, and a historian makes clear what standards are being used.

2003-10-03T22:49:00.001-04:00

HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE: But making judgments about justice or injustice strikes me as something that requires a certain sort of maturity that only comes with time and experience. Young adults tend to be either too strict in their moral judgments—a product of having too little experience with the vagaries of human frailty—or too lax—generally a produce of a selfish desire to justify personally pleasing license.

I’ve always thought practical ethics is a highly situational business, which requires an ability to adjust appropriately for individual circumstance. This does not preclude the idea of an ideal Form of justice or good or what-not (to use the Platonic vocabulary), but only that here in this world, moral principles compete with one another, and judgments must be made as to what takes priority.

This is why history can be so valuable, because it’s a storehouse of collective human experience that can be acquired vicariously. It may not be quite the same as true lived experience, but since our lives are so relatively short, our field-of-action so limited, and the costs of mistakes so high, it behooves us to try to acquire as large a store of experience in whatever way we can. And good history can give that to some extent, precisely because it can give us a larger universe of model-situations to give us guidance whenever a new circumstance arises in our lives.

2003-10-03T22:49:00.000-04:00

EXPERIENCE VICARIOUS AND REAL: But history can only be a supplement, an individual must have some real experience with actual life situations, to help put the vicarious experience of history to use, or to even recognize the usefulness of history in the first place. And people who are eight-or-nine-and-ten don’t usually have that experience, especially in a society as wealthy as ours, which can shield more individuals from many of life’s responsibilities for a longer period of time than was previously possible.

Hard moral choices in life only come with responsibility—whether it be responsibility for one’s family, or one’s school board, or one’s infantry platoon, or whatever. Failure becomes a potential problem with cascading effects that affect not only one’s own person, but other individuals, including individuals one might actually care something about. That sort of responsibility does not come with the dorm room, or the frat party, or even in the seats of a large lecture hall or a small seminar room.

I guess one could argue that since education is supposed to prepare the young for responsibility, history can help in that process, but I really do think history’s effectiveness as a teaching tool for practical ethics is severely compromised if there’s no actual lived experience to proved a sort of external control on the huge mass of historical data. There, is, after all, much bad history, which, for reasons of inaccuracy or poor judgment or whatever will not give much guidance in practical ethics, and lived experience I think is one way of helping to distinguishing the wheat from the chaff in historical writing.

How then is a university supposed to prepare a student for responsibility in the world? I really don’t know—perhaps outside of purely technical and pragmatic skills: how to communicate effectively, the requisite technical knowledge for an intended career path, etc.—there is no way of systematizing that preparation. Perhaps it all depends on adults on university campuses, not only faculty members, but also deans and what-not, to give that advice, based on their own personal experience and what they’ve seen of the world, tailored to each individual student. And I think it also depends on the other older individuals in a college student’s life—parents, especially, but not only them, and whoever else they might come into contact with. But I think flesh-and-blood people matter more than books with respect to this problem.

2003-09-28T12:54:00.000-04:00

ACADEMIC CONSERVATIVES: A few comments with regards to Brooks’ recent column on conservatives in the academy.

First, I do think that conservatives themselves frequently exaggerate the degree of overt hostility they face at universities. In my experience—granted, this may be the product of being in the humanistic discipline least unfriendly to conservatives, history, and being at a southern graduate school—there is very little deliberate and conscious “discrimination” against political conservatives, a point which Brook’s column does make by the way.

I have always thought that the relative ideological uniformity of the humanistic academe can be seen in some ways as the function of the somewhat restricted set of people who end up becoming humanities academics. This goes beyond being Left-Liberal in one’s politics—it also involves academic obsessions with the glories of self-martyrdom, an excessive (if natural) over-emphasis on the practical efficacy of their ideas, blatant egotism, and a propensity to truly pathetic politicking in departments. In sum, academics are intellectuals, and they have the characteristic virtues and vices of such (for my own purposes, here, I’m focusing on the vices, but I do not wish to convey the idea that there are ONLY academic vices).

I suppose that the general similarities among humanities PhDs produces a certain collegiality and guild-like sense of corporateness, which may be indispensable in many ways, and very beneficial in others, but it’s also profoundly restricting. There are many things humanities academics simply do not comprehend, I think, or at least, find it very difficult to grapple with.

2003-09-28T12:53:00.000-04:00

THE RESTRICTIONS OF COMMUNITY: With regards to my own work, I think that a lot of my dissertation’s points about the nature of military change, the relationship between technological developments and actual human practice, and the special pathologies in American civil-military relations are sort-of left field questions (not referring to politics, of course) among academics. In my own experience, I don’t feel that I’ve ever had many really useful (in an intellectual sense) conversations with MOST straight-up academic historians about the specific topics in my dissertation—the books and subjects I look at for the most part are just too different from what most academic historians concern themselves with—so there’s very little common basis for discussion. The reverse is also true—I think most military historians at places like the post-graduate service schools or service academies won’t have much to say with regards to the topics straight-line academics concern themselves; in sum, I think the two groups just don’t have much to say to one another.

I don’t see anything inherently wrong with this—being a conservative, I think there are no unmediated goods in human life, and that to have a sense of corporate community in someplace like academic history, one must have some kind of restriction on what people can do. And although some of those restrictions work against my own material self-interest, I’m willing to be resigned to it, especially since academics really do produce interesting work. It might be almost all left-leaning, but good scholarship need not have specific ideological valence, and as long as one knows what prejudices are in play, the work can still be beneficial in a scholarly sense.

2003-09-28T12:52:00.000-04:00

THE BENEFITS OF IRRELEVANCE: If academic history had a true monopoly on scholarship, then I’d be more concerned, because the restriction would mean the actual foreclosure on an important topic of study—war—among other things, but we live in a decentralized and dispersed society with a tremendous surplus of wealth, and military history has been able to feed off a larger lay readership and institutional support from the national-security state. Military history really doesn’t need the academy to stay alive, and neither does anything else that’s worthy of scholarly interest. Many academic conservatives I think fail to forget this fact.

I know conservatives have concerns about the overwhelming ideological bias of university faculties, who in theory are tasked with the instruction of the young, but I think they worry too much on that front. Most college students in my view generally do not look to their teachers for specific guidance on things like the war in Iraq—conservative always complain about the propensity of the young to disregard the judgments of their elders, and they should remember that in relation to the average American college student and his or her professors.

In sum, the Left-Liberal consensus in humanistic academe is not something I like, but I think we (meaning conservatives) should just all be resigned to it. I really don’t think it actually matters all that much in the grand scheme of things. It may not do much for the self-esteem of most academics, who see their guild as more diverse and free and open to discussion than any other segment of American life—one could say that my characterization of the humanistic academy is of a useful if restrictive place, saved from its worse vices by its own irrelevance—but like I said, I make it a rule (as a conservative) that I don’t expect much from the world, and I hope (but don’t really care) that academics don’t take offense.

2003-09-25T22:24:00.000-04:00

HISTORY AND EDUCATION: Since I have no substantive commentary to give on current affairs, and I have some previous thoughts on this topic I haven’t written before on the blog, I thought it might be the time to put them up.

The post on historical method will really have to wait—I’ve been driving myself mad trying to figure out light infantry tactics in the American Army in the first half of the nineteenth-century, which involves looking at incredibly boring tactical manuals and comparing things like rates-of-march and different provisions for skirmisher drill, etc. I think I might have something interesting to say about it in the dissertation, but it’s tedious spade work. Much of scholarship, to put it bluntly, is just simple drudgery, although I doubt there’s more much of it here than in any other walk of life.

I originally wanted to write this point structured around a somewhat bold claim I want to make—bold, because of our culture’s relentless idealization and obsession with youth—represented in such nonsense as the idea that the “best” years of one’s life are in college (that would be really depressing in my case, I think of college as a time of missed opportunities and fatuous foolishness barely redeemed by a few Professors and friends)—anyhow, to return to the main clause—I wanted to to argue that the sort of humanities education I would try to impart to my students is not well suited to the time of life of the average American college students.

But as I wrote this post, it morphed into something akin to a longish (and too purple-prose-ish) version of that mysterious thing called a “teaching philosophy” I’m supposed to put in cover letters in this infernal job search I’m about to plunge into. I will write a second part, returning to the question of whether or not the young can acquire the sort of wisdom I wish to teach, but as you will see, I’ve bitten of quite a bit of stuff with just the question at hand.

2003-09-25T22:23:00.001-04:00

WHAT SHOULD HISTORY TEACH: If I ever get a real academic job and get to sit down and prepare lectures, the sorts of themes I’d emphasize are:

1. The role that irony, chance, and misdirection play in history. When I speak of irony, I don’t speak of the snide, know-it-all sort that we generally mean in public conversation nowadays, or the angst-ridden self-martyring sort you found among po-mo adherents, but the sort of irony that we’re all subject to, since we’re all people and carry the flaws that human beings have always borne—what orthodox Christians would have called original sin, a concept which serves well enough, I think, whether or not one believes in a pre-lapsarian Eden before the Fall.

2. The profound limits on both our ability to understand the world around us, and to effect any real changes on that world in accordance with our intent. History should teach humility, perhaps humility above all else. Perhaps the Art Historians and English Professors can teach students about the majesty of genius; perhaps the scientists can teach real, concrete knowledge of a particular sort about the physical world around us, perhaps the Philosophy Departments can push the boundaries of ethical and metaphysical knowledge as far as they can go—but all those disciplines teach some sort of human achievement, whether it be in art, or literature, or a ingenious method of instruction, or an even more ingenious explication of the boundaries of pure reason

History should do no such thing, Clio should be a goddess hooded in black, with a cold imperious beauty—a Muse of Humility above all else. But not a Muse of Failure or of Desperation or even of Tragedy, and certainly not a Muse of Angst—the beauty may be cold, but beauty it still is, and History should be no counselor of despair. But the truths History will give will not be a source of Redemption, for that, people should go elsewhere.

2003-09-25T22:23:00.000-04:00

HISTORY, CONSERVATISM, AND THE CLASSROOM: The focus on human limits does have a strong affinity to what we now call political “conservatism,” so I do not think there is any surprise my own politics reflect a strong streak of right-leaning ideas. But I do not think the principles laid out above represent much of a coherent ideological message that could be imparted in a class, even if I wished to do such a thing. All the principles I laid out above, for example, could probably just as easily be deployed to argue against the war in Iraq as they could for—they are only broad principles, and the emphasis is on the responsibility of the individual to apply them in light of particular circumstance. If I was a faculty member asked to appear on some panel where individuals were supposed to dilate on issues of the day, I suppose I would give my opinion, but in a classroom, I think the focus should be on the general principles I laid above, with only the particular applications of the particular time in question considered.

If I taught a class on the Civil War, I should (and hopefully would) focus on the moral issues of slavery and war and emancipation and Union and loyalty from the perspective of all the historical actors themselves, and the students should be allowed to go from there. They can condemn or praise or throw up their hands in despair, they can do whatever they wish with the knowledge they acquire, but they should first understand how the world looked to their subjects, how narrow and restricted those historical actors’ viewpoints must by necessity be, and how limited their efficacy really was to do much of anything, but also how those actors had to make some kind of choice of how to go about the world. And that individuals in the present must make their own difficult choices, albeit ones in entirely different circumstances. Whether or not a specific era of history can give the present guidance will depend on the circumstance, but the emphasis should always be on the need to exercise one’s own judgment in each individual circumstance.

2003-09-17T23:51:00.000-04:00

OBSCURITIES: The good news is that I now know a good deal about the creation of the American General Staff shortly after the War of 1812 among various other "obscurities" about all sorts of things in early American military history (if any of you know anything about the famous Generalstab of Prussia, do not confuse the very different American counterpart, which is actually closer to British practice in Wellington's day)--and I've almost finished a draft of my first dissertation chapter. Which I guess is something of a benchmark in my short-lived academic career, but it's not totally ready to be sent off to my advisors, and I feel a bit worn-out.

And I have eight more chapters to write, quite a bit of research to finish, and drafts are different from the final product of course. Writing takes a lot out of a person--or, at least, it takes a lot out of me, and I'm bushed. However, I didn't realize I actually had neglected my blog so, and will try to think up something to write. It usually takes years to research and write a dissertation.

I guess I feel I don't have much to say--I do want to write a post on historical method and how I do my own research, but only after I get this infernal draft done. I right now spend so much time doing and writing history that I have no desire to write about it when I get home. But I do have a day off coming, so perhaps I'll spend it doing that, instead of vegging out in front of the TV.

As for contemporary events, well, there's only so many times a man can preach patience, eh, and I felt I've said my peace.

2003-09-16T19:45:00.000-04:00

A BIT ABOUT BASEBALL: Yes, yes, I know I haven't blogged in a while--I've been so preoccupied with work that I tend to come home too tired to blog. I haven't written anything about baseball for a while, so I thought I'd mention that Harold Reynolds on Sportscenter last night actually went out on a limb and predicted that my Dodgers would win the Wildcard, on the logic that the Phillies and Marlins will beat each other up in the next couple of weeks. I think that the schedule gives us a chance, but the problem is we have to play the Giants for something like eight games, who I'm sorry to say are a pretty good team. We'll see what happens, but, yes, hope does live at Chavez Ravine!

2003-09-02T18:59:00.000-04:00

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: These grafs are from Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U. S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). The book's title is fairly self-explanatory, and I think that the book's general argument is quite persuasive.

If it is indeed true, as is so often said, that the officer corps counts for everything in war, then the American officer corps of World War II was less than mediocre. Owing partly no doubt to pressure of time, the methods used to select and train officer none too successful. Far too many officers had soft jobs in the rear, far too few commanded at the front. Those who did command at the front were, as the official history frankly admits and the casualty figures confirm, often guilty of bad leadership. Between them and their German opposite numbers there simply is no comparison possible.

Yet when all is said and done, the fact remains that the American GI did win World War II. He did so, moreover, without assault, raping, and otherwise molesting too many people. Wherever he came—even within Germany itself—he was received with relief, or at any rate without fear. To him, no greater tribute than this is conceivable.

[pp. 168-169]

In this context, a warning is in place. The German Army had extremely high fight power, it is true, but only at the cost of producing troops to whom an order, regardless of its nature, was an order and who could therefore be relied upon not only to fight hard but to commit any kind of atrocity as well. To produce fighting power without paying as high a price; that is the true challenge facing the armies of the West.

[pg. 173]

The only revision I would make to van Creveld's general thesis is even more disquieting: van Creveld followed an older generation of scholarship that tended to downplay the role of ideological motivations in the Wehrmacht. More recent work (esp. Omar Bartov's Hitler's Army) seems to me to show that the Wehrmacht was quite devoted to the Nazi cause. Although I think van Creveld's general argument that German military excellence has its sources more in non-ideological organizational straits still holds, it does appear that one of the reasons why the Wehrmacht fought so well was the devotion of at least some soldiers. Although I like Victor Davis Hanson's writings a lot, I do think he protests too much in his op-eds in trying to make a necessary link between democratic armies and high levels of military efficiency.

Military efficiency is of course not our only priority, but if we ignore it for the sake of other considerations, we will incur not insignificant costs in both blood and treasure, and even defeat with all its consequences if we're too wedded to inappropriate standards of moral purity.

2003-08-27T19:28:00.001-04:00

QUAGMIRE REDUX: I noticed in a recent trip to Oxblog that the debate over the current state of our occupation in Iraq seems to have quite a few legs. The only thing I really want to emphasize is that it’s basically premature to say much of anything—much of what seems to me going back-and-forth right now strikes me as punditry based on questionable evidence garnered through second-hand media reports.

