271. A Dream After Reading Memoirs by Presidential Advisers

First decree of the Word Czar:  No memo submitted to the President by a security adviser will contain the words "evil," "vile," "depraved," "vicious," "monstrous," "heinous" or any other word indicating that the nation is dealing with a ruler of despicable character.  Nothing that a ruler does entirely inside his country or to his own people will be referred to in the context of security.

Second decree: No memo submitted by the Secretary of Defense will contain the word "policy."  The words "objectives," "aims," and "strategy" will be used only with respect to goals already determined by the Secretary of State and the President.  Corollary:  the position Under Secretary of Defense for Policy will be eliminated.

Third decree: The CIA is subject to the above restrictions and in addition is ordered to eliminate the word "action" from its memos.  That agency's memos will be restricted entirely to information.

Fourth decree: No security advisor will be permitted to use, in memos referring to people outside this country, the words "liberty," "freedom," or "self-determination" with respect to their aims, or "oppressed," "exploited," or "deprived" with respect to their condition.

Fifth decree:  Atrocities will never be spoken of as actions characteristic of particular peoples; all peoples will be assumed to be, under the right conditions, capable of atrocities.

Coda:

(1) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Political Adviser, or any adviser for whom words serve the power that gives power to all in the executive branch.  For example, if voters want to hear talk about human rights then the Political Adviser may freely advise talk about human rights.

(2) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Diplomatic Adviser (the Secretary of State), or any of his or her subordinates for whom words serve international power.  For example, if talk about human rights weakens a nation or faction (say by causing internal division) that the Secretary of State finds it useful to weaken, or strengthens a nation or faction that the Secretary of State finds it useful to strengthen, then he may freely advise talk about human rights.

(3) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Legacy Adviser, or any subordinates for whom words serve to influence historians.  For example, if the Legacy Adviser thinks talk about human rights will, by indicating that those rights are an aim, raise historians' estimates of a President's performance, then he may freely advise talk about human rights.

Note:  All decrees are issued on the understanding that the restructuring of the Executive Branch is complete.  See the President's orders

(1) that all functions of the National Security Adviser and the National Security Council will be subsumed under the Department of State or the Department of the Interior (expanded to include Homeland Security);

(2) that all functions of the CIA having to do with action, covert or overt, will be taken over by the Department of State (to which any agent may be transferred);

(3) that the President will meet regularly only with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Interior, the White House Chief of Staff, and the four new appointees, Political Adviser, Linguistic Adviser, Resource Adviser, and Legacy Adviser (the Permanent Advisers);

(4) that all other meetings of advisers with the President will be ad hoc, or contingency,  meetings, with attendance determined by the contingency and the expertise or wisdom available to meet it;

(5) that for help in selecting attendees at contingency meetings the President will employ the Resource Adviser, charged with matching contingency to available expertise or wisdom, in which he or she will become expert;

(6) that official position will not be a qualification or a disqualification for attendance at contingency meetings (the Vice President will be an attendee only if selected, though he is expected to attend as an observer);

(7) that the Resource Adviser may attend any meeting, as an observer in order to gain knowledge for future selections;

(8) that the Linguistic Adviser (the adviser charged with keeping verbal and conceptual order — the Word Czar) may attend any meeting, as an observer, in order to gain knowledge for future decrees.

Note for those expecting to be observed: It will be well to keep in mind the purposes of the President's restructuring: (1) to avoid the transfer fallacy — taking expertise in one area to be transferable to expertise in another, as, say, from warfare to foreign policy; (2) to avoid the personality danger, where a person (say a general), or a type (say military) has such force or charisma (as gained, say, through past success, as in World War II) that his lack of expertise or wisdom with respect to the immediate contingency goes unrecognized.  (The President's gratitude to and respect for the Joint Chiefs of Staff should not conceal from you the fact that their removal from all advisory meetings — the Secretary of Defense will speak for them — reflects his desire to avoid the charisma danger, clearly evident in their imposing presence in the past.

The President recognizes as a final danger that you, particularly if you come from within the government structure (remember, the Resource Adviser draws on the entire nation for expertise), may be so intimidated by the presence of the Linguistic Adviser that your advice may not be as free and full as it would otherwise be.  That adviser recognizes the problem but believes that if you give single-minded attention to the contingency before you, defining it and locating it to the best of your ability, you will forget him, see what is required, and go on to give the President the best advice he can get.

217. Attacking Assad: does analysis matter?

 

 

What is it about the Middle East that makes our best journals, our most thoughtful, our most analytical, journals so dismissive of careful thought, even their own, when they see a chance to act there?  Remember the Times in 2003.  Now look at the August 31 Economist.  The analytical writer (p.20) wipes out the big distinction President Obama has made (asphyxiating gases horrible?  "so are most weapons") but the lead editorial writer cries (p. 9) for us to end the peculiar horror of gassing in Syria.  Is it that they think that the results of analysis have only academic interest?

