256. Come on U.S. presidents, listen to my civics teacher.

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Most of us believe by now that a market economy will outperform a planned economy hands down.  Communist states just fall behind in supplying material goods.  And that's where we measure success in the East-West competition, isn't it, in material satisfaction of the workers?  The American Dream is a dream of money, ability to buy things; the Marxist dream is a dream of satisfied needs, material needs (it's dialectical materialism, isn't it?).  Show Krushchev those rows of middle-class houses in Detroit, tell him they belong to workers, and we can see points going up on the board.

So why did we need to do all those dirty tricks to communist countries, and send advisers to coach resisters, and agents to funnel arms to opponents, and technicians to help the arms-handlers, and do all those covert things Robert M. Gates, Cold War insider, tells about in his book, From the Shadows? 

"Because sometimes, when something had to be done, you could do it more effectively and safely covertly than you could by doing it in the open."

But why did we have to go so far?  Like mining a harbor and blowing up a Soviet ship.  Real in-your-face challenges.  I remember those Cold War anxieties.  We knew what kind of eager warriors we had in Washington.  Smart, but oh my. They could so easily miscalculate.  Trigger too much pride, impose too much humiliation, underestimate a paranoia, and we could find ourselves under an approaching missile.  Or stuck in a postcolonial swamp.  Along with the dictator we backed.

"I know the answer to why we went so far.  Because I've studied some history.  It's that if we hadn't gone far enough we simply would have lost."

Lost what?  Our lives?  Our way of life?

"No.  The game.  It's the game, stupid.  The Great Game, the game played by Britain against Russia for a hundred years in Asia, the game played by Palmerston in his morning coat and Disraeli in his spats, sending an emissary here, a regiment there, the game we're continuing to play against Russia now.  But it's really the game played by any country that wants to be a Great Power (to take over the capital letters awarded to those countries who succeeded in the nineteenth century).  Slip a little and you lose your title."

That's a tough game, I know, but if you're up against communists you don't have to play it.  If what my high-school civics teacher told me about both systems is true we can just sit back and wait for their system to wither.

"Yes.  If your civics teacher is right about communist systems that's what our legislators can vote for.   And if voters really believe what they say about communism, they'll be behind them.  So instead of a Cold War with all its expense and crises we'll have peace and prosperity and saved lives and built-up capital and everything civilized human beings might want. Oh yes, and love will be a thing that can never go wrong, and (to finish Dorothy Parker's way) you'll be Marie of Romania.  The unreality of your logically sound conclusion must be apparent to you. "

 Well, with Gates’ help it's becoming so.  I must admit that it's hard to see any of those five presidents he worked under — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush — saying, "Well, we're going to sit back and wait for things to go our way on this one."  Even harder when you see Obama getting plastered every time he goes an extra second on his chair.

 "And that's just pressure from the voters.  Think of presidential cabinets and staffs, the best and the brightest, the most eager.  Even the most progressive, those most alert to human suffering, with the most humane instincts, even they are going to want action.  Action.  Get a picture of them at home during the Cold War (as in Katherine Graham's autobiography) and what do you see?  Hawks, hawks, and more hawks.  Democratic, humane, Goldwater-deploring, Nixon-fighting, future warriors on poverty.  There they are in Graham's dining room, sorting out moves against the Soviets.  To the last guest!"

And yet, if my teacher is right about communism and I'm right about a passive stand-down in the face of it, what they're going against is peace and prosperity and saved lives and built-up capital and everything civilized human beings might want.  Who goes against such things?  Barbarians.  Are Cold Warriors barbarians?

"It's a reasonable question, and, as you can see in Gates' book, one our presidents most frequently had to ask about CIA people, who often took the operational lead, or stood nearby pushing their favorite operations.  But pushed in such a gentlemanly way.  None more gentlemanly, more civilized appearing, than CIA Director William J. Casey,   "He dressed expensively and formally.  Even on weekends, when he would come into the office, he almost always wore a jacket and tie." He'd have been right at home, sartorially, among the players of the first Great Game, those in the Palmerston cabinet, planning moves against the Russians. 