A few points:

2003-08-27T19:28:00.000-04:00

SUCCESS OR FAILURE: Even if the Iraqi opposition to the American occupation is of great depth and staying power, that doesn’t necessarily mean the United States shouldn’t be there right now. If it is correct (as I believe) that the Iraqi state under Saddam was extremely dangerous, precisely because it was a state with all the requisite capabilities of resource mobilization, and in fact, that it was far more dangerous than even a well entrenched insurgency, then the invasion and the occupation are still justified, and the losses we are taking and will be taking are acceptable from the point of view of policy and state-craft.

The question really is: what is worse, what we are and will be suffering in Iraq, or what damage we would have taken from an Iraq still under Saddam’s thumb? The judgment hinges less on a debate over how serious the situation in Iraq is right now, but more over on how much of a threat Iraq would have been without the war, and what Iraq will look like in the long term. The first question will always be open to debate; the second we can’t even begin to judge until we see how things turn out in a few years. Even then, the calculus will also be open to dispute, but my point is, much of the debate doesn’t seem to make clear what is and what is not success.

It’s possible that the potential threat of a Saddam-run Iraq would have been serious enough to have made our invasion and the current occupation a more palatable evil. Or not. But that’s where I think the debate should be, not over whether or not Iraq is another Vietnam, or in trying to gauge the successor failure of the occupation to date without defining what is success and what is failure.

2003-08-27T19:27:00.000-04:00

ABSOLUTE VICTORY?: Here’s a thought: the Federal government experienced huge amounts of overt and frequently violent defiance of Federal authority during Reconstruction after the Civil War, all of it more serious then what we have so far seen in Iraq (granted, that resistance could escalate, but I’m talking about what’s so far happened, not what might happen). The same white Southerners who had rebelled during the War were basically able to extract concessions to restore white rule under “Redemption.”

But does that mean white southerners were able to “win” the Civil War? No, of course not, the Confederates wanted an independent nation and slavery secure; not a scarred and bloodied South economically blasted by invading armies minus slavery and the little part about actually having an independent country. Jim Crow and segregation was white southerners’ second choice—the best they could do to vindicate white supremacy—and even that was obviously vulnerable to federal authority.

If you want another example: US troops after the capture of Mexico City had to deal with widespread problems with guerillas for several months before a peace treaty was finally signed (guerillas had also been an issue before, but Mexico City's capture was in retrospect more or less decisive to the war). But the treaty was signed, and no one would deny that the United States got the better part of the bargain.

I do not want to try to argue for some kind of moral equivalence between either the Civil War or the Mexican War and the Second Gulf War—the situations really are too different—what I want to raise is the question of how we define victory. A victory that is not absolute does not mean that it is not a victory. The situation in Iraq is obviously serious; whether or not it is about to become a defeat is an entirely different question.

2003-08-24T13:53:00.000-04:00

LITTLE LEAGUE WORLD SERIES: I’m going to celebrate the completion of a draft for an article I turned into the editor on on Friday with a post on nothing but baseball.

I’ve been watching the Little League World Series some—not as much as I’d like—but I’ve seen parts of games here and there. It’s fun to watch, at least partly because it’s (relatively speaking) pure and pristine. Baseball I think is the cleanest of major professional sports in the United States; the worst scandal MLB has is the flap over steroids, which is nothing to be proud of, but at least baseball seems less afflicted by the sort of thuggery that seems to be infesting pro-football-and-basketball. But all the money in the majors does lead to a certain unseemliness to the bigs, which doesn’t mar the Little League World Series as much.

Little League, of course, isn’t truly simon-pure. There’s the worry about 12 year olds throwing breaking balls; there are the occasional problems with adults faking ages; but all in all, one can at least know that everyone on the field is relatively guiltless. If there is something untoward going on, one knows that it couldn’t happen without an adult’s aid, and since it’s properly the responsibility of the adult to behave correctly—children can be forgive for minor vices, precisely because they’re children—everyone on the field more or less gets a pass due to their age.

I know some people are concerned about the television coverage; the fact that ESPN is making a good chunk of change from all this, but the TV doesn’t seem to do any harm. And it may do some good; presumably parents are less likely to go ballistic over-react, at least partly due to all the national attention.

And it’s fun to watch the kids take something so childish so seriously—as is the wont of children. The pitchers pawing the mound and looking in for the sign; obviously trying to imitate—consciously or unconsciously—big league pitchers, and not quite succeeding. The batters with their slightly oversized protective gear, contrasting with the raw, bony look many boys have before they fill out (some, like me, never really fill out, but simply elongate). One can’t help but feel bad when a pitcher gets in a bad spot and wears his grief (un-intentionally) far more openly than any big-league pitcher would dare—I think major league pitchers are perhaps the most grim and stoic characters in sports—but they’re kids, and you know they’ll survive (not always the case with the big leaguers—I’m thinking of the Angels closer whose name I don’t remember who killed himself years after he blew a save in the 1986 ALCS), since it is just a game after all.

I hope my fellow-Americans will forgive me for rooting for Japan—I saw a little Japanese kid show bunt, throw his bat back, and pound a key line drive down the right-field line against a 6-foot tall and 12-year old flame-throwing pitcher who just towered over him and have been rooting for ‘em since.

2003-08-16T18:45:00.000-04:00

INITIATIVE REDUX: I forgot to address a point in my longish post on the question of initiative. Since statecraft tends to be an exercise in imperfect expedients, far removed from the realm of abstract and theoretical perfection, more modest criteria should be judged for success or failure, and one of those is who is forcing the other party to react more to one's own actions, rather than the other way around. The party that has the initiative may still incur losses, or suffer downright defeats, but although every contender in [a] war will suffer setbacks, only one will be more successful than the other (at least in the long term). [Therefore] the [acquisition and] maintenance of [strategic] initiative should be an important part of any attempt to come out looking a little less pummeled, and perhaps even downright victorious.

As far as I’m concerned, the United States still has the initiative against violently hostile opponents in the Middle East. If the Baathist insurgents and Islamic radicals are able to expel us from Iraq, then we lose that initiative, but for now, even with the deaths of US soldiers and the obvious problems of nation-building, anti-American terrorists in Iraq are trying to roll-back an American victories against Saddam, as opposed to continuing an offensive on targets in the United States proper. This state-of-affairs also applies to Al Qaeda, which still has not managed a successful attack in the United States since 9/11 and the Anthrax attacks (assuming Al Qaeda was behind the latter). Part of maintaining the initiative is sustaining sufficient will and self-confidence to refuse to lose it, and although material limitations and the actions of the enemy will impinge on this, I do think this administration has sufficient self-resolve to maintain its current strong position.

Now, as for North Korea, the issue of who is maintaining the initiative is much less clear-cut. Right now, I think both sides are at best (from the US perspective) in a rough equilibrium, with perhaps even the North Koreans having a slight edge, which is why the state of affairs is so much more dangerous.

[Rev. - The first version of the first paragraph had some problems with syntax, which I've since corrected. As is my usual practice, I've put the changes/additions in brackets]

2003-08-15T21:36:00.000-04:00

MORE BLOGGING I HOPE: It seems my new method of blogging can compensate for my feeble connection. I write the posts in Word, a practice I sometimes did before just to keep them from being eaten by blogger, but now I do it all the time since composing in blogger is intolerably slow [with my current connection]. And then I just paste everything in. This method stinks when it comes to including links, but I was never really into that even when it was so much easier with a broad-band connection at school, and I don't think it'll detract from what I at least see as worthwhile in my posts. My hopes for adding some links is totally dead for the foreseeable future, though. I delayed doing it at school due to my technical ineptitude, and when pared with physical limitations on my connection, I think it's now flat-out impossible. (Rev: When I refer to "links" in my last two sentences, I'm of course referring to the seemingly obligatory practice of warblogs to give links of what sites they visit.)

2003-08-15T21:31:00.000-04:00

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: Well, I’m going to say my spiel on the whole “fly-paper” strategy idea and put this dead horse to rest.

Much of the now-vaguely remembered comments I read among blogs about a fly-paper strategy seemed to imply that this was a conscious strategy by the Bush administration from the get-go, to actively encourage Islamic terrorists to go to Iraq and make trouble there as opposed to the United States or even places like Israel or Southeast Asia or East Africa where these groups have been operating in the recent past.

This always struck me as a bit implausible. Looking back on the unfolding of the war, it seemed that the Administration had a sort of multi-phased approached to the war. First, it tried to win with the lowest cost in blood and treasure by using an elaborate program of psychological warfare and subversion—hence all those leaked reports of negotiations with high-level Iraqi commanders and the like. This effort wasn’t a total failure, especially if you include (as I do) the physical attacks on Iraqi command-and-control by air assets and special operations forces as one of its components, but it certainly wasn’t successful by itself.

But the administration did have a back-up plan, and I think all the crusty opponents of Rumsfeld do deserve some credit for having pushed for this, since the original “Downing Plan” as reported in the media did not seem to involve any heavy armor component. I remember some news accounts that seemed to imply that Franks, who seems to have had a very good working relationship with Rummy, was able to persuade the Secretary of Defense to add a substantial force of heavy armor to the invasion plan. Now, obviously, I’m sure Rumsfeld’s opponents would argue that this addition was only barely enough and far too risky, but one of the things military history can teach I think is the omnipresent role Clausewitzian friction plays—“Murphy’s Law” to use the rough colloquial equivalent—and how success is the only real criteria for judging things.

Every military campaign has plenty of snafus and screw-ups, some ending up quite bloody, and some more than a little tragicomic, things like Ariel Sharon’s entire brigade in 1956 not having a single wrench for changing tires (a serious problem for any mechanized outfit), but not every campaign is successful. This administration has won two decisive campaigns, which means that they’re doing something right on at least the operational level. I’ve of course already laid out my position on the wisdom and morality of their actions, and I won’t belabor that point here.

Anyhow, leaving that digression aside, while all the psyo-warfare stuff was going on, 3 ID was also making its run, and when it became clear that Saddam hadn’t been killed in the first decapitation strike and that we weren’t going to get a generals’ coup to make it all peaches-and-cream, that division along with the Marines (and if the Turkey situation had been handled properly, 4 ID would have been in the mix also) was able to finish the job the old fashioned way by rolling tanks into a city and conquering it outright.

And then the major, conventional phase of the war ended.

2003-08-15T21:30:00.000-04:00

YET ANOTHER PHASE: Now it strikes me as obvious that the administration didn’t expect the scale of the insurgency we’re now dealing with—not to say that the current insurgency is unmanageable or truly threatening on a strategic level (as opposed to the personal level of individuals losing their lives)—but in the most optimistic case, it seems clear that the administration at first hoped it would find a fully functioning state headed by a palatable set of generals who would have gotten rid of Saddam on their own. Such an orderly transition would presumably have automatically disarmed and/or co-opted most Baathists and provided a ready security apparatus that could indigenously deal with whatever Saddamite dead-enders were left.

When that outcome became obviously implausible, the administration seems to have still hoped that the Iraqi bureaucracy could basically function on auto-pilot with a new leadership organically rising up with assistance from friendly exile groups and current mid-level officials. I think the administration ended up much too optimistic on the state of Iraqi civil society, which led to all the initial snafus in the occupation. On the bright side, the administration also seems to have devoted its limited planning resources to real catastrophes that didn’t happen—giant refugee flows, huge infrastructure damage, mass starvation, etc.—which, along with the war itself, should have claimed the lion-share of limited resources on the planning level. I’m sorry, but if we had lost the war in the first place, the most elaborate provisions of safe-guarding antiquities wouldn’t have mattered a whit.

But there was too much optimism about some kind of organic civil society somehow coming out of the blue, and when this became obvious, Garner was relieved and Bremer’s administration was brought in with a firmer hand. But the up-shot with regards to counter-insurgency in all this was that we must now reconstitute an Iraqi security apparatus almost from scratch, which means we have to bear the brunt of pacification until some sort of Iraqi militia is ready for prime-time.

And it does not seem that this scenario was expected—I still remember a NY Times article shortly after Baghdad’s fall where Defense Department sources were openly talking about trying to reduce the US troop presence to something like a division by the end of the year, assuming the security situation improved. Now we’re talking about extended 12 month long duty rotations for Iraq, with current force levels remaining about the same, although it’s my impression the Marines will be replaced by the multinational division headed by the Poles. And I’ve heard comments that a “generational” level commitment to Iraq will now be required, on the model of the long and still continuing US troop presence in Germany and Japan.

2003-08-15T21:29:00.001-04:00

SO WHAT?: Okay, so the administration’s doesn’t have some grand and exceedingly clever scheme that plots out every move, so what? There’s actually a danger in over-planning in that plans invariably disintegrate on first contact with the enemy to use Moltke’s dictum, and good state-craft should be flexible in its ways and means. Martin van Creveld, a fine military historian (whose politics I know nothing about by the way, so I’m not claiming that he would agree with this specific use of his scholarship), has argued that all effective command systems allow for a great deal of flexibility and do not over-plan. He cites Vietnam in Command in War as a case-study in the disastrous dangers of micro-management, while in Supplying War he argues that the invasion of Normandy was planned and organized to such an excessively thorough that that it took the swash-buckling and almost reckless will of Patton to keep the Allied advance from being bogged down in baneful bureaucracy.

My own assumption during the war was that we wouldn’t have an insurgency problem to deal with, because the major conventional set of the war would be bloody enough that most of the guerrillas would have been dealt with in a very nasty Battle of Baghdad. As it turned out, the war was over so quickly that the Saddamites lived to fight another day, and although they’re making a not insignificant amount of trouble, I would prefer the current trickle of casualties to a real, full-set siege and battle for Baghdad against better organized formations using heavy weapons (and perhaps chemical weapons to boot) as opposed to RPGs and road-side bombs.

No one really predicted all the facets of the outcome. The so-called neo-conservatives underestimated how hard it would be to graft liberal democracy on a society that’s been traumatized for so long by totalitarianism; the Lefties still haven’t gotten their Vietnam Redux; the Realists never got their own version of gloom-and-doom; and although I think people on my side of the aisle so far look more accurate, the jury’s still out, and we’re talking more about getting fewer things wrong than more things right.

2003-08-15T21:29:00.000-04:00

STRATEGIC INITIATIVE: I do think, though, that all the talk about a fly-paper strategy gets at something important, if in a roundabout fashion. In statecraft, I think it a good principle to always maintain the initiative, to make one’s opponents react to what one is doing, as opposed to the other way around. Part of the problem with the containment policy for Iraq was in the sheer inertia of the policy; while we remained static trying to hold the line, Saddam could constantly probe and obstruct and force us to respond to his actions, as opposed to the other way around. Whatever one thinks of real or imaginary links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, whatever one thinks of the exact imminence of Saddam’s threat to the United States, whatever one thinks of the exact state of readiness of Saddam’s WMD programs at the time of invasion, it is clear that Iraq was an openly avowed enemy of the United States with whom we fought a full-dress war not so long before the most recent full-dress war, and who we continued to trade shots with in the no fly zones for something like a decade.

We can certainly debate whether or not in this specific case it was worth the effort and the cost to put down this specific opponent at this specific time, but in my view, it was not a coincidence that another openly avowed enemy of the United States—Al Qaeda—just happens to come out of the same part of the world, and although they have different ends, they do have the same enemies—namely us, our nominal ally in the Saudi regime, and our more natural ally in Israel—and perhaps we should do something about the problem. Why should we always wait for a group to show its ability to harm us severely before we actually do something about it? Why shouldn’t we have taken Saddam at his word (and the occasional war or pot-shot at a plane), that he really, really didn’t like us, and responded in some fashion?

