| Friday,
August 26, 2005 Mail will be mildly delayed; I'll have that
up later this afternoon.
Robertson and Assassination
It's probably time to point out that while Robertson is probably the
wrong man to say it, if we have to interfere with other countries and their
leadership, special operations teams are a lot cheaper than wars. The notion
that a head of state has King's X exemption from being assassinated is
likely a royal development and something much wished by heads of state, who
prefer to drop bombs from 15,000 feet on bridges and Chinese News Agencies
to enforce their will on foreigners who irrationally insist on doing things
we don't approve of. A lot more intelligence and bribe money would have
knocked out Saddam with much less loss of life and we could have been saved
the bother of invading Iraq.
Dictator or other head of state dies violently. Country goes through
whatever rite of succession is customary (Prince inherits, VP takes over,
new elections, civil war, party purges, whatever) and the US ambassador goes
to new head of state and points out that his life will probably be longer
and certainly a lot simpler if he accedes to whatever demands Washington is
making this week. Let in the Albanians and surrender your historic homeland;
get out of your historic homeland and let the settlers who believe they are
descended from previous historic invader/possessors live there in peace;
stop building nuclear power plants; stop building a blue water fleet that
challenges the Monarch of the Seas (oops, wrong century); whatever the whim
of the US President and Secretary of State happens to be. Do that and we
won't send in the special forces.
It is certainly cheaper and more humane than sending in an army to kill
100,000 civilians, just as it would have been cheaper when we first went in
to Iraq to bribe the then existing Iraqi army to keep order on pain of being
disbanded and left without pay. If one intends to rule the world, it's a lot
simpler to rule through client kings and presidents and chairmen and
chairladies and secret masters than through direct occupation. Cheaper and
easier on our troops, too.
But it's best not to talk about it too much, and if you do, you need to
choose your talkers.
But Robertson was the wrong man to say that, one supposes. Perhaps he
should have got a coalition of people, former Clintonistas, some old spooks
from the Agency and British Military Intelligence, some of Kennedy's team
from Viet Nam, the Watergate team, and all of them get together to say it.
Throw in a few realist academicians, too, just to make it clear we are
talking about a national consensus here...
(For some discussion see mail)
==============
On Iraq, Evil, and foreign policy of
a Republic
I was engaged in a conversation on Iraq last night that started with a
friend calling Bush "more evil than Cthulhu" and my asking why on earth
would anyone think that? Evil consists of knowing the right thing and doing
something else for base motives. Bush may be wrong, but he almost certainly
is not evil. There followed the usual confusion about evil oil interests and
contracts to Brown and Root and such, little of which was accurate; the
actual understanding of many people, including fairly smart people, of
what's going on in this world is startlingly small.
But it did get me to think out loud on the subject, which is, as I
suspected it would be, the war. She was sick of it.
Put the war in perspective. We lose two troopers a day on average (at
least that was the rate last time I looked). Call it 800 a year, mostly
young men with a sprinkling of young women. This is enough to make us want
to call off the war (which may or may not be a desirable thing to do without
regard to its cost). My question is, of the 50,000 a year who die on our
streets and highways, how many are young men and women of military age? I
would guess considerably more than 800. Indeed, I would suspect that at
least 800 young men and women are killed nationwide on Prom Night, although
probably not noticed because Prom Nights are scattered over a couple of
months. If we had one national Prom Night I would guess the slaughter would
be so great that we'd seriously consider calling it off -- but we wouldn't,
just as we don't get all those dangerous cars and trucks off the highways.
So the casualty cost of Iraq isn't all that large; which is not to demean
the sacrifices of heroes, or to take anything away from them; it is to try
to put things in perspective so that we can engage in rational thought. If
you actually thought every human life of infinite worth you would not
undertake anything risky including bridge construction.
The question is, is it worth it? And the answer to that lies in what one
believes will be accomplished. With bridges and skyscrapers we are pretty
sure the result is possible. It's different with foreign policy.