You don't have to be a Clausewitz to see what's wrong with our taking military action in Syria.  I think you just have to do the kind of ends-means, cost-benefit thinking we demand in our other enterprises.  And carry it through to the end, asking the usual questions, demanding specific answers.  "OK, we take the course of action X to accomplish Y which will bring the outcome Z which will be worth the cost A and be superior to the outcomes of alternative courses of action M, N, O, P, and Q measured against their costs B, C, D, E, and F.  Could you go over your projections for that in the Syrian operation?"

I feel sure, if only by the example of General Shinseki before Iraq, that military men like General Dempsey have put this kind of question, more acutely than I have, to the administration.  Nobody is better at getting the details of execution than those who are going to have to execute.  But nobody, in the case of our military, is more helpless.

But let's just  limit our analytical attention to the end, Y, which will justify the whole thing.  If we don't see that clearly everybody's in trouble.  The ends brought most urgently to our attention are (1) to punish the Assad regime for using gas, (2) to reduce their ability to use it, (3) to bring a better regime to power, and (4) to preserve American credibility.

Punish.  Just to make Assad hurt?  Say he's sorry?  Makes no sense unless you reduce it to (2), the material effect, and (2) imposes a great handicap.  You can't bomb stockpiles of gas shells without bringing about the very thing you're trying to avoid, clouds of people-killing gas.  In any event, there's likely to be enough gas left for him (or anybody who grabs it) to use if he wants to.

So (3), bring a better regime to power, a more co-operative, more enlightened regime?  Anybody who can see the makings of that regime now, in that scramble of guerrillas, has eyesight better than anybody I know.  I think (3) is about the longest shot on the track.

And (4), preserving America's credibility, America's word?  You don't ever want to dismiss credibility.  Too many wars have been avoided by one side backing down in the face of credible power and will.  But you can ask why our credibility is on the line here, and whether it's America's credibility. 

If President Obama had not drawn that red line the question would not have arisen.  He'd have no word to take back.  And here's the place to reflect on analysis, and pickiness with words, and Socrates' demand that we slice nature at her joints.  Obama's line, as I hope I established in Post #215, was drawn far from any natural joint.  It was drawn halfway up the horror bone, up where no knife can get through.  Gassing is not really distinct from other horrors.  Yes, it's horrible, but if you think it's much more horrible than the other horrors of warfare you just haven't looked closely enough at those other horrors.  Your eye, or your mind's eye, needs to take in what's in the stretchers coming back from the Iwo Jima beach, or at the barbed wire rolls on the Somme, with disemboweled draftees hung up calling all night for their mothers.

How do you know you're at a joint and not at the far end of a bone?  When your knife can't slide back.  Lyndon Johnson's cut into Viet Nam at Da Nang, when he ordered the Marines into combat with the Viet Cong, is a perfect example.  He couldn't go back because to do so would be to "lose," "fail," "get beat," "cut and run," and, after the first casualty, "betray those who had given their lives in this cause."  Once he had made it a fight, us against them, those expressions kicked in, and became obstacles to retreat.  None them applied when he was sliding around with advising and training and supplying the South Vietnamese.  He had hit the joint normally recognized in a declaration of war. 

I'm afraid that Johnson's failure to recognize a joint could be Obama's failure.  And Congress's and the Economist's.  And the public's.  We all need Socrates here.  Gassing, he could point out, is one point on a scale (of horrors) that has plenty of degree marks.  There are no degree marks on warring.  You either win or lose, succeed or fail. 

That's awesome, an alternative like that, so you want people facing it to proceed very carefully, even Socratically:  Just what will it take to win here?  What does it mean to win?  What does our experience tell us?  I think General Dempsey is proceeding carefully, and maybe even asking those questions, but I don't think President Obama is proceeding carefully.

205. The Dangerous Humanity of the Intelligentsia

 

In the New York Times (May 5) Bill Keller begins his case for intervention in Syria thoughtfully and moderately, in a way no neutral academic could fault.  But in no time, as David Bromwich has just shown (New York Review, June 20), he is using words, and leading other writers on his newspaper to use words, that would take our country where the least thoughtful and moderate would take it.

Bromwich is good at showing what New York Times tendentiousness shares with Republican hawkishness: vagueness about the details.  John McCain says, "We could train and arm well-vetted Syrian opposition forces."  Bromwich asks, "'Vetted' by whom?"  McCain says, "We could destroy artillery and drive Assad's forces from their posts."  Bromwich asks, "All without ground forces?"  NYT editors pass an innocent-sounding headline, "Whitehouse Sticks to Cautious Path on Syria."  Bromwich says that's telling us that "the common sense of the well-informed now favors intervention."

That may be over-reading, but you don't have to over-read to see the tendentiousness in the case The Economist (May 18) makes.  Doing nothing could "even result in a victory for the loathsome regime of Bashar Assad."  "Loathsome" tells us that the common morality of the humanely moved favors intervention in Syria — as George Bush's "evil" told us that common Christianity favored intervention in Iraq. 