Furthermore, our contest is not only against religiously inspired terrorism, it’s against everyone who actively wishes to do the United States harm. Sure, Baathism is in its origins secular, but it still looks pretty anti-American to me, and in issues of statecraft, it’s what people do that matters more than their ideas. An American killed by a secular terrorist is just as dead as one killed by a religiously inspired one. And although Iraq had not devoted its resources to pull off a 9/11, making its threat less immediate than Al Qaeda, the difference is that it’s more dangerous in the long term, since it had the resources and backing of a modern state, a point I’ve emphasized before, and I’ll emphasize again. The question is one of potential I’ll grant, but it was also one of potential with regards to Al Qaeda after the Cole and Embassy bombings, and I don’t want to wait for as definitive an answer as 9/11 before we act against openly avowed and really quite unpleasant enemies, especially when we’re dealing with a real state, as opposed to a dispersed and shadowy non-state actor.

If religiously orientated Islamic terrorists will now rally to Iraq’s defense, because we’ve tipped their hands, fine. They would have tried to do us ill in other parts of the world; I don’t see why it’s so bad that they will now try to do us ill in Iraq as opposed to here in the United States proper or in Saudi Arabia or the Philippines or wherever. And, like the advocates of this fly-paper idea, I do think it’s better that we fight the terrorists in the Middle East, as opposed to the streets of New York or the avenues of Washington.

I suppose doves will declare that we’ve only forced religious and secular anti-Americanism together; my response is, well, who says that they wouldn’t have joined forces on their own in the future? Why not attack both now while they’re separate and divided (assuming they really are so divided), instead of waiting until they become coordinated and that much stronger. Generations of Left-wing historians have spent much effort “exposing” how ideological the United States has been—if the aggressively capitalist United States of American could make common cause with the Soviet Union to fight the Nazis—then maybe, just maybe, a secular Baathist and a Jihadist type might decide that, hey, maybe we should kill off the Americans first, and settle our differences later. These groups have made their intentions clear, and it’s time that we did the same in turn.

2003-08-14T23:07:00.000-04:00

OF MICE AND MEN: I was going to put up a lengthy post today, in an effort to try to keep up this blog more, but my plans were stymied by the giant power outage in the Northeast I'm sure the readers of this will have heard of. Although I have a laptop and a functional (if excruciatingly slow) internet connection (14.4) through my cell phone, my laptop battery died a while back, and I fell victim to the disadvantages of my frugal obstinacy in refusing to buy a new battery for an underpowered and beat up--if functional--old Compaq Presario that's almost three years old. We got power maybe 40 minutes ago, but I need to sleep to go to work tomorrow, so a longish post will have to wait.

I'm not sure what the longish post will be on until I write it. I suppose I'll address the whole "fly-paper" issue, which I've been meaning to for a while, but I've been so slow on writing that post that I've (as usual) missed the proper timing on it. But I do want to address the whole issue of what I call "strategic initiative" at some length, so I guess that's probably what I should write on first.

I've also sometimes thought about writing on what exactly historians do, and I did actually start a post earlier this week describing the nuts and bolts of my archival work. I scratched it, since I wasn't sure if anyone really cared all that much about my grubbing through documents, and I in all due honesty have always felt a certain reserve I don't like to breach in this blog, which isn't really compatible with the whole self-publishing character of blogging in many ways.

Although I don't think my blog-personality is totally detached from who I am on a personal level, I don't think that I'd ever be able to be as personally revealing as Lileks, or for that matter, Sullivan. Not to say that they're the norm for bloggers, but I do think many bloggers will talk about friends and family far more than I have, and even those personally revealing moments in this blog have centered around my ideas about my own place in the academy.

There are of course my posts about baseball, but although I adore my Dodgers, and am quite miffed that they're only scraping by right now, my affection for baseball is many ways a profoundly self-conscious attempt at complete escapism. I spend perhaps too much of my time reading material by and about soldiering, which of course involves a good deal of general human unpleasantness, and baseball provides a sort-of profound relief to it all. There is a certain grandeur to the game, but I do think that writers on baseball have exagerrated it to some extent and forgotten that part of the glorious innocence of the game lies in the purity of irrelevance.

But perhaps even a post about what I do on a daily basis felt too close on some level, or maybe my instincts stemmed from a fear that to write something on that would betray a sort-of excessive narcisissm--as if anyone would care about my humdrum routine of reading old books and leafing through old government records. Josh Cherniss recently had some posts about historical method (it's too difficult for me to find the links with my net access, so you'll just have to take my word on it), which I should have responded to, and would perhaps give a post about what I do on a daily basis more intellectual heft, but I didn't since I think I was in Maryland at the time with even worse net access (i.e. virtually nonexistent beyond e-mail) than I do now. Oh well, I've always had a singularly bad sense of timing.

I guess I'll figure it out at some later point, when I'm not so harried....

2003-08-05T06:30:00.001-04:00

STATE BUILDING: The erosion of the modern nation-state is supposedly one of the great themes of our contemporary post-national area, but it is something of a curiosity how much of the commentary on “nation-building” efforts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq all seem to take the premise that the modern nation-state is a form of political organization compatible with a very wide range of historical place and circumstance.

For example, in all the talk about more aggressive nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, there seems to be very little discussion of where exactly Afghanistan’s nominal borders came from. Why, pray tell, should lines drawn by British Imperial authorities be contiguous with a functioning modern state in a part of the world where tribal and ethnic loyalties are so profoundly important? And where those loyalties are strengthened by an inhospitable landscape naturally conducive to dispersed tribal resistance?

These are not necessarily “new” issues—a large theme of Robert Kaplan’s work has been the erosion of the nation state in books like The Coming Anarchy. In fact, Kaplan has even talk about the erosion of nationality in the United States with regards to the widening gap between the American military and certain segments of the American population, which he wrote about back in the mid-90s when there was a great deal of literature on a supposedly widening civil-military gap.

Kaplan argued, if I remember correctly, that while the American soldiery lived on isolated bases in a sort-of monastic-warrior guild, coastal American elites became more and more similar to their counterparts in Europe, creating a state of affairs where an Ivy Leaguer would have more in common with a well-educated Parisian or Spaniard than with the company-grade officer who is supposed to be serving and protecting the Ivy Leaguer.

Kaplan didn’t make the specific analogy, but one can think of what happened to the Roman legions, which went from being a sort-of militia more-or-less reflective of the citizenry to a “professional” force that eventually became more beholden to ambitious generals than to an abstract republic it no longer had much of a connection to.

Much of those concerns seem dated now with the generally high repute the military now enjoys in American society as a whole, and I thought much of the discussion was premised on a false idealization of civil-military relations in American history, but it is an issue in play and can’t be ignored.

2003-08-05T06:30:00.000-04:00

VIOLENCE AND THE STATE: Anyhow, back to the issue at hand. All political communities require some degree of coercion, and in my view, the most important characteristic of the modern state is its monopoly of a certain type of violence (I know Weber wrote about this issue, which I haven’t read first-hand, so if I duplicate or depart from his ideas, it’s purely un-intentional)—this violence’s defining characteristic are the ability to at least keep in check competing centers of political authority both in and outside the state.

If you look at what I specialize in—nineteenth-century American history—the Federal government has done everything from suppressing domestic dissent among renegade farmers during the Whiskey Rebellion to suppressing attempts by Americans on the Canadian border to incite a Canadian revolt against Great Britain to pacifying Indians to suppressing the attempt by a third of the country to simply leave the polity and form their own state. And it has defied the attempts of foreign powers—first Great Britain to win independence in the first place, then a whole range of foreign-policy crises and war scares throughout the period.

2003-08-05T06:29:00.001-04:00

A THRESHOLD OF VIOLENCE: What makes a modern state different from something like a feudal form of organization is that a state must have a certain degree of organizational prowess to be able to mobilize violence that can overwhelm competing internal groups (I’ll let aside the question of external threats for the moment). This is not per-se an issue of technology—the ability to overwhelm is entirely relative, which means that the level of technology varies. That is to say, while Napoleon could have suppressed Parisian radicals with bronze cannon firing grapeshot, even a state-builder in as technologically backward a place like Afghanistan could not do the same, because tribal groups have automatic weapons and RPGs. What they do not have is the requisite level of organization that allows a modern military like that of the United States to project immense amounts of violence at very long distances over sustained periods of time. The most important gap between the US Army and the Taliban is not so much one in technology as it is an organizational difference between a loose pre-modern tribal and religious organization and a modern bureaucracy.

But there are limits to what organization can accomplish—issues like geography and culture also come into play. Looking again at Afghanistan, the sheer lay of the land becomes a factor, along with the particularly martial character of the different peoples involved. And, of course, circumstance will determine how much coercion is needed—much less is need in long-established states like the United States or those of western Europe.

And all of this can of course come to naught if external forces can overwhelm a state. For example, white Southerners a very viable (in terms of domestic control) nation-state between 1861-1865, but saw it shattered by the Union Army. Here is an example of how my distinction between internal and external threats is also to some extent artificial: sometimes there can be a state within a state, and other times a state can be strengthened by a perceived need to fight off external threats—what happened in the United States during World War II and the Cold War where a fairly small Federal government exploded in size to deal with external threats.

2003-08-05T06:29:00.000-04:00

THE PRIMACY OF THE STATE: But there should be no confusion over what form of organization is more deadly: in our current war against a state-less terrorist organization—Al Qaeda—we’ve lost a bit over three thousand since the war began in the 90s with the Embassy bombings. While fighting a true modern state, the British lost over twenty-thousand soldiers in a single day at the Somme. And even Al Qaeda was only able to operate at its organizational peak when it had access to some state-resources in the form of a Taliban. And organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas continue to draw benefits from states like Iran and Syria, and have to modify their behavior somewhat when those state-sponsors have to tack in the face of something like American pressure.

2003-08-05T06:28:00.000-04:00

CONTEMPORARY STATE-BUILDING: All this is not to say that Afghanistan is somehow fated to perpetual warlordism, or that any and all sort of devil’s bargains should be made in Iraq; it is to say that there is nothing inherently natural in building a state, and one should [not] be surprised if state-building in Iraq and Afghanistan is marred by pitfalls and difficulties, in the same way that all the historical nation states of the West have had their ups-and-downs, whether it be struggle between Parliament and the Stuarts in seventeenth-century England or France with its numbered Republics and Imperial interludes. And since there must be a state before there is a liberal-democracy—both Afghanistan and Iraq are much too large for democracy on the Classical Greek model—an idea one can find in Federalist No. 10 by Madison, there will be much rough sledding ahead of us.

[Thanks to a reader for picking up the "not" that was missing above]

My main concern is that there is a danger in having too high a bar for success—if one sets the bar too high, one is asking for automatic discouragement. If one expects a liberal democracy in Afghanistan and gets no such thing, then one may give up on having a loosely federated government run out Kabul with just barely enough authority to prevent a return to total anarchy, and not recognize how it is all the more important to strive for the latter, for precisely the reason that it is possible. Principle without pragmatism may be noble; it may be inspiring in a spiritual sense for those who have the luxury to admire such things; but it is not statesmanship.

2003-08-01T19:31:00.000-04:00

THE ELECTRONIC WILDERNESS: I've been in DC for most of the last week, was in Richmond for part of last week, and am currently in beauteous Carlisle, PA, home of both the Army War College and the US Army Military History Institute, one of the finest collections of military books and military history manuscript material in North America. I was planning to blog a bit from my hotel room in Maryland, but the place charged for local calls, so I was unwilling to use a dial-up connection from my room, and I think it'd be a bit rude to use the Library of Congress public terminal to blog.

Anyhow, I may have time to write a post tonight--I need to do some laundry!--but blogging may be a bit erratic for a few days as I settle in to my new abode for the next three months in a suburb of New York near West Point. So the two promised posts on state-building and "fly-paper" strategy may have to wait.

2003-07-20T16:42:00.000-04:00

I HATE MOVING!!: I may be more than a touch nostalgic about all things old, probably to the detriment of my scholarship, but I am not at all nostalgic about my days in college, where I acquired a few friends, learned a good deal (but not as much as I could of) from learned instructors who probably could have spent their time more productively than dealing with me, but made the usual clutch of mistakes nit-wit late-adolescents make.

And now I'm reminded of the whole tedious business of living in dorms, moving every year (or sometimes every semester), and the like, since I'm due to clear out of Charlottesville soon and am in the throes of packing. The good thing is I now have a car; the bad news is that I've acquired more useless junk over the course of the last three years. I'm actually looking forward to clearing out--after some ressearch in Richmond and DC I'll be at West Point soon, where I'll be doing research that doesn't require me to drive two hours (or more) to get to the infernal archive. I've driven up I-81 through the Shenandoah so often that I've become sick of the scenery; as usual, my irritable disposition triumphs over whatever pleasures nature can offer.

2003-07-20T16:41:00.000-04:00

WAIT AND SEE: The two other posts I was planning to write this week will just have to wait--I will briefly say that I find much of the general discussion over Iraq tedious and all-but-useless. The long-term viability of the Baathist insurgency is yet to be seen and can only be settled with time; if American soldiers are killed at the same rate as now 18 months from now, and if the Iraqi militia we're planning to set up totally falls on its face, then I'll be more concerned, although the casualty figures will still be pretty low by any historical measure. Right now, I think it more likely things will get better, but I'm a historian, not a prophet.

More than anything else right now, it really is wait and see. Counter-insurgency tactics generally includes the use of proxies--whether it be the Afghan strongmen we've made a somewhat unstable alliance with in Afghanistan or the Indian allies of the US Army during its old frontier campaigns or pro-Confederate and pro-Union militias in Civil War Missouri. Since Saddam in the Sunni regions was successful in maintaining a complete monopoly on institutional violence, there are no ready-made anti-Baathist Sunni militias for the United States to have immediately co-opted; compare the Kurdish North where the Kurds had their own military forces and were able to take up law-and-order functions with fewer problems and disruptions (along with the fact, of course, that there's much less support in the North for the Baathists in the first place). This seems to be also the case to a lesser extent in the Shia South.

If the administration wants to pacify the Sunni regions, it will have to build a militia up from scratch--in the worst case, we can form a Shiite militia to counter-balance pro-Saddam sentiment among the Sunnis--but right now, there doesn't seem to be enough indigenous support among the Sunnis or competence among the Baathist guerillas to justify such a politically problematic step, which would make more difficult the long-term prospects of an inclusive and non-sectarian liberal nationalism in Iraq. But even with a Sunni militia, there will be teething problems in bringing such a force up to speed, especially if they're going to be held responsible to western standards of human rights and the like--the sometimes uncontrolled and bandit-like character of nominally pro-Confederate and pro-Union guerillas in Missouri is a good example of the dangers in using militias--but again, the Baathists hold-outs right now do not look like adept guerilla fighters like the Sioux or the Afghans, so the brutal necessities of war are a bit ameliorated by our current material superiority. But most importanly, setting up a militia will take time, and although I think we will end up being successful, it's just going to take time.