"And he'd have a lot in common with that other group of well-dressed males around a table in St. Petersburg, planning opposing moves.  I'm with you here.  They're all one.  They're all having the time of their lives.  'Man, is this ever a great game.'  All their hormones are engaged. Male life lived all the way up.  If the Brits weren't having so much fun why would they call it a game?"

That's a terrible thing to picture when you can see where the low-level players of their game wound up. There they are, the poet reminds us, "East and west on fields forgotten....Lovely lads and dead and rotten."  To the soldiers it wasn't such a great game.

"That eats at me me.  And all the more in the light of the history I've read.  I know that what put those lads on those fields, dead, were moves planned by gentlemen, educated, highly civilized gentlemen, England's brightest and best.  As our brightest and best put our lads, dead, on the fields of Viet Nam."

It eats at me too.  And it leads me to believe that I, for all my upward-gazing awe, and you, for all your sophistication in history, still have a naive view of gentlemen.  All those players of the Great Game, old and new, whatever their dress, or manners, or education, or state of civilization, were playing for a very primitive satisfaction: to get the best of another male. What we have to see in those morning coats, essentially, is what I saw on my big city grammar-school playground: competitors in a contest over who would be "cock of the walk," as my uncle from the farm called the winner.  Unsatisfied testosterone.  New on the playground, old in the cabinet meeting.  Inside that morning coat or blazer there's still an unspayed tomcat.  There may be signs of a successful operation, but it hasn't worked.

"That's certainly hard for me to dispute when I look at the CIA described in all the other books about it.  Oh, it's got variety, and thought, and humanity, but you know what its default position is?  You really want to know?  It's a grip on the balls.  The CIA's most vigorous people, the people that gravitate to it, still love Teddy Roosevelt, his manliness, his realistic manliness: 'When you've got 'em by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.'  So shut up, peaceniks, about hearts and minds.  On with the Great Game.  The Ur-Game was Greek wrestling, with no holds barred."

How it must grind those types now when they read of Jimmy Carter, that wimp, doing more with his talk of human rights to break down the Soviet Union than they ever did.  Carter, leveraging the idealistic language Ford had gotten the Soviets to agree to in the Helsinki Accords, and with the help of the new pope (still with no army divisions), started the fires in Poland and Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe that would burn down the whole communist house.  And Gates, noting how he and Ford were belittled for their naive idealism by "those who considered themselves as hardheaded realists in foreign policy," gives him full credit for it (pages 89-96).

Did Carter understand power, the power of ideas, their appeal to hearts and minds, better than they did?  His behavior encourages doubt but to me it looks like it.  The central fact about those CIA realpoliticians, those confident justifiers of the dirty trick, the talking point when you want to take their money (and their reputation in history) away, is that they simply did not understand power.

"And, you know, every time a dirty trick was exposed they had a chance to understand it.  The indignation before the world's TV sets, the disappointment in our allies' faces, the regret in the hearts of our young. They could have learned something from that."

Well, they certainly got their come-uppance from the grieving young in the sixties.   "Covert action?  That might be uncovered?  Christ, can't do that any more.  Not with all these students ready to flood the streets."

"The realpoliticians couldn't do anything any more. Kissinger at the table with the North Vietnamese starts one of his old moves and then, in mid-gesture, realizes that the students wouldn't put up with it."

Ah, those sickened hearts and minds of the young.  But back to the education of the vigorous old.  Only if they had taken their high-school civics course — the course the grieving young were so much closer to — only if they had taken that course seriously, would they have learned something.  Take "democracy" and "the rule of law" as mere words and you're uneducable.  You're free, in your ignorance, to mine another nation's harbors, and overthrow its elected presidents, and deceive your own legislators about the whole thing.  You're free to undermine, and dismiss as naive, the very power that can win the battle you're fighting, the power of an idea.

