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.