I don't see manipulation in this tendentiousness.  I see the genuine transmission of the humanity of the Enlightenment, and find flowing in these journals the stream the journals of Paris opened up.  It's what we count on them for, and are grateful for.  But it's not the whole Enlightenment.

Part of the Enlightenment is analysis which requires complexity to be acknowledged and not over-simplified.  Both the Times and The Economist show that they are doing that with the Syria problem.  "None of the options are risk free," the one the Times recommends "must be carefully choreographed and accompanied by... diplomacy," and still "it might well be that the internal grievances are too deep and bitter to forestall a bloody period of reprisals." "All options for the West" are "fraught," we could be "dragged into a quagmire," and the best choice is "imperfect," says The Economist.  The two newspapers could hardly do more to reassure the skeptical, high-information reader.  And still they do the things that Bromwich nails them for.

But there's still another part of the Enlightenment, trust in the common man, or (these days), the low-information reader. He's the man we all rely on to carry out our policies.  But he's the joker in the Enlightenment deck, and I'm not sure these editorialists understand him or know how to play him.

Say our nation is "enforcing a no-fly zone."  In an editorial room that's going to be different from waging war.  If you listen in a debriefing room, though, you won't detect much of a difference.  "I shot that son of a bitch right out of the sky."  Among common warriors, in the air or on the ground, the difference between enforcing a zone and waging war lies only in the number of sons of bitches.

Ah, but The Economist's no-fly zone will be set up "on humanitarian grounds."  There's the humanity the intelligentsia wants to see.  The common warrior, maybe played by a Jon Stewart, will see it too.  "Well, at least I got shot out of the sky on humanitarian grounds."  Not shot down by a son of a bitch?  "No, he was a good American human being."

The fact is that the process of killing, any kind of killing, turns the people who are trying to kill you into sons of bitches.  And the things you can do to a son of a bitch are different from the things you can do to a fellow human being.  War, bless Clausewitz for telling us, is an irreversible extension, on both sides, of what can be done to sons of bitches and an inexorable escalation of their number.  Technology, as in drones, may slow this process, or dull our awareness of it, but I don't think it can stop it.

That's a danger, letting your nation get into killing, but there's a prior danger: letting your nation get into a contest.  It's a danger heightened in the United States by the common American man's hatred of losing, as can be observed in any stadium.  If you start losing in a contest he'll want you to do more.  If you don't, manager or coach or President, he'll make trouble for you.  He hates losers.  And he, in the Enlightenment's most significant gift, has the votes.  He can throw losing presidents out.

Uncommonly bright Americans, editors, need to fix this on their walls, so they don't forget it: The American common man hates losing.  So a president who wants to stay out of war will avoid putting the country into win-lose situations.  And the uncommonly bright ought to help, not hinder, him.

158. Handling Testosterone: Through the Ages

Is the history of the West just a history of well-handled or poorly handled testosterone? 

If you start with Athens Thucydides makes you think so.  There's Pericles warning his eager countrymen to stay within their walls.  "Wait out the Spartans; they'll smash you if you don't."  There's Alcibiades, coming along with his call for an expedition to Sicily, a call to the blood.  There's the Athenian army, smashed to the ground at Syracuse.

Jump to Queen Elizabeth (preceding Post) because she's such a contrast with Alcibiades.  One after another her eager English lords get themselves to the Continent with what they hope will be a conquering army and she cuts off their funds.  "War costs too much."  What about our honor, our pride?  "Sorry, the loss of it is not worth the loss in lives and treasure."

You can't hear that without thinking of those nineteenth-century British cabinets, finding it "unthinkable" that the Royal Navy "might be deployed and then not used effectively," of the "loss of honor" if "we abstain longer from entering the Black Sea in force (Post #157)." Think of sensitivity to honor there and you have to think of France's war party in 1870, unable to bear Prussia's snubbing of their ambassador (same post).  Neither England's queen nor France's emperor could handle that testosterone.

The good handler isn't always a restrainer, of course.  Elizabeth wasn't before the Armada and Wellington wasn't before Waterloo.  "Up Guards, and at them!"  "Once more into the breach..."   "We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the airfields...."

The stronger the let-'er-rip people are the more strength it takes to restrain them.  We're talking about moral strength, social strength, face-to-face strength, Raymond Spruance looking at Bull Halsey and saying, "Keep the planes aboard, we're going back."  In World War I it would have meant saying to generals with armies mobilized at the borders, "Stand down" — what honor prevented every ruler or general from saying at the time.  You know what I hear Elizabeth saying?  "Mobilized, schmobilized.  This is going to cost too much."

And you know, at the end of history I think that she'd have a lot of admiring men around her, the most perceptive men, the men most capable of appreciating conference-room courage.  Bull Halsey and George Patton, men who knew what it took to rebuke them.  "What balls she must have had."