So, I conclude, my high-school civics teacher had the secret to power, the key to the kingdom, all along.  She have could given it to these presidents play by play.  I'll make her National Security Adviser and let her speak:  "Trust your system.  Trust democracy.  Trust free enterprise.  Trust the ideals of the Founding Fathers.  Trust their strength.  In the battle for hearts and minds, the battle where the war is won, they will win out.  The world will see you conserving lives and treasure, prospering, confirming the practicality of your nation's ideals.  And there's only one person who can keep those ideals from winning out.  You.  You can screw them up.  If by your behavior and the behavior you allow your subordinates you show that you don't trust them, you will screw them up.  The world will hear the once-powerful words and say, 'Yeah, yeah.'  There goes your strength and you'll be back to the no-holds-barred game, which you have no better chance of winning than the other dirty players have."

255. The Sex Business

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In The Economist's leader this week on the sex business only two kinds of people are mentioned as being opposed to prostitution: puritans, "who think that women selling sex are sinners," and do-gooders, "who think they are victims."  I would add a third category: teachers, who think that prostitutes are children.  In the sense that they are under-educated.

You understand that I regard anybody who doesn't know the literature his civilization has produced, as under-educated.  A student who has taken only science and engineering courses is under-educated.

What those students are missing by not taking those humanities courses, and what literature courses will best give them, is what prostitutes most need: a dramatized view of life as a whole.

Drama.  How do you get drama that gives you a sense of the whole of life?  By looking at death.  The end.  While you're right in the middle of life.

Oh, did the poets I taught ever do that!  First in the middle, the joy.  "There it is, oh golden, golden, there it is, seize it, seize it," and then "Gone, gone, gone forever, as it will all go."  Carpe diem, then ubi sunt, in the terms given us by the Roman poets.

But poets in any period do that, arousing you to the intensity of physical love and then sticking you with finality of physical death.  If you don't seize the love, the joy, when you're able to, you'll lose your chance.  At the end you'll die deprived, and in between time, if Milton is right, you'll suffer the little deaths of a deprived (he would say "depraved") mechanism, an inability to seize, seize all that's there, together.  Because you (I'm including the client now) wasted your abilities on a part, in a childish seizure, "loveless, joyless, unindeared." 

So, children, know the whole, glimpse the human future, and you'll be less likely to lie with the "cold-hearted witch,/ And after, drained dry,/ Come to the chamber where/ Lies one long sought with despair."   Yeats knows that, for most of us, there will be a period when we can't help looking back.

That looking back.  Is there a way to make it less regretful?  Yes, if you have produced children, a family, grandchildren, the "large posterity" that Spenser saw possessing the earth, all the product of the "wedded love" that Milton saw driving "adulterous lust" to range "among the bestial herds."  Physical love viewed in the fullest context.

Awareness of that context, however dim, must be what makes Christmas the saddest day of the whorehouse year.  Family, family, reminders everywhere.  Polly Adler's book, A House is Not a Home, told us about it.

There were more victims then, the forced, to whom none of this applies.  Now, with prostitutes able to charge $250 an hour (recently $350) there are fewer.

It's the people with the choice who need the drama.  Some, of course, have the imagination to provide it on their own.  But they won't get it from the True Romance magazines that, Adler says, litter the whores' private quarters.

However you get the drama, though, you can easily lose it, lose your sense that something important in human life is at stake. How, reader responsive to literature and art, do you lose that?  By becoming a scientist (you think), a clinician, a Kinsey, or an aloof Economist writer too cool to see prostitutes as anything but "workers."

254. The Hawk in Us, the Dove in Us.

 
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Men are 76% hawk and 24% dove.  Women are 68% dove and 32% hawk.  Seventy-five years of watching human beings consider war have given me those figures.

My mother gave me an explanation of the difference: "If men had to give birth they wouldn't be so quick to kill each other."

"Hawk" and "dove" have no permanent value.  Sometimes you want the hawk in man's nature to kick in and sometimes the dove.  It all depends on what analysis of the always-complicated particulars has shown.

If the analysis comes out with a "can't win" or "can't win without prohibitive cost" or "can't win without shame," you want to release your dove enzyme.  You are a citizen in a democracy and, since war or peace will depend on the number of individual enzyme triumphs, your squirt, one way or the other, is going to count.

Can enzyme squirts be controlled?  Enough to matter, I think.  We control that enzyme that makes us lust, whatever it is.  We put off looking at dirty pictures.  We, if we are in the priesthood, take cold showers.  When it's the hawk enzyme we're trying to stay on top of we can avoid looking at displays of atrocities, newsreels full of goose-steppers, leaders' faces made to suggest Stalin or Hitler.  Those are dirty pictures.

