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.

216. The Horrors Competition

  

No, I don't mean a competition to see who can do the most horrible things to people.  Nobody tries to be a champion in that league.  I mean a competition to see who can rack up the most horrible things the other fellow has done.  It's the competition that gives us bragging rights in the Human League.  "You're more inhuman than I am."

Of course we mean "your tribe," "your race," "your religion," and, some of us, hope we can take the meaning to "your genes," "your essential nature."

People keep trying to win at this game. In the Balkans five nations are still piling up evidence that worse things were done to them than they ever did.  In Ireland Protestants are still adding up Catholic atrocities and Catholics adding up Protestant atrocities.  There's hardly time to get a count.  Stop to measure a pile in Asia — Muslims against Hindus, Buddhists against Muslims, Sikhs against Hindus — and somebody's sure to come running up with another bundle.  "Hold on!  The latest from Myanmar!  The Buddhists will never match these figures!"

Of course the Buddhists will match them.  Groups embarrassed by current figures just go to the past.  "Yes, we're bad now but seven centuries ago you had a general that makes us all look good.  Look how he slaughtered."

Not that there haven't been undoubted, all-conquering slaughterers.  Admit it, though, and what do you hear?  "Here's one, here's an undeniable case," and up comes another victim dragging his victimizer.  One Holocaust exception opens the gates. 

And not that there haven't been pure non-slaughterers.  Be one of those and you're a sure winner.  I don't think we'll hear from you, though.  You'll be too sweet to play this game. 

With everybody else, though, it's a contest that gets more complicated with every play.  Imagine yourself the scorekeeper.  The Crusades.  "You behead!"  "You crucify."  "Yeah, but you behead more than we crucify."  "We do not."  "Yes you do.  History shows that in 1189 you beheaded this many people." "Whose history?  Yours!"  "Yes but our history is more reliable than yours."  "OK, but even if the numbers are too high we're still ahead.  Crucified people suffer more than beheaded people."

Oi, the scoreboard.  Go from quantity to quality and it's a mess.  Well how about ten points for a crucifixion and three for a beheading, three leaving room for lethal injection, etc., lying ahead.  Sounds good but you just know that as soon as you get it fixed somebody's going to come running in with a disemboweling or a gassing.  And, if you're an old historian, you'll know more: any historian who runs in claiming to have found the last horror is going to be followed by another who has looked at the period more closely.  The closer historians look at any period the more horrors they are going to find.  Sounds to me as if anybody, if they slice it right, can be on top of the leader board.  "You're all more inhuman than I am."

Maybe what we need is a big, loud voice coming in and saying, "You're all inhuman, period.  Yes you too, you weak, you meek, you oppressed.  You just haven't had a chance yet."   The voice of the old-time God would end the game all right.

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.

175. The Economist Calls for Intervention in Syria.

 

You'd never say that the editors of The Economist write heart-rending prose, but yet they can do something to hearts.

"Is it because America and Europe have tired of their own wars that they have started to turn their backs on other people's?" one asks this week in a leader.  "The number of dead in Syria has passed 30,000 and some days 250 bodies are added to the pile."

See the bodies, see them in a pile, see it growing, and growing, and growing — unless you do something?  Images.  Not as vivid as TV images, but still images.  The writer didn't have to give us that pile.  Nor what comes next, a hypothesized picture of "Syria's great cities ... ground to rubble" in a future where "the whole Middle East would choke on dust." 

He tells us that the dictator Assad's assault is against "civilians" (not "rebels") and the violence of it "breeds implacable hatred, and so the rebels [has to be "rebels" now; "civilians" doesn't fit the final verb] will fight on."  If Assad weren't so violent the rebels wouldn't fight on?  "Let's quit; he's just arresting us"?  The nouns are ticklish but that connective ("and so") is downright painful.  Painful to one accustomed to The Economist's care with cause and effect, that is.

Their care is to avoid the vague and wishful, and yet that "and so" is wishful.  So is much that is said to show that intervention is "feasible."  "It is possible" that the "mere threat" of a no-fly zone would "keep Mr. Assad's planes on the ground."  So is the word "probably" in this sentence about the behavior of other Arab countries:  "So long as there is no invading ground force (and there won't be), they will probably fall into line."  How confident that "and there won't be" is.  I think of earlier confidence: "Bombing will do the job.  Surgical strikes."

But, in light of the whole editorial, that must be a slip.  Economist caution, Economist cool, prevails.  The writer knows that "intervention is a slippery slope," that "nobody can be sure who would replace [Assad]."  He does "not call lightly for the world to undertake such a risky operation."

Maybe the coolest reason that journals can now offer for action in any region is that somebody is "destabilizing" it.  With the rest of them The Economist assumes that stability is good, and in a State Department way.  Geopolitical.  But "stability" can remain good only if you keep your eyes off of the root, "stable."  It means "firmly established, not likely to change."  Good only, then, if it's your good.  Not good if it's Torquemada's Spain or Stalin's Russia, no matter how firmly they're established.  Torquemada and Stalin have just as much claim on the word as you do, American journal writers. So we need some other word to justify going into Syria.  The Economist needs it — if it's to be superior to other journals

If the writer of the leader doesn't use the kind of words I'm looking for, the superior words, who does?  The writer in the business section.  Yes, an accountant is what I want.  Somebody able to do a cost-benefit analysis.  Makes realistic projections.  Makes sure that what goes on her page reflects what's in the real world.  Chary of images.

I see her coming over to give some instruction to this leader writer.  She's pretty severe.  "No, no.  You can’t talk about giving Syria 'a chance to re-emerge as a nation at peace with itself and its neighbours' without readiness to tell your reader when that peace was.  You say re-emerge.  Was there a time when no Sunnis had to fear an Alawite massacre, when Syria was at peace with Israel?" 

But it's the editorial's last sentence that will get her, the sentence that gives the boss (in this case the reader) what he pays an accountant for, a solid weighing up: The sooner the world intervenes the more lives can be saved.  "What figures back that up?  What experience?  Your reader is not an accountant but he can read the news.  Just today (Oct. 20, 2012), the papers tell of 'back-to-back bomb blasts in a crowded Baghdad market near a revered Shiite shrine,' and of a 'string of shootings targeting government officials' that killed at least 17 people.  On the net he can see that in the first eight months of this year 3,323 Iraqi civilians died by violence, about 1800 of them killed by suicide attacks and vehicle bombs.  Markets, shrines, children's playgrounds, pilgrim's buses, were targets.  This eleven years after an intervention for which humanitarian goals much like yours were part of the justification.  That's our experience in the real world, and the people who pay us will expect us to take it into account."