If the end result of the war is a stable, moderately religious,
government friendly to the US in Iraq, then yes, it was worth it despite the
terrible costs (which are far heavier on Iraqis than on us). But how likely
is that result?
Making that estimate requires us to answer questions that involve real
uncertainties, the kind of uncertainties that we have insufficient numbers
of cases to have any reliable probability estimates about; uncertainties
like the mood of certain leaders, and the state of the health of certain
religious figures, the probable eloquence of our ambassadresses, and a
number of other factors that have more influence over human events than the
historical determinists like to suppose. (Antietam and the marching orders
lost with a packet of cigars will do as well as any for an example of what I
mean; if Lee's plans were not known to the North, what might have happened
there?)
Now most of us from the realistic school of analysis would say that a
stable Iraqi moderate regime is highly unlikely and always was highly
unlikely, there being few precedents for such things. But: there was one
precedent.
Lebanon before it came apart comes closest to mind, and mind you, it did
come apart despite a careful power-sharing Constitution that gave places to
the Christians, Sunni, Shiite, Druze, and secular factions. None of us can
say a priori that moderate stable regimes in the Middle East are impossible,
precisely because there was the case of Lebanon before it came apart, and
it's pretty clear that the Lebanon experiment could have been propped up by
the Great Powers if they had cared to do that, and at far less cost than we
subsequently paid to mitigate the horrors that came about after Lebanon came
apart. Lebanon before its crash is an existence proof.
So is Switzerland.
Which is not to say that stability in Iraq is likely, or that it is as
easy to persuade Kurds and Shiites and Sunni to live peacefully together as
it is to require that of Germans, French, Italians, Calvinists, Lutherans,
Catholics, and atheists to do so, or that you can plant democracy in the
deserts as easily as in the Alps. But it is to say that it is
possible.
And for better or for worse our national leaders have determined that it
is possible, and that it is in our national interest, and that we will
invest blood and treasure in Baghdad. And that is the way things are.
Bush is not evil. He may be wrong. He may not be wrong. On election day I
am allowed and required to render my decision on such matters. Other times,
such decisions are a bit above my pay grade. Which is not to say I will shut
up about the subject. Just to say that it's hardly evil not to take my
advice. A mistake, perhaps. But not evil.
For comments, see mail.
On Prudence, Competence, and the
Spirit of the Age
Most comments on the above are easily summarized: the invasion of Iraq
was ill advised, badly thought out, imprudent, unwise, and potentially
disastrous.
Since I said all that before we invaded, I can hardly argue, especially
since things have turned out just about as I predicted they would.
Why, then, am I not jumping on the Bush bashing bandwagon?
It has to do with the duties of citizenship. We used to say that politics
stops at the water's edge. We thought we meant that, but it turns out that
few do. All rush to take political advantage of perilous situations, and do
so without much thought as to what to do in place of the policies they
denounce.
This isn't true of Cochran, who didn't want us in Iraq in the first
place, and wants us out, now, as soon as possible, without regard to the
costs of leaving. It was a bad job, and the sooner we are out the better.
Buchanan's American Conservative magazine has much the same view. Moreover,
they're sure they are right.
Now I have tried to say this before, and I don't seem to have got it
across: my view of the world is not the prevailing view of the intellectual
class of the United States or indeed of most of the world. Most
intellectuals believe that deep in the heart of every man beats a burning
desire for freedom and liberty. This is taught in nearly every university of
this and nearly every other land. Man is born free, and if he is in chains,
they are chains forged by society and imposed on mankind. Man is born free,
but not only free, but good. Man is good, or at worst morally neutral, man
is not fallen and the Biblical story of The Fall of Man is neither true nor
even symbolic: it's a story that offers no true insights and is best
forgotten. And that, I put it to you, is the Spirit of the Age.
And when it comes to competence, Bush doesn't look all that bad in
comparison with, say, Carter, who lost us Iran and was negotiating terms of
surrender with the USSR; who truly believed we were in an era of limits and
suffered a national malaise. Carter faced an enemy with 26,000 nuclear
warheads, deliverable warheads, who truly had the capability of destroying
civilization, and who pretended to face us with the stark choices of going
red or being dead.
