Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
As a follow-up to Shannon’s post, this remarkable interview with Michael Scheuer.
Key fact: The “rendition” program originated with Clinton, not Bush.
Second key fact: The program worked.
Educated guess: Obama will not touch this program, and the news media will let it die out as an issue.
Exceprts from the interview below the fold.
So Obama has decided to keep rendition and the torture it implies as part of U.S. covert operations. Surprise, Surprise. Turns out that instead of being a sign of pure personal evil, at least threatening to torture spies and illegal combatants is a necessary tool for even the most “enlightened” individuals.
Of course, anyone who spent any time actually studying the matter instead of trying to score rhetorical points out of selfish political motives knew that something like this is needed and as always has been.
Strategy is a very misunderstood concept. Over the last eight years the United States has implemented a number of various strategies which were more the nature of public relations campaigns, attempts to give the impression of government design on what have been commonly seen as disorganized chaos following mismanaged policy adventures. Too often it seems that „strategy“ is used interchangeably with „intentions“, in order to give the impression that by calling one’s stated intentions a „strategy“ it magically increases the likelihood of success.
Reading Clausewitz’s On War during what has been arguably a nadir of strategic thought’s influence on US policy formulation could be seen as depressing. At the same time our current situation is comprehensible in Clausewitzian terms. As Americans (addressing the American contributors to this roundtable) it may be particularly difficult for us to understand (let alone face) the dysfunctions of our own domestic political system (dysfunctional policy sharing the character of those who have implemented and supported it) along with the assumptions of our own strategic culture.
Clausewitz offers a different perspective and a theory-based methodology – in effect a conceptual yardstick – with which to look at our own situation and compare it to other situations at present or in the past. There are no guarantees that this will lead to better policy however, or to more practical and farsighted statesmen, even the best strategic theory could not save Prussia which no longer exists as a political entity.
So, a bit of an introduction as to the importance of strategic theory but also its obvious limitations. Another obvious limitation is lack of understanding. Book III offers a good point of departure for a quick review of what Clausewitz is up to here.
From a Telegraph story [h/t Instapundit]:
The biggest display of public disaffection with Mr Putin prompted a violent response in Moscow. Pro Kremlin youth wingers brutally beat some protestors, while others were detained, including Eduard Limonov, a prominent Kremlin critic and leader of the outlawed National Bolshevik Party.[emp added]
What the hell are “youth wingers”? How does that even make sense? You have right and left wingers because they represents opposite sides of a spectrum. Does “youth wingers” imply a division between young and old?
More likely they just couldn’t figure out whether to call the bullies “left” or “right”.
One theme of Book III is the contrast between strategy, a world of uncertainty, and tactics, a world of mechanistic certainty. This contrast is most striking in the contrast between the moral and the material. Military theorists like von Bulow and Jomini, the immediate predecessors of Clausewitz, attempted to take the deterministic approach that met with some success in tactics and use it to reduce strategy to a “war by algebra”, amputating that inconvenient and unquantifiable moral dimension:
It is even more ridiculous when we consider that these very critics usually exclude all moral qualities from strategic theory, and only examine material factors. They reduce everything to a few mathematical formulas of equilibrium and superiority, of time and space, limited by a few angles and lines. If that were really all, it would hardly provide a scientific problems for a schoolboy.
But we should admit that scientific formulas and problems are not under discussion. The relations between material factors are all very simple; what is more difficult to grasp are the intellectual factors involved. Even so, it is only in the highest realms of strategy that intellectual complications and extreme diversity of factors and relationships occur. At that level there is little or no difference between strategy, policy, and statesmanship, and there, as we have already said, their influence is greater in question of quantity and scale than in forms of execution. While execution is dominant, as it is in the individual events of a war whether great or small, than intellectual factors are reduced to a minimum.