21. Dancing Around Clausewitz.

"It's war, stupid." That can well be on your wall, but if you are a leader of a NATO nation now you can't act on it. The people you are sending in to help force Qaddafi out have to be called "liaison officers" (NYT, 4-21-11), as the people Lyndon Johnson first sent into Viet Nam had to be called (as we are calling the people we will leave behind in Afghanistan) "advisers" and "trainers." Nobody wants to be "at war."

To fill in the wall message I like to go to Carl von Clausewitz, whom I hear saying, "Look, the only way you can make some leaders do things is kill their people. The people you send to do that are called 'soldiers' and the thing they will be doing is called 'war,' whose law of escalation into worse and worse killing I have explained. Don't deceive yourself into thinking your use of force leads to anything else."

Are the statesmen who send liaison officers and advisers deceiving themselves? If so Clausewitz's "realpolitik" shows up their "illusion politics." If they are not deceiving themselves, if they see the reality of war as they hide it, I think those statesmen are a rebuke to Clausewitz and to those who define "realism" so narrowly. They see a political reality that makes calling things by their right (that is, accurate) names unrealistic. They see a public that denies votes to speakers of "war." On Clausewitz's wall they'd put "It's the election, stupid."

This is the pain of U. S. Presidents: both wall statements are true. Sometimes they need to remind themselves of one, sometimes the other. The trick is in changing them to meet the times. What a problem! By now Obama's wall must look like a bad mathematician's blackboard.

The better leaders of democracies can calculate coming pain the better they'll know how to reduce it. What they need is a graph that would show them total pain, so that they could see how much a short, sharp pain, say, paid off. Go in with a big force and get the killing over with. There's the initial spike but look at the total. Maybe worth it, maybe not. Figure the area under the curve.

How would you figure this one: Obama's back-and-forth on the wall, starting with the destruction of the Qaddafi column to Benghazi (war), then "out of there in a week" (politics), then CIA on the ground (war), then the turnover to NATO (politics), and now (also NYT, 4-21-11) "sending Predator drones." The linguistic comfort in that last choice (he frankly makes war while satisfying the political need to keep our people alive) can't conceal the fact that Obama is in great pain. Now what you have to figure is the amount of pain there would have been if he had let the Qaddafi column go to Benghazi and smash the rebels right there.

I see we're going to have to factor in the ability of the American public to bear the sight of what clearly would have been a slaughter in Benghazi, but that at the moment is too much for me to go into. I welcome ideas and will take up the problem in a later post.