And it will also take time for a true quagmire to develop--the constant use of Vietnam as an analogy is simply a function of the present using the past for entirely instrumental purposes. Before WWII, supporters of appeasement used the carnage of WWI to justify their policies; before the Civil War, pro-secession southerners cited the American Revolution as proof they could win their independence; before this recent Iraq war, hawks over-used the folly of appeasement in the 30s while doves cited Vietnam. In the end, all these comparisons say more about the needs of the present than what actually happenned in the past, much less what lessons we might be able to derive from it.

By my own modest standards--getting rid of a national security threat, maintaining the strategic initiative in the war against terror, and to create as far as it is reasonably possible the conditions for an Iraqi future that will be far from perfect but will still be far better than life under Saddam for most Iraqis--the war and its aftermath have far exceeded the best-case scenarios I ran through my head. It's right to say that hubris is the special vice of many hawks, with their nearly messianic hopes and desires for liberal democratic nation building, but their error is still closer to the truth than the Left-liberalism in Europe and the United States, which seems continually preoccupied with proving its own rectitude.

As far as I'm concerned, and this is of course far from unbiased opinion, this conservative administration run by an intellectually unimaginative Texan is doing far more for the cause of liberalism than all the academic and media scribblers, all the pundits, all the progressive intellectuals, who are so obsessed with conservatives' (especially of my stripe) inability to match them in piety that they ignore the new opportunities that have arisen in the Middle East. And I'm sure fifty years from now academic historians will denounce people like me, in the same way so many now denounce the United States for confronting the Soviet Union after World War II or for supposedly provoking the Japanese empire into war before Pearl Harbor, among other things, which is just fine by me; I personally think I'm as good a scribbler of books as the average progressive academic, and as a scribbler myself, I know that scribblers generally do not matter a whit, and thank heavens for it.

2003-07-15T20:40:00.000-04:00

WAR AND PEACE: The Spartan King Archidamus is most famous for arguing against war with Athens in the summer of 432 BC during a momentous congress of the Peloponnesian League—the alliance led by Sparta in opposition to the Athenian Empire. The war’s catastrophic effects on the Greek world, comparable in many ways to the trauma that World War I wreaked on early-20th century Europe, has given Archidamus a reputation for far-sighted statesmanship, especially in light of these prophetic words:

For let us never be elated by the fatal hope of the war being quickly ended by the devastation of their lands. I fear rather that we may leave it as a legacy to our children; so improbable is it that the Athenian spirit will be the slave of their land, or Athenian experience be cowed by war. [1.81; all translations are Crawley’s]

The war lasted until 404 BC, and although Sparta emerged victorious, many scholars have seen its victory as essentially Pyrrhic, and the Peloponnesian War’s destructive chaos as the root cause of the Greek disunity and weakness that led to Philip of Macedon’s rise to domination over all of Greece.

The origins of the Peloponnesian War are complicated and have been the subject of rooms full of books, and I have no desire to review Thucydides account of the war’s causes and the work of modern scholars. Suffice it to say that Archidamus—an old King with much experience of war—was an advocate of moderation and prudence in as momentous an issue as war with Athens; whether or not moderation and prudence actually supported the specific course of policy in this specific case I will not go into, because I have not contemplated the question fully in a while, and I wish to talk about other things for now.

2003-07-15T20:39:00.000-04:00

CHARACTER AND CONSERVATISM: Instead, I’d rather focus on another famous section of Archidamus’ speech, which lays out Sparta’s virtues, or at least, what he saw as its virtues, in direct rebuttal to the complaint of the Corinthians at the same Congress that the Spartans were too slow and plodding in contrast to the restless and daring Athenians [I’ve decided that running commentary in brackets is the best way for me to explicate my ideas]:

And the slowness and procrastination, the parts of our character that are most assailed by their criticism, need not make you blush. If we undertake the war without preparation, we should by hastening its commencement only delay its conclusion: further, a free and a famous city has through all time been ours. The quality which they condemn is really nothing but a wise moderation; thanks to its possession, we alone do not become insolent in success and give way less than others in misfortune; we are not carried away by the pleasure of hearing ourselves cheered on to risks which our judgment condemns; nor, if annoyed, are we any the more convinced by attempts to exasperate us by accusation

[For my purposes here, I think the focus on a sort-of steadiness is the most important, especially in the ability to persevere in case of misfortune, which as long as humanity remains human, is always visited on every people, with variation only in the nature and extent of the misfortune suffered.]

We are both warlike and wise, and it is our sense of order that makes us so. We are warlike, because self-control contains honour as a chief constituent, and honour bravery. And we are wise, because we are educated with too little learning to despise the laws, and with too severe a self-control to disobey them, and are brought up not to be too knowing in useless matters--such as the knowledge which can give a specious criticism of an enemy's plans in theory, but fails to assail them with equal success in practice--but are taught to consider that the schemes of our enemies are not dissimilar to our own, and that the freaks of chance are not determinable by calculation.

[I will not try to explain away or apologize for the anti-intellectualism inherent in this statement—conservatism is justly open to this charge, and although I do not wear the accusation with pride, I have no desire to evade it. Conservatism for me is a system of ideas appropriate to questions of statecraft; it is not at all conducive to art or literature or philosophy, and it need not be, in the same sense that we do not expect electricians to know the ins-and-outs of smallpox or doctors to fathom the profundities of circuit breakers and fuses. Because conservatism is premised on human limits, “that freaks of chance are not determinable by calculation,” it cannot be suitable to forms of human activity that aim to expand the boundaries of artistic representation or human contemplation or what-not—the sort of activities most closely bound up with the intellect.]

In practice we always base our preparations against an enemy on the assumption that his plans are good; indeed, it is right to rest our hopes not on a belief in his blunders, but on the soundness of our provisions. Nor ought we to believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that the superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school. These practices, then, which our ancestors have delivered to us, and by whose maintenance we have always profited, must not be given up. And we must not be hurried into deciding in a day's brief space a question which concerns many lives and fortunes and many cities, and in which honour is deeply involved--but we must decide calmly. This our strength peculiarly enables us to do.

[I do not think Archidamus’ emphasis on the need to worry more about one’s provisions than on the actions of others is necessary conservative, although I do think it wise advice, but I do think his emphasis on the “severest school” and the fundamental commonality of human nature is a conservative rebuttal to the argument of the Corinthians that “to describe their [the Athenians’] character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others” (I.70)—in other words, that an Athenian is a fundamentally different sort of creature than a Spartans and plays by entirely different rules. Archidamus thinks this nonsense, and thinks the Spartans and Athenians roughly comparable in most respects, with the severity of Spartan training a distinct advantage.

This statement for me is problematic; I am disinclined to admit the moral superiority of Spartan education, with all its calculated brutalities and general unpleasantness, and the Athenians prove a resilient foe to say the least. And I think Archidamus may underestimate the real differences in—for lack of a better term—different national characters or cultures or whatever the heck one wishes to call it.

But on the deepest and most profound level, I do think there are profound commonalities to human experience, especially the role that chance and misfortune plays, ideas that are profoundly discordant with the intellectual predilections of our era. Our conservative President is described by some as a first-rate Wilsonian idealist, while his opponents among self-described progressives lambaste him for failing to attain impossible standards of moral purity they themselves cannot possibly achieve. For most, it seems the boundaries of human action are limitless—for some, the United States can spread its liberal democratic values if only it tries hard enough—for others, individual human beings can be morally spotless by simply asserting their spotless-ness at ever increasing decibel levels. But it strikes me that there is precious little space to discuss the sorts of imperious necessities that bind our hands from achieving our messianic hopes and desires.]

2003-07-14T20:27:00.000-04:00

FUTURE POSTS: I've been remiss with my blog--I didn't realize I hadn't posted since last Tuesday until I visited my own site--and can only plead three days of archival work last week in Carlisle and Washington and a visit to Philadelphia to see a few old friends. In order to inspire some more motivation on my part, I do want to outline three upcoming posts I want to write this week:

1. An explanation of why exactly I--a self-described hawk, not the "eagle" of Andrew Sullivan's variety--use the pseudonym "Archidamus," despite the fact that Archidamus is most famous for arguing against Sparta going to war [with] Athens in the famous Peloponnesian Congress you can link to in my sidebar. In theory, this post will cause me to spell out my own personal version of conservatism, which is something very different (in my own mind at least) from militaristic jingoism, and the more messianic tendencies of what is now commonly called "neo-conservatism" or the liberal interventionism of a journal like the New Republic.

[Rev. Reading this post again, I want to make more clear that in my view what is now commonly called "neo-conservatism" may not be "real" neo-conservatism]

2. A piece on re-conceiving troubles in both Afghanistan and Iraq with regards to "nation-building" as more accurately problems of "state-building," using to some extent recent schools of scholarship in both political science and history that deny the "natural-ness" of the nation-state (perhaps most famously with Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities). Although I find much "post-national" scholarship to be as imprisoned by arbitrary notions of "trans-national" political community as the first agents of nationalist imagination this "new" crop of scholars so gleefully take apart, I do think that "states" in the modern and generally western sense are contingent and specific forms of political organization--in other words, they only operate in specific historical circumstances. Much of this scholarship is overly po-mo with tedious jargon of such a stifling sort that to use the useful ideas of this literature one must sometimes fall prey to its claustrophobic vocabulary, which I will try to avoid in my full post, although I think I haven't really escaped it in this short preview.

Much of the criticism of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent, Iraq, seems in my view to ignore the incredible difficulty inherent in any project of state-building, much less liberal-democratic nation-state building, a goal of an even more ambitious sort--a difficulty one can easily see in the long, drawn out, and very bloody histories of state building in both western Europe and in our own history (an issue that relates closely in many ways to my own scholarly work on the antebellum US Regular Army and the Civil War)--the very historical circumstances which should have been the most hospitable to the modern state.

3. A post on the role of planning in military affairs that aims to take aim at the idea that a conscious "fly-paper" strategy drives this Administration's policy in Iraq or that the Baathists themselves consciously chose guerilla warfare and purposely gave up during the conventional phase of the war to go guerilla. I want to emphasize the idea that all war plans fall apart on first contact with the enemy, and to emphasize the role of conscious planning in as confused and chaotic a phenomenon as war is to profoundly misunderstand what I see as part of the inherent nature of the military conflict. Instead, I think it is better to view the Bush adminstration's actions in Iraq as part of a larger and vaguer strategy to seize the strategic initiative against Al Qaeda and anti-American terrorists in general, an attempt that has been for the most part successful, although it has had its fair share of mishaps and snafus and Clausewitzian friction. But this larger strategy is driven on the ground by the sort of expedients and improvisation one always sees in wars--chaos and disorder that policy makers themselves never like to admit to--but a willingness to improvise in my view is a common trait in successfull military operations.

Following an old theme of this blog, I want to use the specific instance to try to reduce expectations of what it is realistically possible to achieve in the War on Terror, without succumbing to the cheap defeatism of a Left-Liberalism blinkered by a narrow fixation on Vietnam and specific cultural notions about violence. And to show the significance, quite frankly, of what we have achived, which by historical standards are quite impressive, if not especially congruent with strict notions of utopian morality.

But, for now, I've got to get back reading through diaries of George B. McClellan on microfilm.

2003-07-08T22:26:00.000-04:00

CLASSICS ON THE WEB: I just got a note from a nifty site called Classics in Contemporary Culture. A blog I'll be sure to visit regularly in the future.

A brief explanation for my many references to the classics, especially the Greeks who I know much better than the Romans, although I cut my teeth in teaching by TAing a lecture survey for Roman history. If I had started my ancient languages in High School when I should have, I might have ended up a classicist. As it is, my Greek needs serious attention to get it back to even the rudimentary level it used to be; and I'm determined to get some Latin in by the age of 30. As it is, the closest I come to Latin is the occassional reference to A. E. Housman.

For another web-site devoted to the classics, go the superb Perseus website hosted by Tufts University. The fine scholar who runs the project, Gregory Crane, has also written a fine book on Thucydides--Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism--which I've started reading. Every person with a strong "realist" bent (broadly defined) and who cites Thucydides as support--including myself of course--should read it, mainly because Crane questions both the premises of realism and to what extent Thucydides himself bought into the whole ideology or persuasion or whatever one wishes to call it.

2003-07-07T13:45:00.000-04:00

NOT SO SAME OLD SAME OLD: I want to revise my previous comments on historical troop-strengths. Looking at the numbers, and thinking about the issue more, it seems clear to me that we spend a higher proprotion of national resources (especially economic) on national defense than in the nineteenth-century, and that even in raw human terms, the American military is significantly larger than in previous peace-time years (remember that I don't consider the Cold War "peace-time"). In this sense, there is a profound change with the rise of an American "empire" or "hegemony" whatever one wishes to call it. The reasons for this are many--historical chance and circumstance, the increasing ability of technology to over-ride the previous protection of sheer trans-oceanic distance, etc.--but it is a change and I now think I overplayed the continuities in my previous post.

Perhaps the comparsion I really wanted to highlight, and which I still stand by, although I didn't calibrate it enough before, was the fact that the current War on Terror--whatever its very real seriousness--does not scale up in terms of threat levels to true Great Power War--what we worried about with regards to the Soviet Union for the 40-some-odd years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even without the use of nuclear weapons, the Cold War went hot in a very big way in both Korea and Vietnam, which ended up being skirmishes in light of the always-looming possibility of a full-blown exchange of nuclear weapons in a true death-match. And now that we seem more on guard for some sort of bio-terror epidemic, and the fact that a terrorist group presumably will not be able to acquire more than 1 nuclear device in the next 50 years or so, thus making only one city vulnerable in the worst-case scenario, the direct threats to American security from terrorism are all too real, but not as serious as they have been and could be in the future.

In this sense, I suppose we now exist in a middle state between the comparatively external threat-free status of the nineteenth-century and the Great Power conflicts of World War II and the Cold War. A better analogy might be the professional soldiery of the Roman Empire--if I had the figures at hand, I'd try to calculate per-capita figures for legion per citizen during the mature Roman Empire--I do know that the legions of the Empire were more professional and of higher efficiency compared to the Roman soldiery of the expansive Republic, but the Republic's armies while that polity was healthy could always field a much higher percentage of the population, which made up for its lack of skill (which is in a sense what both the Union and Confederate armies did during the Civil War). But the average citizen in Italy or North Africa or Greece far away from the Empire's restive borders didn't have to worry much what the legions were doing, in much the same way that the American public is in many ways quite detached from what's happening in Iraq or Afghanistan now, in spite of modern television and that public's genuine sympathy and appreciation for the efforts of the troops overseas.

2003-07-06T20:16:00.000-04:00

GAWD SAVE LUDDITES: It took me forever to figure out how to make a stupid table. I finally managed to decipher it, but my irritation at this sort of thing probably will always keep me out of the ranks of "true" bloggers. BTW, I should point out that the post's numbers were put in fairly hastily: if this were a published article, I'd have doublechecked my figures, but I do have a day job, ya know.

Oh well, here's to hoping the Dodgers win the rubber match tonight. Rough time in Dodger nation, but Hope lives at Chavez Ravine!

2003-07-06T20:00:00.000-04:00

SAME OLD, SAME OLD: In light of recent comments about the under-sized Army, I’ve dug up and calculated these rough figures on the historical troop strength of the US Army in relation to the country’s population. These are raw figures, mostly from peacetime. Bear in mind that starting in the twentieth century, the numbers are less useful since the Army has much less of a monopoly on uniformed personnel, which means the post-WWII figures are strongly understated.