What's the most dangerous kind of testosterone?  No doubt about it: holy testosterone, testosterone serving God, testosterone that wars against Evil.  You have to fear this kind most because it's beyond rational deterrence and it goes all the way.  Serve your country and you take seriously the cost-benefit calculation rational people make before they go to war.   Serve God and you set that aside.  If your opponent is Evil there's no reason to stop short in anything you do to him.  If your God likes martyrdom you can scorn death and even seek it.  Give this kind nuclear weapons and instant massive retaliation means only instant, massive martyrdom.

What kind of testosterone is hardest to handle?  I guess it would be free-floating testosterone, the kind waiting to attach itself to a cause. Poolroom testosterone, the testosterone of the undrafted and inexperienced, is this kind of testosterone.  It's got to show that it's there and as potent as anybody's.  It's hard to handle because it's so diffuse.  Touchy testosterone, the kind honor-conscious ambassadors and generals have, is right in front of you, there at the conference or mobilized at the border.  You can give it orders, as Elizabeth did.  Poolroom testosterone is spread through the country, which, if the country is a democracy, lets it power war parties.  From far in the background.  Who do you give orders to?

It's possible that free-floating testosterone is more dangerous than holy testosterone.  It looks, especially at first, as if symbolic gestures — a carrier sent here, some missiles installed there, a few soldiers landed to show the flag — could satisfy it.  And sometimes, with the right rhetoric, they do.  A feeling of potency is all the boys in the poolroom really want and a show of hardness is often enough to give it to them.  Remember the advantage being "hard on communism" used to give candidates at the polls?  (Or was that just a reflection of what the other candidate's softness cost him?)  Anyway that, in the long decades of the Cold War, was most of the time harmless.  And a lot of it, now, looks comical, politicians walking around perpetually hard just to get the poolroom vote.

The trouble is that sometimes symbol becomes substance, as President Reagan discovered after the force he sent to Beirut was cut down in one explosion.  "You know that 'peace-keeping force' that couldn't really be a peace-keeping force because it exerted no force, the one we sent to show the flag, the symbol of our might?  Well those were real people in that force!  They died!"  And there you have a new and far more difficult reality to deal with.

Viet Nam was far more complicated than Beirut but you don't have to be a Walter Lippmann to see how much of our entry there was pushed by symbol-need, behind which was this vague hard-on-soft-on testosterone need.  Or to see how much testosterone need added to the push, through symbols, that took us into other real quagmires.

"You've gone too far.  There were good reasons to enter Viet Nam and Afghanistan and possibly good reasons to enter Iraq.  And as for your 'poolroom testosterone,' it behooves every country to have a reservoir of male hormones ready to tap.  How, otherwise, will armadas be defeated and holocausts avoided?"

All right, until I can argue in detail I'll say only this about testosterone: that it interferes with the cost-benefit calculations that tell us how to handle it.  And since these are often about life-or-death matters, and always complicated, such interference can be disastrous.  Testosterone should be treated, then, as if it truly is what Michael Gilbert (in The Disposable Male) called it: "the most dangerous chemical in the world."

133. Charisma, Angela Davis, Paris

There you were in 1972, trying to decide whether an injustice had been done to Angela Davis who, unable to make bail, sat in prison waiting to be tried as an accessory (the term for it in most states) to the murder of Judge Harold Haley.  The charge was based on evidence, later confirmed, that she had bought the gun that killed him.

Ordinarily those facts would make it easy for you: the charge was justified (providing the murder weapon would have forced an accessory charge almost anywhere) and due process had been followed in arresting her, imprisoning her, and setting bail (in her case $100,000, well justified by her having already fled).

What complicated your thinking was that many injustices had been done to African-Americans in the United States for a long time and that some in law enforcement, grudging the ground lost in the recent civil rights battles, were using and bending the law to gain some of it back. You had to ask yourself, "Is this justified enforcement or is it another case of racial harassment by the white majority?"  You had to look closely.

But in 1972 there was, especially in academia, something very powerful working against a close look: charisma.  Angela Davis was loaded with it.  So were Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver and all the Black Panthers she was associated with.  And those opposing them?  The Marin County prosecutor, Albert Harris?  Charisma zero.  Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, addressing the nation about the case?  Maybe a negative number.  (Hoover put her on the Ten Most Wanted List — only the third time for a woman — and Nixon congratulated the FBI on its “capture of this dangerous terrorist.") 

I think that if you were an aspiring academic and intellectual in 1972 it would have been as hard for you to resist Angela Davis's charisma as it was for your political opposite to resist the momentum of white resentment.  She was a bright student, she had won a scholarship to Brandeis, she spent a year in Paris, she worked for civil rights, she was beautiful, and she had been a target of Governor Ronald Reagan, who requested that she, because she was a communist, be barred from teaching at any university in the State of California.  She was right there with all the good people who had been persecuted as "communists" in the recent McCarthy era. 