And then there's Kennedy who got us into Viet Nam and let McNamara run
the war for him. Who sent Ted Sorenson over to approve the murder of the man
who had invited us into Viet Nam in the first place. Who set up a policy of
losing the war but staying in. There was Roosevelt who got us into the
European war after running on a platform of keeping us out of it. Perhaps
that was a good thing. Many would say so. But having done it, we ended up
with the USSR as the big winner, and the USA facing, eventually, 26,000
nuclear warheads, which, I put it to you, is a great deal more danger than
we face now.
Bush is incompetent on the conservative view of mankind; but that is a
minority view. The followers of Strauss and Trotsky who morphed into
neoconservatives do not share the conservative view of mankind, and neither
do the liberals. Now the liberals, it is true enough, are quick to pile on
Bush now that the war is not going well (or possibly appears to not be going
well); but they were not in principle opposed to meddling in the affairs of
others, of supporting Israel against the Palestinians, of bombing Serbia
into submission for the benefit of the Albanians although I doubt most of
them ever met a Serbian or an Albanian and prior to our sending in the air
power could not have located Kosovo on a map of Europe to within 200 miles
assuming they can do that now.
Yes: on my view of the world, Bush is incompetent and undertook precisely
what John Quincy Adams warned us against, going abroad to seek monsters to
slay, and endangering our freedom and prosperity in the doing of it.
But my view is not that of the intellectual leadership of the United
States, and those who want to bug out of the war now do so because it is
going badly, not because they doubt the principles on which we began that
war. And, I put it to you, while some of us wanted never to be there and
said so then and now, many now want out for political reasons. Politics no
longer stops at the water's edge, and they want out not to help the United
States but to harm the President and Republicans.
Now heaven knows I have no great brief for the Republicans. The Stupid
Party has not changed much, and adds now to stupidity a tendency to support
some pretty unsavory and rapacious people. But the Democrats don't seem a
lot better, and if they have discovered a principle that will keep the army
at home when people overseas do things we don't like, I have not heard them
articulate it.
Bush, at least, has nominated for Associate Justice someone who has
principles, and seems to be a constitutionalist. He has sent to the UN
someone who doesn't worship that place of privilege and lordship. He has
done many things I dislike, but he has also refrained from doing many of the
things his opponents promised to do which I would have disliked a very great
deal more.
I do not know if staying the course in Iraq will see us through to
victory. I know that staying the course in Viet Nam would have kept South
Viet Nam free, and Saigon would not be Ho Chi Minh City had we sent in the
Air Force and sent supplies to ARVN in 1975 as we did in 1972. I know that
the heroes have left their blood in the Mesopotamian desert, and I would
like to think it was not for nothing. I have my doubts about our ability to
win, but I have no doubt about the consequences of running now that we have
engaged; and I do not at all count out the abilities of our armed forces to
bring about a decent end to Iraq. At great cost, yes; but they may well
succeed. They're damned good at what they are doing, now that they
understand the mission. America muddles through, but we do get the job done
quite often. Don't sell the GI's short.
As to the cost, again, what should I say? I knew it would cost hundreds
of billions and said so at the time. I would rather we invested in nuclear
power and fuel cells and solar power satellites and domestic oil production
so that we can tell the Middle East to mind its own business while we mind
ours. But then I would rather we left abortion and drug wars to the states.
I suspect there is about as much chance of my advice being taken in the one
matter as in the other.
I will continue to offer my advice. I doubt it will be taken. More
discussion in Mail.
=================
Two Questions regarding FrontPage:
1. is there a way to insert a time and date stamp that does not change?
Other than to just write it in. (NOTE: I know how to put in a time/date
template that changes each time the page is accessed; there is one such at
the top of this page. I want a time/date that does NOT change, but shows the
time of creation and never again shifts. Clearly I can write that in by
hand, but it would be convenient to have a means for doing it more simply.
2. How do you apply indentation styles? (NOTE: I know about the
html <blockquote> command. I just don't want to have to go into coding.
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