Note that by pre-World War II standards, today’s “peace-time” army strength is roughly in line with previous history. Just as “peace-time” in the nineteenth-century meant sometimes vicious Indian fighting on the frontiers, “peace-time” now means wars and interventions in places like Iraq and the Balkans and perhaps even Liberia soon. I would be first to say that the War on Terrorism is of great national security interest, but a distinction needs to be drawn between this war we’re in and true great-power war on the scale of the World Wars, the Cold War, or the American Civil War, which saw drastically higher levels of mobilization and casualties.

Rev. For my revised thinking on this, see this.

2003-07-06T19:57:00.000-04:00

Year	Active army strength	Population	Soldiers per capita
1789/90	718	3,929,214	0.0002
1800/01	4,051	5,308,483	0.0008
1810	5,956	7,239,881	0.0008
1820	10,554	9,638,453	0.001
1830	6,122	12,866,020	0.0005
1840	12,330	17,069,453	0.0007
1850	10,929	23,191,876	0.0005
1860	16,215	31,443,321	0.0005
1870	37,240	38,558,371	0.001
1880	26,594	50,189,209	0.0005
1890	27,373	62,979,766	0.0004
1900	101,713	76,212,168	0.001
1910	81,251	92,228,496	0.0009
1920	204,292	106,021,537	0.002
1930	139,378	123,202,624	0.0001
1940	269,023	132,164,569	0.002
1950	593,167	151,325,798	0.004
1960	873,078	179,323,175	0.005
1970	1,322,548	203,032,031	0.0065
1980	762,739	226,542,199	0.003
2000	480,000	281,421,906	0.002

2003-07-06T19:50:00.000-04:00

Historical census figures can be found here

2000 Army troop totals here

2000 population figure here

I could not find 1990 troop strength figures, so I omitted them.

Troop totals for years up to 1980 I got out of Russell Weigley, History of the United States Army, rev. ed., 596-600.

2003-07-04T19:50:00.000-04:00

RHETORICAL EXCESS: I agreed with most of the substantive points made in this WaPost op-ed by Michael O'Hanlon, but his concluding paragraph that:

It would be the supreme irony, and a national tragedy, if after winning two wars in two years, the U.S. Army were broken and defeated while trying to keep the peace. Unfortunately, the risk that this will happen is all too real.

I have beat the drum of complaints about excessive deployments, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Armies can be more resilient than many would think, and no matter how much we should appreciate our servicemen for putting their lives on the line, the fact of the matter is that they've taken very few casualties according to any historical measure.

For example, the Army of the Potomac took approximately 32,000 casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) in one week of May, while the British famously lost 21,000 dead in a single day at the Somme. Or, if you want examples from American history more similar to counter-insurgency: the US Regular Army won its Indian Wars in the nineteenth-century despite high levels of desertion among ranks of enlisted men primarily recruited from the desperate, poor, and indigent of American society; severe underfunding and manpower strains; a host of political problems due to political and moral disagreements over Indian policy; opponents who were far more formidable insurgents than the current crop of Iraqi guerillas; the occassional massacre of detachments of US regular forces; etc. American policy during the Indian Wars was more than lacking on moral grounds: but as for the amoral world of who wins and who loses, and in measuring whether or not an army is "broken" or "defeated": do the Seminoles still control the swamps of Florida? Do the Sioux still run the Great Plains?

If European armies on the western front could continue incessant trench warfare in truly awful living conditions for years--far beyond anything our soldiers in Iraq have to deal with--then they can manage Iraq. Whether or not they should is of course an entirely different question, but I'm talking about raw questions of institutional efficiency, rather than questions of morality or good policy. There should be no confusion about the difference between waging what is so far a relatively low-level counter-insurgency in Iraq to the extreme strains of even nineteenth-century conventional warfare, and strong words like "broken" and "defeated" should be reserved for appropriate circumstances. The probable negative impact of the recent spate of deployments on enlistments and the like are certainly serious, a point I have talked about at length on this blog--but please, reserve this sort of rhetoric when the time is appropriate.

Or, to use another example, the United States Army came out of Vietnam battered, demoralized, and humiliated. Everything I've heard about the Army of the 70s is deeply disturbing, but the Army still managed to guard the Fulda Gap, didn't it? Disgruntled units didn't march on the capital demanding rederess, did they (I think a disgruntled Pennsylvania unit did exactly that after the end of the Revolution, although the terrified members of the Continental Congress were able to defuse the situation with various promises of redress)? Renegade officers didn't decide to sell tactical nuclear weapons to the highest bidder, did they?

I make this point, because there is no iron law of history that decrees that because we have a very low tolerance of casualties, every American war will follow that rule. We must be able to distinguish between real situations of crisis and situations of seriousness, because if we cannot, we will not be intellectually and emotionally capable of dealing with the strain of real catastrophe when it occurs. War is a fundamentally irrational and brutal business--making its violence purposeful is a difficult business under any circumstances, and it does not help if one is unwilling to distance onself from the tragedy and sorrow inherent in every human death, in every example of human suffering, in order to determine the proper course of action. Did the pacifism of progressive Englishmen inspired by the real carnage of World War I do anything other than make the carnage of World War II even worse--compassion and empathy are not sentiments useful for all situations in all places and times, and neither is rhetorical overstatement.

2003-07-04T13:12:00.001-04:00

MARTIAL CHARACTER: Vague generalizations about different nations' armies strengths and weakness should never be taken too far, but in the nineteenth century, and to a lesser extent in the twentieth century, national martial characters in the West can be delineated as follows:

The British: Fantastically tough and long-suffering infantry, but with officers who are either foppish dilettantes or reckless young aristocrats who try to make up for a lack of professional competence with a sort-of insane bravery. Think the Charge of the Light Brigade.

The Russians: Even more stolid than the British, but with even more incompetent officers.

The French: Great panache and style in their fighting, but sometimes they rely a bit too much on style, for lack of a better way of putting it.

The Prussians: The most "efficient" in a narrow, operational sense, but sometimes overly rigid, and especially weak in the political elements of "Grand Strategy," a combination which has proven especially destructive for Europe.

The Americans: Enthusiastic but ill-disciplined and not especially brave (although not especially cowardly either, I only point this out because Americans have traditionally confused enthusiasm with courage); very good at logistics but not so strong tactically and operationally.

2003-07-04T13:12:00.000-04:00

AMERICAN LOGISTICS AND BRAVERY: I was inspired to write this post by a nice piece over at Winds of Change on new advances in American military logistics, which seems to play to a strength American war-fighting has had since the Civil War.

Some things have changed, though: with the rise of post-national pacifism in western Europe, the US Army has the tactical and operational pre-eminence once associated with the Prussians of old, if for no other reason that the US Army is better trained and equipped from the simple expenditure of more resources than everyone else. But Americans are still unwilling to fight to the death in the grand, sometimes deliberately suicidal style of Japanese Imperial troops, which reflects strong cultural aversions to reveling in death.

Some segments of Al Qaeda are of course willing to embark on suicide missions, but for them, this serves as a substitute for conventional military competence. The Japanese, in contrast, combined an ability to fight Western militaries on their own terms, but with a much stronger tolerance for self-immolation. Or, to put it another way, a Japanese kamikaze tried to fly his plane into military ships protected by military devices (planes, anti-aircraft artillery, etc.); while suicide bombers of the radical Islamicist sort usually go after vulnerable targets like civilian buses or pizza parlors or skyscrapers, precisely because they are much less well defended. And those suicide bombers are also much more exceptional: if it was something other than a small minority of Palestinians who wanted to become suicide bombers, the IDF would have much more problems in preventing attacks.

This should not be seen as a criticism of the general level of bravery among American soldiers (and as I pointed out before, Americans are “average” as opposed to lacking on this front); this cultural trait has the beneficial pay-off that US troops thus tend to be much less viciously contemptuous of their defeated foes: armies with soldiers that would never allow themselves to be taken prisoner like the Romans and the Japanese of old can treat the opponents they defeat with an especially violent and vicious contempt. All one needs to do is compare Japanese conduct in occupied pieces of China during WWII to MacArthur's tenure as benevolent lay-emperor to see the difference, which is especially striking since Americans unleashed a good deal of brutality in retaliation to Japanese conduct during the Pacific War. And great martial people like the Romans center so much of their self-image around their aggressive ability to whip neighbors that they end up constantly looking for a fight to prove yet again that they’re the toughest warriors on the block, which means they’re always fighting one group or another.

2003-07-03T23:33:00.000-04:00

IRRITATIONS: I wrote a long post on the consistent misuse of historical analogies, but my computer crashed and I lost the post just when I tried to tun in to the current Dodgers game. Too add insult to injury, we're down 5-1 to the Padres. The game ain't over, but this is one of those times in a baseball fan's life when faith begins to fail, no matter how one rebukes oneself for doubting one's time. To put it bluntly, we just stink right now. Our pitching is going through some rough spots and showing itself to be mortal; the offense has been even worse than usual; and we've had a rash of injuries. We're still in it; there's a lot of baseball left, but all is not well in Dodger nation right now.

Oh well.

To summarize my post, which I'm too tired to rewrite, my basic point is that historical analogies are consistently misused by pretty much everyone throughout history, and that since questions of policy concern future prospects and dangers, statecraft may be helped by a strong knowledge of history, but it hardly needs it. And that I'd rather have history be unused than abused.

Well, maybe things will turn around on the baseball front on the 4th. Heck, we just scored a run, so maybe we'll have a two game win streak tomorrow.

2003-07-01T10:02:00.000-04:00

LIBERAL EDUCATION CONT.: I began this train of thought about a week ago, and will now try to continue it here. This post is also related to my posts on the uses of history.

So, what exactly is a humanistic education supposed to do:

Following Housman again, I think these statements are useful to keep in mind:

The faculty of learning is ours that we may find in its exercise that delight which arises from the unimpeded activity of any energy in the groove nature meant it to run in. Let a man acquire knowledge not for this or that external and incidental good which may chance to result from it, but for itself; not because it is useful or ornamental, but because it is knowledge, and therefore good for man to acquire. . . . For knowledge resembles virtue in this, and differs in this from other possessions, that it is not merely a means of procuring good, but is good in itself simply: it is not a coin which we pay down to purchase happiness, but it has happiness indissolubly bound up with it. Fortitude and continence and honesty are not commended to us on the ground that they conduce, as on the whole they do conduce, to material success, nor yet on the ground that they will be rewarded hereafter: those whose office it is to exhort mankind to virtue are ashamed to degrade the cause they plead by proffering such lures as these.

This is not say that knowledge leads to happiness in the commonplace sense:

Entire happiness is not attainable either by this or by any other method. Nay it may be urged on the contrary that the pursuit of truth in some directions is even injurious to happiness, because it compels us to take leave of delusions which were pleasant while they lasted. . . . But even conceding this, I suppose the answer to be that knowledge, and especially disagreeable knowledge, cannot by any art be totally excluded from even those who do not seek it. Wisdom, said Aeschylus long ago, comes to men whether they will or not.

Housman, I should acknowledge, was talking about knowledge in general:

If a certain department of knowledge specially attracts a man, let him study that, and study it because it attracts him; and let him not fabricate excuses for that which requires no excuse, but rest assured that the reason why it most attracts him is that it is best for him. The majority of mankind, as is only natural, will be most attracted to those sciences which most nearly concern human life . . . The men who are attracted to the drier and the less palpitating sciences, say logic or pure mathematics or textual criticism, are likely to be fewer in number; but they are not to suppose that the comparative unpopularity of such learning renders it any the less worth of pursuit. . . . we can all dwell together in unity without crying up our own pursuits or depreciating the pursuits of others on factitious grounds. . . . There is no rivalry between the studies of Arts and Laws and Science but the rivalry of fellow soldiers in striving which can most victoriously achieve the common end of all, to set back the frontier of darkness.

2003-07-01T10:01:00.000-04:00

LEARNING AND THE UNIVERSITY: So where does the modern University fit into all this? First of all, and I have the authority of having taught some at the college level to lay claim to in making this statement, we should all be realistic about the fact that many of our students are less than entirely ardent in the pursuit of knowledge, especially that of the humanistic sort, where there is no practical pay-off to further buttress the college student's efforts. Housman himself admitted something similar to this, that:

The pleasures of the intellect are notoriously less vivid than either the pleasures of sense or the pleasures of the affections; and therefore, especially in the season of youth, the pursuit of knowledge is likely enough to be neglected and lightly esteemed in comparison with other pursuits offering much stronger immediate attractions.

Or, as one of my Profs here once remarked about UVA students, "It's well known that they spend more time in class looking at each other than at the lecturer."

And, can anyone really blame them, especially since academics are generally a class of individuals not known for their movie-star good lucks?

But because of their resources, universities are still the centers of learning and knowledge in our culture. It is not an easy thing to maintain a real research library, or build a scientific laboratory, or support a legion of faculty who do nothing of immediate economic use. Or, for that matter, to find means to persuade wealthy patrons to donate the money to maintain such things. And it is in universities where the ethic of seeking knowledge as an end-in-and-of-itself survives the most; some faculty of course see their jobs as lying in the moulding of certain sorts of citizens this way or that, left, right, or center, but students have always been notorious for frustrating the more grandiose visions of their instructors' self-image.

Certain types of knowledge, of course, lend themselves much more readily to dispersal. The poet need not have access to a library of 1 million volumes to write poetry; the historian may get along just fine without any former academic affiliation. And these individuals still teach in a sense through their writing, and although this is teaching of an altogether different sort than the physical presence of teachers and students in the same classroom, and, quite frankly, really no substitute; it does have a permanence that classroom-teaching cannot have, since even the best instructor must one day retire or die.

2003-06-29T21:05:00.000-04:00

INSURGENCY: OxBlog has a long post on this topic with regards to Iraq. I just wanted to add the following:

A few points on guerilla warfare to be kept in mind:

1. Guerillas generally do not succeed in governing some piece of territory unless they operate in conjunction with "conventional" or "regular" forces--I can give loads of examples--the Continental Army that aided American insurgents during our Revolution; Wellington's Regulars in Napoleonic Spain; the North Vietmanese Regular Army, which was what ended up destroying the Saigon regime in the end, not the Viet Cong, which my understanding was essentially destroyed after Tet; etc.

The reason for this is very simple: guerillas' advantage lies in their ability to disperse and avoid an opponent who by definition can bring more force to bear on individual points. But one cannot govern or control a piece of territory if one has to immediately disperse whenever the opposing army approaches. This is why occupying powers tend to control cities, which are discrete pieces of land where a garrison can be permanently kept, as opposed to a countryside that cannot usually be flooded with soldiers in perpetuity. Now, if a guerilla force can harass an opposing army's line of communications, weakening it so that it becomes more vulnerable to a friendly conventional force, that's a totally different issue. Conventional forces working in conjunction with guerillas also prevent an opponent's easy dispersal of its own forces to deal with guerillas--if there was still a Republican Guard division rolling around in the desert, US forces could not disperse in Iraq to mount local foot patrols, because detachments would need to be large enough to take care of themselves in case it ran into a conventional Iraqi force.

2. Guerillas without conventional forces can make territory impossible to govern, but they usually only do this with significant amounts of external aid. For example, Afghan insurgents were able to expel the Soviets with significant American and Pakistani assistance, but they proved unable to "govern" Afghanistan in the modern, nation-state sense of the term. Or, to use an American example, white Southerners waged troublesome guerilla war on the Union Army's line of communications throughout the Civil War, but once Confederate regular armies were destroyed, the guerillas more or less disappeared. Yes, yes, I know that Reconstruction saw a good deal of political violence against white Republicans and newly freed blacks in the South, but none of that political violence aimed (or could even plausibly succeed) at undermining the Federal government's final authority in the conquered South.