In our present charisma-free environment (at least on this score) we who want to stand with the just can go pretty directly to the essential questions.  About Davis, "Was there or was there not good reason to arrest her, imprison her, and set her bail at the given figure?"  About the Communist Party, "Is it expressing dissent or engaging in rebellion — that is, attempting to overthrow the government?"  In the 70s we had to work through so many layers of charisma that we — outside of a few privileged political-science seminars — had a very hard time getting to these questions.

And you know who had the hardest time?  People who had been to Paris, people who actually lived there or who lived there in their imaginations, people who felt its great postwar attraction.  If anybody these days is in doubt about that charisma all they have to do is read Alice Kaplan's new book, Dreaming in French. There it is, in the lives of three women who spent student days in Paris, and were liberated by that experience, as many others were.  It was wonderful, it was exhilarating, and it was a handicap to clear thinking.  For Americans trying to get to the essential questions about cases like Angela Davis's it was another layer, a very heavy layer, of charisma they had to get through.

For the French, and particularly for Paris intellectuals, there was no doubt about the injustice done to Davis.  It was the confidence of the distant look.  Americans were unjust to blacks, Americans were unjust to her.  In the letters of sympathy to her (some of which Kaplan showed on slides Wednesday at the American Library in Paris) Davis is simply "in prison," without qualification.  Another victim of the system.

That's such a bad example to young American academics.  It tells them they can be good, they can stand with the just, without looking closely.  It reinforces that kind of Christianity, stronger in America than in France, that tells them, dangerously, that goodness is measured entirely in the heart.  Take the right general position, adopt the right attitude, and you are relieved of responsibility for particular judgment — which always requires particular inspection.  (No hearts could be in better condition than those incapable of inspection: the children who wrote the letters Kaplan showed us.)

So should our young not go to Paris?  Not feel the liberation Jacqueline Bouvier and Susan Sontag and Angela Davis felt?  By no means.  There are too many provincial constraints (taking America to be a province of France here) they, in order to grow, need to be free of — among the many they shouldn't be free of, constraints needed for growth and understanding.

A smart young person, after feeling the Parisian liberation, will pause for inspection. "Let's see now, what am I liberated from and what not?"  He (or she) will be the heir of the smart young person in the sixties, who, looking at the Viet Nam mess, said, "Let's see now, what authorities have been discredited and what not?"  The smart ones of both times are trying to avoid the dumb mistakes of wild freedom and blind anti-authoritarianism; both have learned to look closely.

70. The Sixties? That's Murk You're Looking Into.

 

All right, the man who gives me the most penetrating insight into the student riots of the sixties, T. E. Hulme, is associated with the fascists of the Action Francaise. Obviously he can't be trusted. Fascists are bad and he's bad. Do I have moral clarity?

No, you have moral facility. You have a litmus test that makes good-bad judgment easy. Thousands before you have applied it. It's the Nazis' gift to moral debate in the twentieth century.

And delivered, I see, by the logic of association (see Post #66), not real logic. A passing cloud. But still, enough to make me go back and check the essay. I see that Hulme's insight stands on its own merits. I'll use it.

Yes, you're the boss, as a man seeking moral clarity has to be.

Thank you. Now I can present you with a real problem. I'd been doing all this marching, real and symbolic, behind the out-of-Viet-Nam banners. The march had changed somewhat, the students were crazier and the banners weren't quite the same ("national crime" had been changed to "national stupidity," but I'd kept marching. Then I thought about what I was saying, what the words on the banner meant. "Get out of Viet Nam." Was that what I really wanted us to do? No. I really wanted us never to have gotten in. That stupidity. But, just as a military analyst, I had to admit that there was a world of difference between getting out and not getting in. Once you're in you face a host of new choices, and you'd better not make them without doing your staff work. Retreat in the face of hostile fire has always been difficult for generals, justification of retreat to the public has always been difficult for politicians, (admit failure? cut and run?) and reconciliation with the conscience difficult for individual citizens (our promises to our allies? our responsibility for countries we've messed up?). It's all extremely complicated. And there I was, saying simply, "Get out, get out." I was one with all the knee-jerk sloganeers who got us in. So what do I do? Go home?

The problem is clear, but I don't know the solution. It's the problem of complexity, made worse here by the fact that, as I remember, there weren't any other marches in town. Here we may be facing one of those problems that are just beyond our powers.

But I've named the problem, "complexity," I don't know the half of it. Consider this, suggested by a friend: what I was seeing on campuses wasn't close to what I was calling it, a political revolution. It was a social revolution. Of course it didn't live up to my expectations. The social and political were all mixed up. It was about as complex a situation as a moralist can imagine.

I can believe that, but I don't think "complexity" is the right name for what my friend described.  Putting a social revolution on top of a political revolution obscures the picture but it doesn't keep a determined moralist from clearing it up. In a political revolution, for example, the agents have aims. In a social revolution the agents just do things in a way that satisfies them more and sociologists call the result a revolution. Seeing differences like that — and there are a lot of them — is difficult but it can be done. The problem is obscurity.

And obviously I can't give up on it. But I think I've now gone as far as I can go so I think I'll let it alone for a while.

