All right, the Alliance for Security and Advancement makes
this great start and then what?
Nations get tired of making the necessary sacrifices in goods and trade
and Americans get tired of watching all the suffering they are allowing or
causing. Once again reality throws
its weight against high resolve.
Another flawlessly theorized program grinds to a halt.
So how will my super president, my Bismarck of the
democracies, keep his alliance going and his own people in line?
Well, with the alliance he's got a wonderful resource at
hand: money. Just what Britain had
to keep its allies going against Napoleon. He deals it out as needed, according to the chances of
defection. Remember, the U. S. is
not only the richest nation in the world, it's saving money. By not doing invasions, and maintaining
armies abroad, and rebuilding defeated countries, this president can more than
make up the losses other advanced nations will suffer. By the Iraq measure alone he's got over
a trillion dollars to play with. I
think that kind of money will do the job.
Next the suffering in the backward countries his people will
have to stand by and watch. This
is the really big problem. No
matter how well they have pictured the suffering, no matter how well they have
prepared themselves to bear the sight of it, no matter how thoroughly they have
blotted out their contribution to those people's earlier suffering, or the
presence among them of people to whom the suffering can teach nothing (the
already advanced, moderate people), when the sufferers appear on a television
screen they can't stand it. None
of us can stand it. At this point
all our softened hearts will cry out for an end to neglect and cruelty. No matter how convinced we were that it
would end in greater humanity.
This may be an insurmountable problem. A compassionate cruelty program may run
so counter to human nature that it's not worth trying to implement. Especially when the media, the screens,
are so alert to cruelty, so quick to stoke compassion.
I can't see any president, no matter how super, opposing
this alone, and on the spot. He'd
need the help of prior education, particularly the kind that develops the
imagination., the faculty that let's us call up, ahead of time, the images our
schemes, our plans, our programs, our desires,
will produce. All that we have
committed ourselves to. In
Churchill's time, for the British. it would have been the blood, the sweat, the
tears, the cruelty they were going to inflict, the suffering they were going to
have to watch. "Go ahead, Mr.
Prime Minister, bomb Dusseldorf no matter how many good Germans are in
it." Collateral cruelty goes
with the program.
Here for Americans it would be the ability to see, at the
moment they pictured little girls of the future growing up whole and happy, the
little girls whose present suffering CNN would put before them each night. The price paid for the better future.
What would the American president have to have in order to
give his people, in such a short time, this ability to see and accept? Churchillian eloquence? Maybe. For the short term.
For the long term only education, going through history books seeing how
much cruelty and injustice is attached to every advance in humanity and
justice. Without some education
like that in the populace his eloquence might well fail.
If he succeeds, his speeches to the moderate, advanced
people inside a backward country will not be unlike the speeches Churchill
might have made to good Germans.
Our president could, with his people behind him, say, "This
suffering, this damage, good Iranians, is the price you pay for putting up with
leaders like Khameini, giving them the final say." Or, borrowing from Mao, he could say to
the general citizenry, "You, your culture, your religion, determine the
water, the temperature of it, the acidity, in which these jihadist fish
swim. Do something about it or
suffer with them."
"But think how we made them suffer, so wrongly, in 1953
," say the Soft Hearts beside him.
"You are victimizing your own victims."
Here our president has to become a philosopher.
"Reconsider," he says.
"Are we trying to satisfy the dead or provide for the living? I ask the question here as I ask it in
Israel, where satisfaction of the Holocaust dead is so urgent. In both places the welfare of the
living and their descendants comes first.
Sure we feel guilty, but that has nothing to do with our decisions and
plans."
God knows if that will work. The president wonders too. All of those hurting hearts, all of those willing hands, all
wanting to help. So he does
things that would shock the pants off philosophers if they ever found out about
it. He has the CIA slip all kinds
of aid into the backward countries — arms for the opposition, trainers,
advisers, any American (as long as he's not wearing boots) who can help. And, where he can get away with it, he
lies about their presence and mission.
Also, there are the organizations he doesn't have to lie about, the
NGOs. All the while he's been
talking up toughness he's been cranking up the NGOs. Anything to reduce the suffering that will be seen on TV,
anything to grease the Soft-Hearts over the rough part of the track.
That lying.
It's a bad thing, but like many a bad thing it's done to accomplish a
good thing. Here the good thing is
the best thing any 21st-century president could ever give his country: quagmire
protection. Americans risk a
quagmire any time they enter a win-lose situation. Americans hate to lose a fight. They hate to have their credibility reduced, their word
doubted, their standing lowered.
Most of all they hate to see their buddies die in vain. They're used to fights that win
independence, free slaves, repay Lafayette, avenge Pearl Harbor, stop fascism,
and contain communism. American
blood on an island sanctifies it.
"Give back Okinawa?
Have you no gratitude?"
Just the other day (1-10-14), on the front page of the Times:
"Fallujah’s Fall Stuns Marines Who Fought There." It's to keep Americans from feeling and
saying such things that American presidents keep the country going in a fight,
no matter how hopeless or ill-considered.
Well this president knows from history that if he doesn't
give his country a clear-cut victory in a good cause there's not much in it for
him at the termination of a war or end to his term. Fight for eight years, clearly benefit one people, the Iraqi
Shi-ites, and have them throw their shoes at you (Bush). Or clearly benefit nobody and, after a much
greater effort to avoid failure, have to retire (Johnson).
This president also knows that that force, the force against
losing, kicks in as soon as Americans think they're officially in a fight. One way is to stay out of unwinnable
fights. The other way is to keep whatever fight you're in from becoming
official. No bell bringing you out
of your corner. If you've sent
trainers and advisers you never call them fighters. You even deny their presence. You lie. You cheat, you steal, you do anything
to keep Americans from saying, "It's our boys against their boys now, and
our boys don't lose" — as they could say as soon as Johnson sent the
Marines into combat at Da Nang and Bush said go to General Schwarzkopf. In short this president knows that
there is a slippery edge he can never put his foot over, because once he does
these forces will keep him from pulling it back. And they operate for years.
Of course eventually one of the members of our free and
enterprising press is going to point out that the president's trainers and
advisers aren't really trainers and advisers, and that it's the CIA that is
pulling the NGO strings. What's a
quagmire compared to the chance for a Pulitzer?
This is the final challenge and though it's not the biggest
it may be the hardest for the president to meet. Maybe he can't, by himself. He needs PR people.
But God, what an assignment!
"I want you to spin this so that by the end of the month everybody
on television is singing 'God
bless the CIA.'"
Well, let's say the super president has super PR
people. And gives them two months. So that he can work in his speech about how this is a new
kind of war, requiring covert fighting.
So he can build up agents as fighters. Better make it three months. Time for the movies he'll encourage, or plant. Under Cover in the Swat Valley. Sleeper Agent in Pakistan. He Penetrated the ISI. Anything to take attention off the
win-lose Army and put it on the FBI and CIA, whose success or failure is so
slowly and dimly revealed.
Maybe he should make it four months. Give him time to work on Congress for
laws fitting the security-liberties balance to a war that's inside our borders
as much as outside. Time to loosen
up the courts a little. So he
won't have to be breaking any laws.
No, four is too long. Come
on, Senate, this isn't 1965. Come
on, Supreme Court, the Department of Homeland Security isn't the Stasi.
OK, three months it is. Super performance by everybody and on CNN a mother whose
three sons were in the terrorist-targeted building says, "Thank God for
the CIA."
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