3. Guerillas are usually most successful in specific sorts of geography: generally low population densities, insecure transportation infrastructure, inhospitable climates, and easy opportunities of concealment work best. This is why Afghanistan is so well suited to this type of warfare, and why cities generally do not. Like every other point here, this should be seen as any sort of iron “law.” The Russians found out in Grozny not so long ago that urban areas can also be exploited by certain types of guerillas.

4. Guerillas usually fight best if the army in question have either special ideological (for lack of a better term) motivations, or a way of life that makes them especially warlike, or better yet, both. Soviet-occupied Afghanistan is again the perfect example of this: tough, nomadic tribesmen used to living in rough terrain driven both by religious antipathy and a sort-of tribalism for lack of a better term to fight against godless invaders. Or, to go back to American history: Plains Indians who were masterful horsemen, adept at living in an unforgiving climate, intensely warlike, and utterly opposed to giving up their way of life to white invaders.

2003-06-29T21:04:00.000-04:00

PACIFICATION: There are right now many things running in the US occupation forces' favor; my points follow the same order as above:

1. No supporting conventional force exists in Iraq to support guerillas.

2. It is currently unlikely in my view that terrorist groups can provide enough external aid to Iraqi guerillas to actually do anything more than harass US forces. And no real state will provide the necessary aid out of fear of catastrophic American retribution. Witness the somewhat better behavior of Syria after the war's end, or Al Qaeda's less effective operations after the destruction of its sanctuary in Afghanistan.

3. Iraq from my understanding is an urban society situated in terrain dominated by wide-open deserts that do not provide many places to hide from aerial surveillance. American communications are also more secure due to such things as air transport and armored vehicles.

4. Although some Iraqis have a powerful ideological motivation for immediate resistance to US forces--i.e. deposed Baathists and Islamic terrorists--right now, a general nationalist antipathy and distaste for Americans does not qualify as sufficient hatred to wage widespread guerilla war against US forces. And, as far as I know, and especially after decades or rule by a totalitarian state, Iraqis are not born and reared in dispersed tribal communities residing in inhospitable terrain, where men are raised in an honor (in the anthropological sense) driven environment to be especially aggressive and tough--in other words, Iraqis do not sound to me like "natural" fighters.

2003-06-29T20:46:00.000-04:00

TOO EARLY TO TELL: Now, things can change, a strong ideological animus can eventually arise leading to much more widespread and serious guerilla attacks. International terrorist groups can prove to be more effective at supporting Iraqi guerillas than they have been so far. And, of course, the United States has a higher threshold of success--we aim to govern Iraq for a period of time well enough to establish an at least nominally democratic state--Iraqi guerillas may be happy with simply making the country ungovernable and plunged into a sort of Balkans-like chaos where no one is in charge. One should remember though that we also have a lower threshold than the traditional occupying power, in that we want to leave as soon as possible. But US forces must also operate under political constraints that forbid the use of many of the "traditional" insurgency methods of the sort that have proved so successful in colonial campaigns ranging from the many Indian Wars of American history to European imperialism everywhere from North Africa to Afghanistan—hostage-taking, retaliation against civilian populations, etc. Pacification has usually been about carrots and sticks. The Soviets in Afghanistan tried all stick—although one should remember that the Afghans had external aid—in an especially severe way; it didn’t work. But all carrot fails to recognize that all political communities come down to coercion at some level. In our case, for a variety of reasons, the balance will have to be much more toward winning “hearts and minds,” but some vigorous action (i.e. killing people to be bluntly honest) will be needed to attain even the sort of modest ends I have in mind for Iraq, which, it should be pointed out, will still be infinitely better than Saddam’s regime.

Anyhow, there’s going to be some rough sledding ahead no matter what, but declaring Afghanistan another Vietnam is more than a bit premature.

2003-06-29T14:26:00.001-04:00

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY: This is going to be the first installment of a series of rambling posts on what uses history might have for the present--or at least, what uses the sort of history I do has. There are of course many different kinds of history, just as there are many different kinds of novels, paintings, philosophies, etc. But, right now, off the top of my head, I'm going to just divide opinions on the uses of history into three different schools:

2003-06-29T14:26:00.000-04:00

1. HISTORY AS A STOREHOUSE OF PROOFS FOR PRE-EXISTING MODELS OF EXPLANATION.

Perhaps the best example of this is the so-called "applicatory method which was taught in the Army's advanced professional schools around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (I'm drawing from Carol Reardon's fine book Soldiers and Scholars). From my understanding, this is the sort of military history that is still taught for the most part at the current Army War College. In this stype of history, one looks at history (in this case campaigns and battles) as a means of proving some set of principles (in this case, such maxims as "concentration of force," "celerity," "surprise," etc.) One writes an essay on First Bull Run to demonstrate the importance of "interior lines," or, to use a more recent military doctrine formulated by Basil Liddel Hart, on Sherman's Atlanta campaign as an example of the "indirect approach."

This method is certainly not limited to military history. Economic historians, or at least as best as I can tell, since I frequently find their work incomprehensible due to all the math involved, also use the method. In their case, they look at history as the closest thing they have to a real lab, and can test various models by seeing how well they explain past events. Did a defective Gold Standard really cause the Great Depression--yes, in Barry Eichengreen's view, because by setting up a regression analysis, he shows (or at least purports to show) that the earlier a country went off the gold standard, the earlier it began to recover.

This type of history is the most "scientific," and is therefore most closely connected to the social sciences. And it frequently aims at finding models that can serve as guides for the future as well as explanations for the past.

2003-06-29T14:25:00.000-04:00

2. HISTORY AS A BULWARK OF THE PRESENT.

The uncharitable would call this "history as justifying lie." Here, history serves a present set of values and assumptions, not as some sort of "scientific proof" for a hypothesis, but as an emotional and inspirational support. This sort of thing exists very easily on both the Left and the Right--ranging from Afrocentric interpretations of the origins of Greek philosophy to neo-Confederate apologetics about the War of Northern Aggression--to use two diametrically flipped examples in American life. These interpretations need not be factually false (although the two examples I just used are just that in my view), but accuracy in a factual sense is not really its highest priority.

I've used two especially unpleasant examples, which is in point of fact somewhat unfair. In point of fact, history is for the most part quite depressing--to use Ambrose Bierce's quip: "an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools." Human existence is frequently only tolerable if we tell pleasing lies to ourselves for at least a fair proportion--if not most--of our time here in the world of the living--to make up for those moments of unsettling clarity that I think everyone is subject to, and if the lies are not extremely false, or simply vicious, they probably should be tolerated, if for no other reason that they may be impossible to totally dispel, even if one wanted to do such a thing.

2003-06-29T14:24:00.000-04:00

3. HISTORY AS HUMANISTIC WISDOM.

If my first school is most closely allied with science, while my second is most closely allied with myth, (and I really do want to use that term in a non-pejorative sense), the third is perhaps closest linked to philosophy. Here is a rationalist attempt to explain human behavior, while denying the final efficacy of social science models. If one looks at Thucydides, one must remember that many of the abstract explanations of human behavior--the Athenian triad on the origins of war in fear, honor, and interest; the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue; Cleon's meditation on the incompatibility between democracy and empire, etc.--are not given by Thucydides in his own voice--a crucial, absolutely crucial thing to be kept in mind, because Thucydides is cited so frequently by later thinkers to justify ideas that he may not have actually agreed with.

Thucydides does sketch out a political science of a sort in Bk. 3 on the Corcyraean Revolution, but that famous account of moral and social collapse has always struck me as a powerful explanation, but a not especially clear guide for the future. The former-general-turned historian did of course see his history as "useful" for future heads-of-state (1.22.4), but one cannot hope to read Thucydides and find clear guidance on what to do about--let's say--Iran.

History of Thucydides' sort is not so much useful in a practical sense as it is perceptive--it may not give clear precepts for present and future policy questions--but it will say something about human nature, about the internal dynamics of war and politics, about the role chance plays in human life, on the different manifestations of virtue and vice, etc.

2003-06-29T14:21:00.000-04:00

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Now, this sort of humanistic wisdom can still have second-order benefits in the practical world: the Plague and Pericles' death is as powerful an expression of the limits to rational planning as I can think of; or the execution of Nicias, who, according to the historian, "of all the Hellenes in my time, least deserved such a fate, seeing that the whole course of his life had been regulated with strict attention to virtue" (7.86.5), the same man who brought disaster on himself, his army, and his city, because of his principled piety--a cardinal Greek virtue--making him, in Thucydides' view, "somewhat overaddicted to divination and practices of that kind" (7.50.4)--Nicias' fate is a not-so-cheering example of the disasters that can come from good intentions unaccompanied by wisdom.

But none of this gives clear lessons what to do in our present and future, and political leaders need not read Thucydides to know the limits of human action, to understand the practical problems of reconciling imperious necessity and ethics, or to acquire the sort of iron will needed for the business of statecraft. And reading Thucydides need not give a person all those values.

2003-06-25T01:13:00.000-04:00

STUPID BLOGGER: Part of my post on this WaPost article was zapped. Anyhow, I responded to this:

Some people in the occupation authority believe the U.S. government needs to create a modern version of the old British colonial service, dispatching legions of young diplomats and others with specific technical experience to small towns and provincial capitals. "But that would have required a degree of planning in which the United States government did not engage," the official said. "Using the military for postwar governance should have been the last option, not the first."

My general point was that the British experience is not necessarily the one we should always invoke, because the British ran their empire with a self-confident elite perfectly comfortable with wielding authority, and more than able at co-opting local elites, much like the Romans of old. This ability to command was more important in my view than technical or professional knowledge of the sort one learns at the Kennedy School of Government, which, when it is applicable, frequently only works as well as it's supposed to in specifically American contexts. For example, the Romans ran their Empire with a good army, good roads, and an aristocracy with an essentially "useless" education in rhetoric. A "manor-born" ability to command are not the sort of character traits we encourage, (although we do have the same cultural adaptability and flexibility of the Romans) and my general point was that this is more than anything else an argument against aggressive nation-building, which we're in a sense profoundly unsuited for as a people. And against an abuse of the British example as a supposed model.

But since we're stuck with Iraq, I also wrote the half of the original post below:

2003-06-25T01:04:00.000-04:00

MACARTHUR, MR. SENSITIVE: Or, to look at this another way, does anyone think that the US occupation forces in Japan really knew all that much about Japanese culture and society? Does Douglas MacArthur really strike anyone as the sort of "sensitive" diplomat with a raft of degrees, fluent knowledge of Japanese, and devotion to proper liberal principles that so many nation-building enthusiasts criticize the Bushies for not having institutionalized? Some would argue that MacArthur--perhaps the last great general of the Old Army--the tiny, close-knit, and in some ways inbred Regular Army of most of American history, always existing in its own little isolated world, detached from the country it served, marching to a rhythm all its own, proud and resentful of its isolation all at the same time--didn't really understand American democracy.

The proper response to the task facing Washington in Iraq is not to over-plan, to trust in the self-proclaimed expertise of "experts"--no matter how well-meaning, but to be flexible, to give local personnel on the ground flexibility to adapt to different conditions. No one knew how the war was going to turn out, how exactly the post-war balance of power in Iraq would calibrate itself--to have drawn up an elaborate plan would have been absolute hubris. Now, we probably could have used more planning than was actually done, but it's better to err on the side of flexibility in situations like this, and to also accept a good deal of slippage and false starts. And to trust in the common sense of low-level American soldiers. They know what we're aiming for in Iraq, we're aiming for what they grew up with. They know they're not supposed to shoot people indiscriminately, loot Iraqi civilians of their food, etc. Washington needs to set the basic boundaries for everything, but much of this whole effort will have to just ride on the common sense of the average Civil Affairs officer or company commander.

Which means, of course, that there will be plenty of first-rate screw-ups. Which is why we should avoid giving twenty-five year olds all this responsibility unless there is a compelling security issue in play.

2003-06-23T20:18:00.001-04:00

THE LIMITS OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION: I want to write a piece on teaching and that mysterious--and in some ways, dying--thing called a "liberal education," but before I want to make positive statements, I'd like to quote some lines from A. E. Housman's Introductory Lecture (1892). In his era, a liberal education was centered on training in the Greek and Roman Classics in the original Latin and Greek. Housman, a Latinist himself, much to his credit, spoke against those who believed that the study of the Humanities and of the Western Classics in particular were a means "to transform and beautify our inner nature by culture. Therefore the true and the really valuable knowledge is that which is properly and distinctively human; the knowledge, as Matthew Arnold used to call it, of the best which has been said and thought in the world, -- the literature which contains the spirit of man."

After several pages refuting this idea, Housman then declared that:

It appears then that upon the mankind the classics can hardly be said to exert the transforming influence which is claimed for them. The special effect of a classical education on the majority of those who receive it, is not to transform and beautify their inner nature, but rather to confer a certain amount of polish on their surface, by teaching them things that one is expected to know and enabling them to understand the meaning of English words and use them properly. If a man has learnt Greek and Latin and has to describe the blowing up of a powder mill, he will not describe it as a cataclysm; if he is irritated he will say so, and will not say that he is aggravated; if the conversation turns on the Muse who is supposed to preside over dancing, he will call her Terpsichore, and not Terpsitshoar. We shall probably therefore think it advisable to acquire a tincture of Classics, for ornament, just as we shall think it advisable to acquire a modicum of Science, for us. There, in both cases, we shall most of us stop; because to pursue the classics further in the expectation of transforming and beautifying our inner natures is, for the most of us, to ask from those studies what they cannot give; and because, if practical utility be our aim in studying Science, a very modest amount of Science will serve our turn.

The most depressing thing is that we don't even give this veneer anymore--I struggled through two years of Classical Greek, but have no Latin, and don't actually "get" Housman's snide references, premised on the trivial nature of the knowledge in question, compared to the vaunted effects of a proper education grounded in the classics.

2003-06-23T20:18:00.000-04:00

THE VENEER: Much of modern education is now to give the contemporary version of the patina Housman spoke of. I suppose in the modern university, instead of making sure that gentlemen (and it would've been all men in Housman's day) know the Latin-origins of certain English words, we now, for the most part, give those students--men and women--who drop into non-vocational courses (whether by choice or by edict) the vocabulary of modern cultural studies--where once the student would have slaved over the testy obscurities of the Greek particle, they now contemplate the "Other" and its verbal equivalent, "To Other."

The traditional conception of the university instructor as moral leader and instructor--an inheritance of both the medieval university tasked with the contemplation and establishment of divine truth and the philosophical "schools" of ancient Greece and Roma that sought to teach a complete way of life--still exists, whatever the average modern academic's pretense to "tolerance" and dogmatically held non-dogmatism, so the modern course in the humanities also aims to impart a moral and ethical content to match the special aesthetic style of modern cultural studies. Hence, the modern "teach-in" where academics take the same mantle their clerical forebears wore at schools like Harvard and Yale not so long ago.

Conservatives worry too much about the supposedly corroding effects of all this. Having taught students, it is the rare teacher in the humanities who can inspire students to actually care about subject matter of almost no practical value, so much of what academics attempt to impart to their sometimes-captive audiences goes no deeper than the cheap polish Housman commented on so long ago. And, unlike the Oxford or Cambridge of the nineteenth century when the Classics were unavoidable, most students opt out of humanistic courses and take classes where they might actually learn something that could make them money. A nice side-effect of the leveling cultural wasteland of democracy.

