Month: March 2010

Worth Reading: Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft

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Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft comes close to fulfilling the premise of its title. Written by Angelo M. Codevilla, it may be the clearest discussion of statecraft you’re likely to get from an American.

Codevilla puts a great deal of emphasis on two themes throughout the book:

  1. Seriousness.
  2. Proper naming.

He argues that American statecraft has been haunted by three spirits of obfuscation and unseriousness since around 1900: Liberal Internationalism, Realism, and Neoconservatism. Codevilla sums up the three: “As Liberals think that all well-administered peoples are alike and Neoconservatives that all democrats are alike, Realists think that all “moderates” are alike.” The fundamental problem Codevilla finds with all three strains of American foreign policy thinking is that they:

  1. Assume everyone in the world is an American under their skin.
  2. Assume foreign policy consists of scratching foreigners until the true inner American is revealed.
  3. Are ignorant or deliberately paper over the essential proposition that foreign policy deals with foreigners.
  4. Obfuscate the meaning of words such as diplomacy and war away from their basic dictionary meanings.

Codevilla is not kind to what he sees as the wanton unseriousness and obfuscation of America’s twentieth and twenty-first century elites:

Twentieth-century American elites, however, have committed our country to the grandest of ends but have not measured them against the means necessary to achieve them—ends hazily imagined, and means they might not have used even if they had them. Instead of scaling up means or scaling down ends, they invented vocabularies to describe a fantasy in which the means with which they felt comfortable would suffice to remake the world. This meant abandoning the wisdom concerning peace, war, diplomacy, intelligence, prestige, and economics accumulated in our civilization over millennia. In the new, unprecedented world they imagined, any given instance of peace was not the product of a particular peace victory and arrangement of power but rather the absence of conflict. Diplomacy was not a set of tools but a substitute for force. Intelligence was not a matter of a few hidden details but a magic wand to uncover the secret to effortless success. Prestige was a reputation, not for being effective but for being pleasant. Wealth was not one of many elements of power but everyone’s overriding purpose.
 
To be other than sorcerers’ apprentices, American statesmen had better deal with reality as described in dictionaries. This book does not impose its own categories. It looks at international affairs as the interactions of individuals and groups who are what they are, want what they want, and do what they do. It is about the consequences of forgetting common-sense definitions: that diplomacy is mere communication, that international intercourse requires a positive imbalance of means over ends, that allies are available in inverse proportion to the need for them, and that war is the avenue to peace via the gateway of the enemy’s death or submission.

Codevilla covers each major element of statecraft in its own chapter: diplomacy, economic power (money—money—money), war, intelligence, and civil defense (also known by the heavily Teutonic name of “homeland security”).

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A Question

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Is it just me, or is Paul Ryan’s I.Q. (or tenacity, research or thoughtfulness or whatever) a difference in kind rather than in degree from Democrats with whom he spars? Nerds/wonks like that aren’t great presidents, but I’d sure like him on the side of anyone who is. Give him some power and he’d clearly feel restrained by the possible, the practical. He respects us – and those with whom he argues. And he just seems so damn right.

Am I missing something – or, if I’m right, why do his remarks seem to slide off other’s well-oiled backs as if they were water? Of course, your average nerd doesn’t have hair that black and eyes that blue – he reminds me of that old Irish saying, God put in those blue, blue eyes with smokey fingers.

Hubbard Street Dance Facility

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I do not know much about modern dance but went to a show at Hubbard Street Dance on the north end of Millennium Park (right behind the cool music shell) and their facility has interesting colors and neon lights. I only had my crappy blog camera with me and took some photos. It reminds me of an updated version of the United Airlines connecting tunnel between terminals B and C at O’Hare.

“It’s Now or Never”

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“If you want to make your voice heard on the health-care bill before the House votes on Sunday, you’d better do so quickly.” – Ed Whelan, NRO (via Instapundit)

Don’t stop calling even if the vote ends up passing the thing. I’m quite serious about this. Keep relaying your concerns, keep calling, keep at it. Actions should have consequences.

Update: Oh goodness, Instapundit is linking to this report of an incident in which serial phone calling to a Congressman’s office is interpreted as a form of harassment (Huh? How is that harassment? It’s about a specific bill that the Congressman is voting on ?)