68. Not Clowns for God but Real, Excrement-throwing Yahoos.

 

If you no longer believe that the side you joined is good you lose your starting sense of virtue.  By the end of 1968 the Yippie side — meaning sixties youth in rebellion against the establishment — was doing so much harm to the good cause of peace in Viet Nam that I felt like a sinner going to their meetings.

Those student meetings. At one of them there was a fellow ready to go to Washington in a football helmet, carrying a baseball bat, wearing a T-shirt that said "Free Manson."

Maybe it was theater. I don't know. My age group was slow. But whatever it was the students at those meetings were ignorant of power. They were blind to the fact that in a democracy it's not in the streets, it's in the ballot box, and in modern America what goes in the box depends on what voters see on screens. What were they going to see here? Not what I saw. Not clever actors in a street drama, not wise fools, not clowns for God, but Yahoos. Real, excrement-throwing Yahoos.

As for the student leaders at this time, they showed me what courage was — not! There was an easy thing you could call courage: standing up firmly to the establishment. This meant going along with the people on your side. And then there was the hard thing: standing up to people on your side. Like saying to that fellow in the helmet, "Nope, can't have people screwing up the revolution. You're outta here." It's exactly the courage we ask modern Muslim leaders to show in dealing with their extremists.

Intellectual leadership? That was found mainly in The Post, our excellent student newspaper, one of the best in the country (one of only three the New York Times kept on file). No matter how good the editors were, though, they couldn't control their letter writers, or, at times, their own instincts for solidarity. By the seventies the establishment not only couldn't punish students right, it couldn't even look at them right. After riots that brought the National Guard to patrol the streets the Athens Police Department put some officers on the roof of Marting's Department Store to watch for further trouble. Post editors were outraged by the insult. A letter-writer's word for it was "tyranny." Logan's Bookstore, after taking several bricks through its windows, put floodlights outside. More insult. They put up cameras inside to protect against shoplifters. The last straw. You cannot, said the intellectuals, insult our Yahoos.

Ohio University students were far from alone in this kind of admonishment. "You have broken some of the best heads in the country," said the Yale student president, wagging his finger at the commencement audience. (How he must cringe now remembering that statement, the pomposity of it. What mature boomer wouldn't be cringing?) As at a lot of Midwestern schools, Ohio University people had their eyes on the Ivy League. That included student leaders.

I have already given my view of what these students, Yale and OU, were doing: expressing (in Melville's terms) "the Republic's faith" that man is "naturally good, and more, is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged" (Post #32, "Mob"). and suggsted that they were responding to the tremendous flattery they had received in those postwar years. Commencement speaker after commencement speaker had told them how superior they were. They had come in with the highest test scores in history. They were going out in a blaze of achievement. They were the new best, the new brightest.

But there was a deeper flattery, generated first by America's immigrants. Though those immigrants were "wretched refuse" they had these boys (it was always boys) who were going to knock everybody's lights out. If you beam on boys their way those who "succeed," those who, bless the Lord, are in college, are going to have a pretty high opinion of themselves.

Some foreigners I've listened to say that what I was looking at was just another form of "American youth-worship," which they say has a long history. If there is such a thing, in the sixties America certainly paid for it. It produced behavior so ugly that it sent once-worshiping Americans, the majority whose backing was needed for peace, fleeing right back — for a while — to the ugly devils that were for war.

The price I and a number of professors paid was low. In the race to personal morality we'd backed the wrong horse. These kids weren't going to win anything for us. The price the country paid was another matter.

65. How Alertness to a Word Change Could Have Saved Us in Viet Nam.

What made us WWII veterans share the Yippie view of the Viet Nam War was, oddly, an argument in Curtis LeMay's line: our sending troops to Viet Nam was unjustifiable militarily. Forget the morality of it. You don't attack an enemy without learning his capabilities. We attacked with no idea of the staying power, much less the on-the-ground firepower, of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Who the hell did the staff work? Didn't we have anybody who could see that it was long-term nationalism, not monolithic communism, that explained the staying power?

Apparently President Johnson didn't have anybody, and that doomed him. He couldn't win and he couldn't get out. We'll never forget how terrible it was.

How could he have avoided that terribleness? By broader staff work, says the military man. Johnson's staff failed him in judging the enemy, sure, but it still could have judged his own people successfully. Staffs are used to telling generals about the condition of their troops — their state of training, their health, their morale. Johnson's staff could have said to him, "Sir, we've got people here, not just troops, who hate to lose. They hate to admit that they're losing. That's going to make it very hard to get out of this once you're in it."

That's military. Politicians know such things in their bones. Lyndon Johnson didn't need a staff to tell him that Americans hate to lose. He'd been to Texas high-school football games.

So, did he have a chance of bringing this knowledge to bear, and saving us from that terrible decade?

I think he had a good chance, but to take it he had to be alert to the importance of words — the way English majors are taught to be. In March, 1965, Johnson sent Americans openly into combat at Da Nang. Up to this point they had been "advisers"; here they became "soldiers" — the word naming what many of them had in fact been for some time. You'd just changed words.