And those teachers in the humanities who tend to inspire the most, in my own limited experience, at least, tend to draw their power from those elements of the Humanistic disciplines that are the least contingent on the vagaries of passing forms of curricula, whether it be the overthrown classics or the now-regnant cultural studies.

Housman had some ideas about the purpose of education, which I'll excerpt and comment on after I digest them some more....

2003-06-20T20:23:00.001-04:00

A MUSE OF A DIFFERENT SORT: I've never considered myself much of a "literature"-person; I take my writing very seriously, but I'm somewhat resigned to striving for a clear, straightforward style--I had the shadow of a ghost's worth of an old-style liberal education at Yale--enough to appreciate the polished heights of a great prose stylist like Housman (think of a more disdainful and less contemptuous version of Victor Davis Hanson, or a writer completely comfortable with his own urbanity, unlike the yeoman farmer turned furie-hounded and self-appointed slayer of folly and fools), but also not enough to attempt such a thing in my writing. In intent--if not necessarily in result--my writing (and I mean writing in a formal setting, which I do not consider this blog to be) aims at economic clarity, with occasional attempts at greater stylistic sophistication. I also have a strong commitment to the narrative form in history, but on the whole, I consider clarity my signal responsibility as a writer, which in itself shows how far removed I am from poets.

Nevertheless, I will read verse on occasion, and in that context, Patrick Belton's recent link to an interesting Slate piece on Robert Lowell, author of what is probably my favorite poem on the Civil War, For the Union Dead, stimulated this musing on the historian as writer.

2003-06-20T20:23:00.000-04:00

PAST AND PRESENT IN NEW ENGLAND: I actually found the little introduction in the Atlantic interesting--I had first read the poem in High School--thanks to a Junior year English teacher who I owe much to--and knew nothing of its "context." What struck me more than anything else then (and what I still find most important in the poem now) was the harsh juxtaposition between the forgetfulness of modern American life and the event memorialized in the monument.

Only a few years ago I would have heartily endorsed this sort of intellectualist complaint about the leveling effects of development, etc.; now I suppose I would be as skeptical of the cultured as much as the nouveau-riche developers building parking garages underneath supposedly sacred ground. This is not to say that I want every Civil War battlefield bulldozed for brand new Super Walmarts, but arguments about preservation need to go beyond the sort of highly abstract, almost purely aesthetic critique of Lowell in a democratic society such as ours. In the case of something like Civil War battlefields, historians can and have constructed arguments about the importance of maintaining links between the modern citizenry and the greatest crisis of the Republic--liberals can emphasize the role of slavery and race; conservatives can emphasize the importance of martial valor, etc., etc. And for those reasons, I think the National Park Service should continue its efforts to restrict developments near major battlefield sites.

Nevertheless, no one should think that anyone--poet or philistine, liberal or conservative, sage or fool--can stop the ruthless march and dissolution of history into the present and the future. I had a strange sense of this during my time at Yale--another old relic of Lowell's New England elite--when I walked up to the Divinity School to grab books and trundled past bronze plaques commemorating such worthy divines as Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel Taylor, Samuel Hopkins, and Jonathan Edwards--all deemed giants of their age, authorities on the eternal past, present, and future of human existence--and now almost totally forgotten among the teeming undergraduates clustered a half-mile down the hill. Except for the last fellow, known to most Yale undergrads as the name of a residential college, or as a severe fellow with a funny wig who gave especially thunderous sermons.

This is not the usual Tory-nostalgia--in fact, I've always thought conservatives too attached to mythic pasts forever gone. To understand that the most important human questions contain a certain timelessness to all of them is not the same as seeing a golden age in the past that can somehow be restored to reform the present.

Poets like Lowell can thunder forth on modern America's lack of good taste all they want, and if they produce as fine a poem as Lowell did, I'll encourage them myself, but this is a doomed cause, if there ever was one.

2003-06-18T20:31:00.000-04:00

THUCYDIDES AND THE IRON TRIANGLE: Rachel Belton at Nathan Hale writes (via Oxblog):

Thucydides declares that there are three major motivations for war: fear, interest, and honor.

I just want to point out (as I did in a previous post on what I call the "Iron Triangle) that Thucydides said that [it was] the Athenians in a public setting who said that fear, honor, and interest were the causes of war. Thucydides may have agreed with the Athenian speakers at this specific congress, but he may also have not. To quote (the context is that the Athenians are defending their acquisition of a large maritime empire with tributary subject states):

"You, at all events, Lacedaemonians, have used your supremacy to settle the states in Peloponnese as is aggreeable to you. And if at the period of which we were speaking [the creation of the Delian League after the expulsion of the Persians from mainland Greece, when Sparta ceded to Athens the management of the continuing war against Persia--[ed. comment by WWSH]] you had persevered to the end of the matter, and had incurred hatred in your command, we are sure that you would have made yourselves just as galling to the allies, and would have been forced to choose between a strong government and danger to yourselves. It follows that it was not a very remarkable action, or contrary to the common practice of mankind, if we accepted an empire that was offered to us, and refused to give it up under the pressure of three of the strongest motives, fear, honour, and interest. And it was not we who set the example, for it has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger. Besides, we believed ourselves to be worthy of our position, and so you thought us till now, when calculations of interest have made you take up the cry of justice--a consideration which no one ever yet brought forward to hinder his amibiton when he had a chance of gaining anything by might. And praise is due to all who, if not so superior to human nature as to refuse dominion, yet respect justice more than their position compels them to do."

[Emphasis added by me, from I.76, modified Crawley translation in the Modern Library Editioin, I didn't have the Landmark edition of Strassler at hand]

The exact source of Thucydides' speeches is a thorny, thorny problem, which I won't get into right now, because I haven't fully thought the issue out myself, and my Greek is truly pathetic, but I will say here that Thucydides may have simply given what the Athenians said at the Peloponnesian conference, and may or may not have disagreed with this early version of IR theory. And it should be pointed out that Thucydides did at times give explicit statements on his ideas about human nature that were clearly his opinion, and not that of a speaker--see the famous analysis of the Corcyraean Revolution in Book 3, Sections 82 to 84. Futhermore, also note that the Athenian speakers' comments can be interpreted as foreshadowing the famously chilling declaration of the Athenians during the Melian Dialogue that "Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can." Judging by the tenor of Belton's piece, I assume she won't argue for that position.

2003-06-18T19:53:00.000-04:00

WHERE IS INTEREST?: Another point, Belton declares "fear" (what she calls deterrence) [in our historical moment inadequate]--assuming that fear and deterrence are indeed the same thing--she then focuses entirely on honor, but never talks about interest. I do actually think that whatever Thucydides thought of the triangle, it is a useful way of concei[v]ing the origins of war, but only if all three factors are in play at the same time.

Belton declares deterrence useless against terrorists, but I would submit that there are advantages to making Osama fear us--two different things. Bin Laden et al spend much of their time hiding out, avoiding our intelligence services, all out of fear that we will promptly end their existences before they have a chance to hurt the United States some more. This naturally degrades their ability to plan terrorist attacks, which seems part of the reason why we haven't had a successful attack on American soil since the anthrax episode.

I do think that she's on to something very important when it comes to honor, but here's a question. Belton writes:

Like the long war against Communism and Fascism, the war on terror is primarily a war of ideas. Until the Arab world can devise their own path out of their current humiliation--a path the West cannot create for them without causing further humiliation--the war will continue. What we must do is help enable the war of ideas. Our strategy should not be for the West to win hearts and minds--but for an Arab alternative to pan-Arabism and Islamism to arise and win the hearts of their own people.

After World War II, the U.S. engaged in such a strategy quite effectively. We provided assistance in the hot wars Greece and Turkey fought against Communism, while donating funds for local governments to develop. But we also provided a viable alternative, through the covert funding of pro-Europe parties who eventually brought about the Treaty of Rome and the growth of the EU. Such an intelligent strategy for winning hearts and minds has not yet begun. Until it does, we have not yet begun to fight.

[emphasis added by me]

Okay, here's a question. If the Arabs have to figure things out themselves, since aid from the West will lead to more humiliation, then why should use the Cold War example of clandestine support as a mode? Won't the Arabs be humiliated if their new reformist institutions are funded by secret grants of money by the State Department? Won't the need of any aid in this conception of honor lead to further humiliation?

Although it's clear that the war on terrorism is in some sense a war of ideas, it's also a real war, where ideas are refracted through blood and iron--to say that this is a war primarily of ideas, that the most important and fundamental strategy is to encourage certain types of thinking through non-violent means of coercion--strikes me as unpersuasive. Ideas are diffuse and awfully vague--the sort of thing one should not rest one's security on more than anything else. Oh sure, recognizing that American power rests as much on special American abilities to inflict violence as on American ideas of freedom and tolerance is unsettling, but I don't think it's something we should forget.

[Rev. This post was wretchedly proofed--I wrote it too fast--the clarifying changes I made have been placed in [brackets] in order to preserve the integrity of what I originally put up--I'm a bit obsessive about this, because I don't want to appear to be going back and changing the substantive content of posts]

2003-06-16T17:40:00.000-04:00

SKEPTICISM: Not to play wet blanket to blogosphere optimism about Iran, but it's unclear that this current set of protests will lead to an automatic fall of the regime. I've always thought that people in the West tend to overplay the efficacy of protests, especially those conducted by students--or, to put it another way, did Tiananmen bring down the PRC government? It seems that there are a fair number of these armed paramilitaries running around playing enforcer, so it's clear that at least some Iranians support the current regime--and most importantly, these Iranians are willing to use violence to prop up the mullahocracy. I still remember Slobo weathering a fair number of protests, and the Serbs didn't finally kick him out until after he lost the war over Kosovo. Just as a lot of us underestimated the resiliency of Saddam's regime in the early days of the war, I'm not so sure we should necessarily expect the students to be successful.
Rev.: I got around to reading Ledeen's NRO piece, as opposed to just Sullivan's excerpt, and am now persuaded to be less skeptical. I guess part of the reason is that I don't feel that I'm especially well-informed of what's going on in Iran, although Ledeen seems to know as much as anyone else. Oh well, we'll see how it goes I guess. Grim pessimists like me probably would never have predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall after all. I do think that we should give the demonstrators moral and verbal support through public statements and whatever communications aid can be given from outside Iran, but it's up to the Iranian protestors to really show whether or not they can pull this off.

2003-06-14T15:25:00.000-04:00

FATIGUE: 3 ID's morale seems to be sagging a bit (from the NY Times):

Then he echoed a complaint heard without exception among the brigade's soldiers. "We're war fighters," Sergeant Betancourt said. "Our job is done."

One shouldn't overplay these sorts of sentiments--I've never read of an army where the individual soldiers were entirely happy with much of anything--and I think it's clear from the article as a whole that whatever the state of morale there's no shirking of duty in Baghdad, but people should remember that this sort of fatigue does matter in a volunteer army where every couple of years people can choose to not re-enlist. First things first, and these GIs will just have to deal, although heaven knows they deserve to go home, but these are the sort of brakes on nation building people shouldn't forget.

2003-06-14T15:07:00.000-04:00

WALZER REDUX: Josh over at On a Fench has a response to my previous comments on Walzer.

2003-06-14T15:06:00.000-04:00

TEACHERS AND STUDENTS: One issue I forgot to mention in the posts below on why grad school isn't as bad as some seem to portray it is the fact that despite real (if not necessarily "new") economic problems in the university they have not totally destroyed the core student-teacher relationships that lie at the base of a proper "liberal education." Such relationships are alive and well at the top-tier schools that are less subject to relentless vocationalization, while even at less prestigious institutions, there are still interested students and teachers willing to engage them--Victor Davis Hanson is one good example. I've benefited from fine instruction at both the undergraduate and the graduate level--instruction of a somewhat different sort due to the different institutional settings--but still instruction of a worthwhile sort, and which I could never have received on my own. I've never been a big fan of college-year nostalgia--in fact, looking back, much of my days at Yale seemed to be a tribute to wasted opportunities, the feckless folly of youth, and the other varied vices of late adolescence--but I also had experiences in teachers' offices and classrooms that I count as irreplacable, and which I remember to this day. Grad school has also been mixed, probably with a heavier weight to melancholic disappointment, but it has not been without its moments, many of which center around good teachers.

This is not to denigrate the importance of friendship among peers, but I've always thought that the university's institutional apparatus' proper function is to cultivate the relationship of teachers and students. Yale, like all modern American universities, makes grand claims of encouraging certain forms of "productive" socialization--at Yale, this centered around the Residential College system, at other colleges, Student Unions fulfill this role, along with all the support and funding for extracurricular and student-run organizations ranging from publications to social-service clubs to drama organizations. If anything, I'm a living example of how utterly ineffective all this support can be--even at a place with huge resources like Yale; I came out of Yale as socially inept as I came in; I still cannot for the life of me remember people's names (I took pictures of my own students last Fall in a desperate expedient to learn names), which meant of course I was also extremely uncomfortable in my own college where hordes of people knew my name, said hello, and I'd timidly say hello back while desperately trying to not give away the fact that I hadn't a clue what their parents called them--etc., etc., etc.

Heck, I benefited from fine history and english instruction at my public High School--humanistic scholarship will never go away in our culture (barring alien invasion and our subsequent enslavement to Lord Zargon of Krytpon), because there will always be people to attached to asking these sorts of questions and searching for their answers. The settings and volume of such work will of course vary, depending on how much wealth a society has to support people in activities of no material economic worth, and how specific institutional arrangements are made.

This isn't to say that the best efforts shouldn't be made to put institutional arrangements on some sort-of sensible footing with respect to the humanistic disciplines, or at least one more sensible than the modern university with its publish-or-perish manias, its overpoliticized pieties, its frequent disregard for teaching, the over-production of PhDs, etc., but it is not in the power of academics to either kill off or declare dead the true and invisible church of the humanities.

2003-06-13T00:21:00.000-04:00

GRAD SCHOOL STINKS?: Invisible Adjunct is back up, where I found this piece by Thomas Benton recommending students to not go to grad school. Here are some excerpts and my responses:

"Remember," I advise, "that if you go to graduate school, you are contributing to the problem by making it less necessary for universities to hire full-time faculty members at decent wages. If you have a burning passion for Victorian poetry, you can probably satisfy this passion by yourself. Force yourself to read a few dozen academic books before deciding to dedicate your life to a subject. That is what one does in graduate school anyway. Most learning is unsupervised, independent, and onerous. Why pay or work according to an institutional timetable unless one needs an academic credential?

I want to respond to the last sentence, which strikes me as absurd. Much "learning" in graduate school is self-directed--I spend way too much time mucking through manuscript material, staring at microfilm, or just reading (by myself) with a book. But to say that grad students do all their work in isolation is absurd. Why the hell do we show up every week for class for the first couple of years? My advisors spend large amounts of time reading drafts of my work--I would like to think that the process is at least vaguely useful for myself, if a simple time-suck for them.

Having older scholars read one's work is intellectually useful, whether or not one wants a tenure-track academic job or not. It might not be what it's always cracked up to be; some professors are fantastically negligent of their teaching duties, etc., etc., but this sort of blanket statement strikes me as totally overdone.

"Also, remember that most grad students start out as dilettantes, thinking they'll just hang out for a few years on a stipend. But eventually they become completely invested in the profession, unable to envision themselves doing anything else. A few years can become a decade or more. Meanwhile, everyone else is beginning their adult lives while you remain trapped in permanent adolescence."