Well, I certainly don’t want anyone harassed or treated in any way other than civilly and decently. I wonder, however, if such incidents are inevitable given that technology has empowered us “little people” (an Army of Davids!) to repeatedly call, or text, or fax our Congressman, while the low-tech Congressional side is nothing other than a person logging the calls or texts or faxes. I don’t think this dynamic is going to change any time soon, and in an odd way, highlights the problems with a central authority attempting to deal with such a complicated phenomenon as rapidly changing technology. It’s yet another illustration of why health care shouldn’t be managed by central authorities… .

Mini-Book Review — Smith — The Strong Horse

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Smith, Lee, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, Doubleday, 2010, 256 pp.

Strong Horse is a series of conversations, observations and recollections of the author’s experiences in the Middle East over the last decade … focusing on Cairo, Beirut, Israel and Damascus. Living in Brooklyn, Smith took the events of 9/11 as a personal challenge to study in the region. That led him to discussing the political and social culture of the Arab world with individuals as varied as Sufi scholars, Koranic recitators, Lebanese Druze warlords, and Cairo doormen … engaging as well with more famous names such as Naguib Mahfouz (Egyptian Nobel Laureate in Literature), Edward Said, Omar Sharif, and Natan Sharansky.

As the title of the book suggests, Smith feels the conflicts of the Middle East are largely an internal clash of Arab civilizations and involve the “captive” peoples (Copts, Druze, Christians, Jews, Sufis, Shia, etc.) who must somehow survive with Sunni majorities and governments in the region. The spillover of violence into the West, while constant, is therefore largely a secondary effect. The key question, the author believes, is over “who’s the real Muslim?” Since that bloody debate, by definition, doesn’t extend to the infidels, violence in the non-Muslim world is usually some form of manipulation in benefit of domestic agendas. The evidence of the last decade suggests the Arabs reserve the lion’s share of their bile and violence for each other. Though they provide unrelenting warnings about the dangers of inciting further violence by Muslims (through American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan), such concerns never seem to translate into a lighter hand by authorities within the region. It is this observation which leads Smith to propose that “strong horse” politics was, is, and will be, a enduring principle in the Middle East … and widely supported by Arabs of every persuasion.

For Smith, Arab antagonism to Americans and Westerners is fundamental, being as they are neither Muslim nor, more importantly, Arab. The various Arab tribes and sects who feud endlessly amongst themselves do not permit any profound reconciliation with the Other, either across the religious and ethnic boundaries or within them. Muslim willingness to leverage Western allies against other Muslim powers is built right into Islamic history, as outlined with methodical effort in Efraim Karsh’s Islamic Imperialism: A History, reviewed earlier on chicagoboyz here.

The author’s conclusion after his travels and conversations over the last decade is that “overthrow, domination, and eventual collapse” is a political pattern long established amongst the Arab tribes, largely reinforced (not introduced) by Islam, recognized for over half a millennium by Arab historians, and it shows little or no sign of change in the 21st century. The strong horse is the model for successful political change in the region. It was not chosen as a metaphor by Osama Bin Laden on a whim. And it resonates deeply within Arab culture. It is the aspiration of all participants in the political process in the Middle East, in Smith’s belief … and any discussion of peace (as opposed to interim truce) is a form of cultural betrayal. And punished accordingly. Despite the fact that this cultural habit reiterates destructive cycles without end, it cannot be relinquished without giving up a fundamental cultural narrative. The toxic results are self-evident to modern Arabs but if Smith is to be believed, they are caught in a situation where all they can do is “double down” on the model of political change that has served them very poorly in the past. Struggling to cope with the impact of two centuries of Western technology and culture, the Arab hope is that an Arab Strong Horse will arise. The reality is that it is the United States, and inadvertently Israel, that have found themselves in the role of Strong Horse in the Middle East. The burden of the role is that all parties in the region look to gain favor and/or manipulate the destruction of their domestic and regional competitors by playing games with the Strong Horse. As Smith quotes in passing, Arabs are better at feuding than warring. At the point at which they are able to escalate conflict to war, inevitably it is their culture and self-regard that pays the price. What was true of Napoleon in Egypt is now true of America in the Middle East.

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