If only Johnson had understood the magnitude of that change. An "adviser" can't be defeated. He is merely thwarted. Soldiers can be defeated. "Defeat" is what your rival does to your high school when it outscores your football team. "Thwart" is what city council does to it when it votes to change your principal's busing plan. Substitute the first for the second in the mouths of the people back home and you've put their team on the field. From then on it's "us against them, dig in, hang in there, give 'em hell."

I'm hard pressed to think of a moment when words were more important, when the nation's need for leaders sensitive to words was greater, when just one flash of verbal perception could have accomplished so much. It's not just seeing what big things words can do; it's seeing what big things they can trigger. I think Johnson at Da Nang triggered something so big that no government effort, no diplomatic expertise, no twisting, no turning, could stop it.

64. Why the Viet Nam Hawks Weren't So Dumb

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To all us right-thinking lovers of reason the reflex anti-communists, the kind that supported Joe McCarthy, were dumbheads, but how about the senators and Congressmen who drew on those dumbheads for support? They were of the postwar generation John Gaddis (recognized "dean of Cold War studies," and teaching at Ohio U.) credits with a very reasonable aim, to apply the great lesson of World War II: stop aggression early. They needed the bumper hawks so that they could avoid the catastrophic mistake of their predecessors, letting the Nazis get strong before they could be stopped. If only, they thought, they could have had American bumpers plastered with 'get them fascists' when Hitler sent his soldiers into the Rhineland.

So Barry Goldwater and those bumper hawks were working for peace. Yes, peace. Not in the way of the mild but in the way of the stern: through credible threat. "When we make war on you we don't stop until we've crushed you." That was the way of the Romans, and it accounts, say the stern, for the longest periods of peace the world has ever had. (At the moment, in 2011, they would say that way accounts for the long peacefulness of the two countries most thoroughly crushed in World War II.)

It's a respectable way. Ask historians. If you define peace as time without blood-spilling (not cold) war then, they'll tell you, the stern way has the advantage over the gentle way. Examine the periods during which people lived in peace and see what gave it to them. Count up the days. Severity wins.

To make it win, though, you have to have credibility. If you don't have a track record of successful severity, something approaching the Roman, or the Spartan (or the British, at times), nobody will believe your stern threats, the ones that keep them from spilling blood.

So there's the rationale for throwing your all into Viet Nam. You're doing it for your track record, which gives you credibility, which gives you enemies who fear you, and neutrals who respect you. How can you hold back?

You wouldn't, readers, be university people if you weren't ready with a dozen reasons but our interest now is clarity, and I think we've made a gain there. What looked like a war between dumbheads, armies of the night, comes into focus as a reasonable conflict. All the thinking politicians who made use of an unthinking base (and what thinking politician doesn't?) to avoid the mistakes their predecessors made were thinking reasonably. Acting to meet a threat on time is reasonable, and acting to maintain credible threats is reasonable. (Remember, "reasonable" does not mean "right.") On the other hand, all the apparently mindless Yippies had their minds on a reasonable goal too, to avoid complicity in a crime.  Everybody was acting reasonably.  There's the sixties for you.

In the event, some of us wound up justifying Yippies and some of us wound up justifying Hawks.  I wound up on the Yippie side but my reasons are too long for here. Next post: Why the Yippies Were Almost Right.

63. Hawks and Yippies, 1968

To be "good," you have to be "a good citizen," and in a democracy that means being "engaged" in politics, and that means supporting a side. But you have to support a good side, and if one side is doing more good than another you have to support it. But sometimes the goodness is very hard to see, and in riots it can be impossible.

It was close to impossible, at least for me, in the student riots of 1968. I'd come back from East Asia ready to believe that anti-establishment riots by university students, the enlightened, the well taught (by people like me), were almost sure to be good. They might not be as good as the Korea University students, demanding that their government live up to the democratic ideals taught them by their American-studies professors, but still, they'd be good.

In the 1967 March on the Pentagon the university students, at least the ones I saw, looked pretty good. And I thought I saw them clearly. Then in 1968 I didn't know what I was seeing. There on the screen were the Yippies. There were our students, painted like savages. Soon on bookstands there would be Jerry Rubin's "Do It" and Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book." What the hell did all that have to do with ending the war in Viet Nam? How could it possibly serve the good cause?

Irrelevance, diffusion of force, childishness — that's what we all saw in those people. Yet we had to call the side they were on the "good" one. It had to be good. The other side was the uneducated, unenlightened one: get-them-commies, nail-that-coonskin-to-the-wall, get-your-heart-in-America-or-get-your-ass-out.