Errhhh... no. Several of my friends decided that they didn't like grad school after the first year. They left and got on with their lives. Three of the eight first years (no MAs coming in) in my cohort left grad school. They're all doing fine, thank you.

And, erhhh... I'm extremely invested in being a historian, but that doesn't mean I'm going to descend into despair if I don't get an academic job. If you can't understand the distinction between the two terms, then you should read some "scholarship" written before the rise of the modern university. Right after I finish my research, I intend to go home to LA in a supreme manifestation of my provincial quirks, and I don't intend to be applying for lame adjunct jobs all over the country. I'd much rather be a high school teacher and go home to LA than be an assistant prof in some horrible metropole on the East Coast (I told you I was provincial!).

Heck, the only tenure-track job I might go for outside of California is at my alma-mater--Yale--which means, of course, that I'll probably have no job to apply for when I go on the market this Fall. With this geographical restriction, it may take years before an opening turns up where I could even apply, and considering the sort-of scholarship I do, I'm not terribly optimistic about a job at a four-year university (community colleges are a better bet, relatively speaking). And Yale's American history faculty giving me a job--yeah, and I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell 'ya. Why do you think I don't use a pseudonym for this blog? Because I don't care if my future search committee member happens upon this site and is horrified at what horrible, horrible sentiments are expressed here! There's something liberating about knowing how hopeless things really are.

The time committments of doing something like teaching High School would of course put a giant crimp in scholarly production, but in this day and age of microfilm and increasingly large numbers of resources available on the net, and independent institutions that provide scholarly resources, it's more and more possible to write fine historical scholarship on the sorts-of topics I'm interested in outside of the academy.

2003-06-13T00:17:00.000-04:00

JUST TOO MUCH COFFEE FOR ME: As for this tidbit:

"I hardly know anyone who was a grad student in the last decade who is not deeply embittered. Because of my columns on this site, a few people have told me how their graduate-school years coincided with long periods of suicidal ideation. More commonly, grad students suffer from untreated chronic ailments such as weight fluctuation, fatigue, headache, stomach pain, nervousness, and alcoholism."

Anyone who reads this blog knows with what profound contempt I feel toward a profession that, for a variety of reasons--some better and some worse--has refused to see war as a profoundly human experience as worthy of humanistic contemplation as anything else (an issue, by the way, which I see as more significant than the dreary job market, since even in a fantasy world where adjuncts weren't used and grad students weren't flat-out abused as TAs, military history would still be marginalized, since it's the sort of rot that's one level deeper than current job-market problems), but do I then drown myself in drink? This is not to belittle the psychological problems of these unfortunates, but I just don't want readers to get the impression that all grad students suffer from these ailments.

Am I "deeply embittered"? Erhhh... No. To feel contempt for a group of people who have nothing but contempt for the topics of study I see as so profoundly important is a different state of mind than the sort of self-destructive embitterment that Benton refers to. Furthermore, to be embittered in this sense would really take away in my view from the fact that fine scholarship has and continues to be produced, at least in my field of American history. It's just that much of it ignores war, and the people who work on war are ignored by the movers-and-shakers of the profession. I may not be amused by the snickers military historians get, but it's not like I'm actually "oppressed."

And to take this sort of attitude Benton really does, in my case at least, injustice to my teachers here. My best teachers here are much like my best teachers at Yale--there's marginally more "professional" stuff done since we're in grad school, but the basic conversations over ideas are not substantively different. There is still the exchange of ideas that is useful for me at least. They're at a higher level since I'm older and more intellectually developed, or, at least they're supposed to be at a higher level, but this idea that Benton gives of graduate school as a total wasteland may apply for many, but it cannot apply to all.

2003-06-13T00:16:00.000-04:00

NO MARTYRDOM FOR ME: Historians of my stripe--politically conservative and intellectually interested in unfashionable topics--too frequently indulge in the same sort of persecution complex tenured Leftists like to wallow in--but in doing so, we frequently degrade what real martyrdom for ideas. Real martyrdom is to be executed like Socrates for daring to defy one's political community in the realm of ideas; it is to be thrown in jail like Eastern European intellectuals during the reign of Communism; it is not to be deprived of a job one thinks oneself to (and, by "objective" intellectual standards may actually) deserve.

What I've learned and continue to learn in graduate school is to trust my judgments of what is worthy of study, to acquire some degree of methodological discipline, to meet a few friends, to be able to exchange ideas with scholars older and wiser than myself, and the time to make a first go at writing real scholarship. I'm lucky that I'm well funded, which certainly helps, but I know as well as anyone else that my good fortune is very time-limited.

I'm actually sympathetic to the general motivations behind Benton's piece, to dissuade people from entering grad school as a sort-of default, to make people think about whether or not this is something they should really do, and I do much the same thing when I get an e-mail from a prospective asking advice on whether or not they should go to UVA. I always tell them to first figure out whether or not they want to go to grad school, with all its disadvantages, in the first place, and if they do, then UVA's actually a good place to do nineteenth-century American history. But to always think long and hard over the first question.

2003-06-12T23:39:00.000-04:00

HISTORY AS CALLING OR PROFESSION: I'm totally fine with Benton's final graphs on what to say to undergrads who go to grad school:

Go home, find any kind of job, and wait. The economy will change in a few years. New opportunities will emerge, and you'll be free to seize them, possibly with only a few months of training. Do not plan on a lifetime career in a single field. You'll change careers at least once every decade. And, here's the good news: Your undergraduate degree in the humanities has prepared you for that kind of flexibility. Use your education to help yourself, your future family, and the larger society. Do not use it to sustain unethical labor practices in the new corporate universities.

"Don't be in such a hurry to re-institutionalize yourself. Throw your mortarboard in the air. Consider yourself free for the first time in your life. If you really love knowledge and teaching, there's a whole world of both outside the academy. Find it or create it! Go!"

But so much of the rest of the piece I find so excessively overdone, so overly filled with the kind of "I'm oppressed!" angst academics of all political stripes like to indulge in. A professor of mine at Yale gave me advice in a much more judicious way, he compared history not to a profession, but to a calling, and as a calling, I had to be willing to go where I was needed. If the only jobs were in Wyoming, then I had to be happy with that. He made no bones about how bad the job market was.

As it turns out, I was young and foolish back then, but only half-way so. For personal reasons, I feel it imperative to go home, and won't go to Wyoming, but I still see history as a calling, and I will always think first and foremost see myself as a historian. I may end up having to struggle to get my research done during summers after exhausting academic years teaching high-school, but home for me is Los Angeles, a large metropolitan area with good libraries, not some small town in Montana. For reasons I already gave, one really can do research and find publishers for military history working as an independent scholar. Much of the angst surrounding the horrid academic job market centers in my view around overly narrow views of scholarship--the mistaken belief that if the universities go down the tubes, scholarship will also totally die. This is patently false! And, as always, I come back to military history, which has survived due to non-academic support from the government and a large "popular" audience willing to buy books. And scholarship of course was done when human societies were so much less wealthy, where things like universities could not possibly exist.

Anyhow, getting back to myself, a contemptuous but not embittered graduate student, after ten years outside of the academy, maybe I could still build the publishing record necessary to get some post-secondary (community college and up) teaching job in California, which I know for a fact has been done before. But if things don't work out, they don't work out. But I won't some less-than-perfect fortune ever deprive me of what I've learned in graduate school, and my own self-conception as a historian.

2003-06-12T18:01:00.000-04:00

WAR AND THE UNIVERSITY: After my previous post about why, the humanistict disciplnes should study war, one must wonder, why are current academic history departments so contemtuous of the study of war. This is not to say the issue is totally neglected: Ohio State, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Yale all have strong programs in the field, but even then, there are strange eccentricities to the coverage. For example, the only two straight-up military historians (defined as scholars who wrote a dissertation on a topic that involves armies and fighting and battles) of the Civil War at top-tier US universities are Mark Grimsley and one of my esteemed advisors--Dr. Gary Gallagher--here at UVA.

It's no coincidence that no nineteenth-century Americanist at an Ivy League university meets my definition (James McPherson at Princeton makes my point; he wrote a dissertation at Hopkins on abolitionists and the NAACP; although he's become a very good military historian later in his career, that not surprisingly occurred after he got tenure).

2003-06-12T18:00:00.001-04:00

ACADEMIC POLITICS: The first reason for military history's neglect centers on the far-Left tilt of academic historians. Military history has traditionally been associated (with some injustice, but perceptions are frequently more powerful than reality) with what Civil War historians call "Battles and Leaders" history, stirring narratives of great generals fighting majestic battles, etc. Since the rise of the New Social History among academic Americanists in the 1960s, with its new emphasis on "non-privileged" groups in American history (women, minorities of every hue, etc.), one can easily see why military history of this sort would be eschewed. However, this doesn't quite explain the problem since much of the so-called New Military History focused on the "common" soldier as opposed to the commanding general.

The other major reason, and probably the more important one, is the distinctly anti-militarist bent of most academics, which can be traced to disputes over ROTC's presence at college campuses during the late 60s and the like. Added to this mix is the fact that much professional military history is funded and supported to some extent by the military itself--for example, I do much of my research at the US Army Military History Institute, located smack on the grounds of the Army War College in Carlisle, PA. Many practicing military historians with academic credentials not surprisingly teach at either the service academics or in the military's in-house system of professional schools for advancing officers. And many of these historians are themselves serving officers. Academics take great pride in their intellectual independence, and this sort of close association to the state is unsettling to many, I think, even those who are not committed to the sort of Radical state-of-mind that grew out of Vietnam. To what degree academics at universities are "independent," and a faculty member at a service academy is "dependent," is of course, another question, but for the moment, I want to give the academic "perspective" of the issue.

2003-06-12T18:00:00.000-04:00

THE "PERSONAL" AND THE POLITICAL: But the divisions between military history and the academy go beyond the comparatively recent rise of institutionalized Radicalism in the academy; it goes at something much deeper in both our culture and, going farther, in the world-view of the western intellectual. First of all, one must remember that there is a powerful strain of anti-militarist sentiment in Anglo-American culture. Much of the ideological foundation of this republic came out of Whig tradition in England that numbered among its principles a profound suspicion of "standing armies." Questions of national defence were easily solved, it was thought, with a citizen-soldiers' militia who would make tyrannical officers and martial institutions unnecessary.

Bound up in all this, and moving far beyond it when the republicanism of the early modern period slowly withered away, were certain strains of outright pacifism that gathered steam in the nineteenth century, which can be found in things like British Cobdenism (free trade equals economic prosperity equals peace) and other sorts of Anglo-American reform. The ever-onward march of Progress had no place for war, and this attitude still has powerful sway, even among our current intelligentsia, who claim to have moved beyond such nonsense as Progress. How else can we explain the huge moral standing among these crowd of institutions like the UN, the affection for "multilateralism," the attempt to fight terrorism not with war, but with the devices and institutions of domestic law enforcement, etc? There, of course, has also been a romanticization of certain approved sorts of violence conducted by revolutionaries committed to acceptable sorts of liberation, but among American academics I think, a sort of loose pacifism is far more prevalent than outright approval of things like Palestinian suicide bombings.

2003-06-12T17:59:00.001-04:00

WAR AND THE INTELLECTUAL: But going even farther than this, beyond the contingent quirks of modern "progressive" conceptions of war as an aberration, there is the fact that there has been so little really effective work by western intellectuals on war. In the ancient period, we have various manuals of various sorts, but aside from Thucydides, and to a lesser extent Polybius, there is little really effective treatment of war as a phenomenon in-and-of-itself. If one reads something like Livy, one of the greatest historians of one of the great martial peoples of human history--the Romans--one is struck by how utterly useless his account of military affairs is. War is reduced essentially to a question of virtue. The Romans knock other people around in Livy because they're braver than everyone else. Thucydides' great achievement was to go beyond the treatment of both war and history as simply the un-refracted consequences of individual personalities with their own individual virtues and foibles, or of the easily-divined judgments of the gods, but as events with a larger set of causes, including but not limited to individuals' virtue or vice.

There is then a very long drought until we get to Clausewitz's On War, and even now, with our giant national-security state, much of the intellectual production is focused on specific policy questions, as opposed to the sort-of diffuse contemplation I think of with the humanities. There are several reasons for this I think:

1. War is not the arena to discovery the efficacy of Ideas with a capital I. For example, if one looks at great generalship, all great generals have enough intelligence to be competent, a large dose of common sense, and huge amounts of sheer grit in the face of highly stressfull circumstances. Some of these generals are "intellectual" (meaning they read books about such things as philosophy or literature and will even write their thoughts about such things), but many are not. For example, Sherman's writings are filled with interesting musings on the nature of war, of law, and of the citzen's relationship to the state, but Grant (who Sherman always saw as the superior General) has left no such store of intellectual production. What he has left are great campaigns, but not ideas in the sense that a poet or philosopher would use the term.

2. Following no. 1, war is also subject to an astonishing degree of unexplained randomness. Much dumb luck goes into war, which makes the phenomenon that much harder to explain. Intellectuals wish to explain the world around them, to give meaning to the formlessness of human existence, but war as an event in and of itself is extremely difficult to explain to any degree of satisfaction. So, intellectuals will tend to explain war with the sort of external intellectual apparatus they apply to other "more important" things: Marxists see the outcome of wars as products of economic materialism; the 60s Radical will see Vietnam as the just desserts of immoral American imperialism; Herodotus sees Greek victory as the obvious consequence of greater Greek virtue, etc. But the idea that war may have an internal dynamic separate in some sense from economics or ideology or whatever, and a dynamic driven in part by a sort-of capricious luck impervious to the human intellect, is, I think, an idea intellectuals would rather avoid.

3. Differences of temperment. Soldiers have long had contempt for scribblers and thinkers in their comfortable studies; Intellectuals have long returned that animosity for the uncouth and brutal world of the camp. Intellectuals prize subtlety and a special ability to grasp complex ideas; Soldiers prize directness and boldness of action. Intellectuals see courage as a matter of the head--the defiance of prevailing opinion--the willingness to dare to think what no one has thought before; Soldiers see courage as mostly a matter of defying phsycial danger in battle. And the list can go on forever.

2003-06-12T17:59:00.000-04:00

INDIFFERENCE TO CIRCUMSTANCE: Suffice it to say, both groups of people have their place in life, and the divisions between the two are in the end something we must be resigned to, I think. Many military historians with academic backgrounds (this includes me) spend too much of their time griping about what can never be changed; others waste far too much time trying to build bridges and a "dialogue" with fellow academics who will never really care all that much about what we study, much less throw out a bone in the form of a tenure-track position. Those military historians with real military backgrounds--i.e. former or continuing serving officers--can presumably retreat into the world of the camp; civilian military historians will have to take refuge in fact that all humanistic scholarship must come out of solitary study, and that the greater solitude than usual that comes from our despised-orphan status in the university is simply another impediment we can do nothing about, something akin to the tiresome drudgery of archival work in faded manuscript material or the fact that baseball fanship is an existence cursed to almost certain disappointment every October.

2003-06-10T23:09:00.000-04:00

RIDICULOUS: I nearly lost faith--2 outs in the 12th, and only one run to show against the worst team in baseball--the hapless Detroit Tigers. Green is still in his funk, along with everyone else, but Beltre and Cora come through--bless 'em!--and we move to 4 back against the Giants. And I get to go to the grocery store with my head held high, instead of being disconsolate for stubbornly following the game to its conclusion, to only taste the bitter cup of defeat.

All in all, a win's a win, but we got to play better than this...