Well, if you have to be on a doubtful side you'll find a way to explain the bad in it. Some of my colleagues and I told ourselves that in all that incomprehensible behavior the students were making a comprehensible moral statement: "We refuse to be accomplices in a national crime." Avoiding complicity in a crime is as morally respectable a thing as you can do, right? Hadn't we just been calling for it in Germany? "Where were the good Germans?" Well, the good Americans, those Yippies, were saying, "We're bailing out, and we're calling your attention to this open hatch here in your heartless bomber." The obscenity we saw on a 19-year-old's forehead said, "I am not Curtis LeMay."

I had seen some Curtis LeMay types during my own service. They loved what they were doing. War was their life, what they had trained for. But to keep it up they had to have an enemy. With the Axis gone they didn't need much of an excuse to turn somebody into an enemy, and the communists were giving them plenty of excuses. Those career war guys were dangerous and the bumper hawks made them more dangerous (great heavens, they could push us through Viet Nam right into a war with the Chinese). So the Yippies were onto something, it was rational, they were good, and we were good in supporting them.

That took some seeing, but we eventually saw it or came up with it. What we peace profs were incapable of seeing in 1968 was that the other irrational ones, the bumper hawks, might have been onto something too. You could make a case for their rationality. Next post: Why the Viet Nam Hawks Weren't So Dumb.

34. "Mission creep"

Once again, for those who remember, the contrast with World War II: "Your mission is to bring about unconditional surrender." The troops under you leap at the enemy's throat. In the Somali operation (Restore Hope), for which the expression was first used (by Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post) the mission was to provide humanitarian relief to starving Somalis. Then to protect those providing the relief. Then to take out the warlord who was endangering them. Then to punish the warlord for fighting back and taking out some of our people. Then...but President Clinton called a halt to it and we left (Operation United Shield). The difference from WWII is as great as the difference in combat deaths: WWII 291,000; Somalia, 29.

Some of what Wikipedia tells us about the term, "that it often implies a certain disapproval of newly adopted goals by the user of the term" is certainly right, but some is plainly wrong. Mission creep is not undesirable "due to the dangerous path of each success breeding more ambitious attempts"; it's undesirable due to each failure breeding more attempts to avoid failure, as the Somalia case shows.

Clinton's call was a tough one because he was bucking one of the forces fundamental in human nature, and especially strong, I think, in American nature: the drive to succeed. We hate failure. We don't like to admit failure. We don't like to see our President admit failure. In anything we've undertaken, large or small.

No wonder Presidents keep asking the Pentagon to dial things up a little. No wonder Secretaries of Defense hate it. Get one little, clean mission you think you can accomplish and, clink, there's another one, a little bigger, a little dirtier. With a lot of potential blame hanging on it. Secretary Gates knew the story well when he alerted senators to what preoccupied him in Libya: "mission creep."

It's a great expression, but there's one thing wrong with it. "Creep" fails to convey the actual distance covered. For President Johnson's ordering of the Marines to use their arms against the Viet Cong at Da Nang it suggested another small advance, an elbow forward. In reality it was a leap over the broadest chasm in the American psyche. Once our troops started battling enemy troops, once they were (in the public eye) no longer "advisers" or "trainers," we had undertaken a war and war was a thing we could only win or lose. It was us against them, by God, and when success didn't come it was hang in there, it was stand on the goal line, it was Valley Forge. Only summer soldiers and sunshine patriots bugged out.

On the combat side of that chasm familiar forces kicked in to keep us going forward. There was the debt to those who had died. Did they give their lives in vain? There were the promises to those we'd come to help. There was our worth as an ally. There was the credibility of our future threats. And there was, as always, the force of mounting reciprocal paybacks that Clausewitz makes a feature of every war.

Most of what President Johnson chose to do in Viet Nam fits the notion of a creep. Bomb the North from carriers far at sea. Pause. Bomb. Pause. Creep, creep. Raise the troop level, slowly, quietly, making sure you announce the change only in a noon release. Creep, creep, creep. Announcement of what the Marines were going to do, however, though it was framed like the others, was not a creep. There was no disguising it. It was "Up Guards, and at them!" Now we'll get those communist bastards.

"Creep" also fits what we then did, though it's far from what Hoagland had in mind: move further and further from reality. Everything lodged in the public mind about the evils of communism was now released, in increments of illusion. It was us against Marx. With guns. Do you know that that bastard was already only ninety miles away, in Cuba? The whole "soft-on" vocabulary kicked in. Hardness was shown in words. Symbolic stands became more important than real stands.

I think of the bumper sticker that appeared about that time: "Victory over communism, not co-existence." Can words ever put you further from the real world? An abstraction winning over an abstraction, and not in a graduate seminar but on the battlefield!

It's easy for us now, knowing that those were not really communist bastards (they were nationalist bastards), to see what our people needed then: better words, fitting better with reality. They needed "mission creep." Maybe a columnist using that expression then would have given the country a better idea of what was happening. Maybe a staff member could have given the others, given Johnson, a better idea.

But no expression fits reality perfectly. They would still need somebody, drawing on something in some vocabulary, to say, "OK, but here it's not a creep, it's a leap. Anybody have a word that'll get that across to the President?"