If analysis goes the other way, go ahead and look.  You'll need that testosterone.  Your country's leaders will need it.  Say we're attacked.  "Release the testosterone!" says the President, coming out of a cabinet meeting, and his people go to work on the pictures.  In a good cause.  Properly done.  We all do our best to control the dove enzyme.

No enzyme release, dove or hawk, is proper without analysis.  What The Economist released with its editorial on Putin's vices (along with putting his grey face in a web on its cover, that dirty picture) is improper.  Putin's vices, internally practiced, are no more appropriate in an analysis of international power than the Pope's virtues.  The question is, How many divisions does he have?  And where?

And the answers here are (1), "more than enough to take over the Ukraine any time he wants to" and (2) "right there on the border, or nearby" — in any case, a lot nearer than any we can muster.  Russian military forces have come a long way since 1993, when Yeltsin settled on an internally focused National Guard of about 100,000.

If that doesn't tighten your ducts there remain the nuclear weapons.  In November, 2012, "the Federation of American Scientists estimated that Russia has approximately 1,499 deployed strategic warheads, and another 1,022 nondeployed strategic warheads and approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads."

So put away those dirty pictures, Economist.  Take a cold shower.  You can do it.  Determined Christians, Christians brought up reading Dante and Milton, have done it for centuries.  It's called "reason governing the passions."

Would you like to have an example of a man governing his passions in our day, and in the face of these very temptations?  Malcolm Fraser, former prime minister of Australia, provides it in a piece he wrote for the Guardian on March 2, advising everybody to quiet down over Russia's incursion into Crimea.

Nobody can say Fraser lacks balls.  He's the Secretary of the Army who, against rising cries, managed and stuck to the program to conscript Australian youth and send them to fight in Viet Nam.  He's the Minister of Defence who brought a government down because the prime minister was interfering with his work.

So he was sitting on top of something when Putin threatened to intervene in Ukraine. And he kept on top of it long enough to consider why Putin was threatening.  A big reason was that he thought that the U.S. had promised his predecessor, Gorbachev, that if Russia agreed to the joining of then-communist East Germany to West Germany, and make it part of the West (membership in NATO), then NATO (the West) would not "move one foot East" — into "an area of traditional Russian influence."

Fraser counts on us to fill in his hints for the main reason that Russia is concerned about its sphere of influence.  It's not that it presides over an evil empire that it longs to see grow; it's that twice it's been invaded so appallingly from the West, first by Napoleon, then by Hitler.  We Americans easily blow away sphere-of-influence thinking as obsolete in a globalized family of nations, but we live safely with oceans all around us.  As does this Australian, Fraser.

But Fraser is analyzing now, and trying to see a problem "from the other fellow's point of view" (as the principal of my elementary school put his advice to us playground fighters).  That effort leads him to see NATO, which many thought "had done its job," move eastward "to the borders of Russia."  Right where Napoleon and Hitler had started from.

Fraser concludes that the move east "was provocative, unwise and a very clear signal to Russia: we are not willing to make you a co-operative partner in the management of European or world affairs; we will exercise the power available to us and you will have to put up with it."

In other words, playground belligerence.  That "belligerence" is the right word we confirm when we see President Bush trying to put elements of the anti-ballistic missile system into Poland and the Czech Republic, claiming that they're aimed at Iran. What other word would we use if Russia tried to put missiles into Nicaragua?  (Fraser didn't ask that; a little of my own enzyme is getting mixed in here.)

Even without my additions, though, Fraser makes a strong enough case to get a good dove surge, and it might have been even stronger if he had ignored the close studies showing that the U. S. did not, in fact, make that promise to Gorbachev. Enough people believe he did, enough to give him the necessary surge.  But no, he admits that Gorbachev "almost certainly" was mistaken.  And there goes Fraser's chance to produce an orgasm for peace, and get the big credit.  But so be it.  An analysis that comes out 75-25, rather than 90-10, still calls for the right enzyme.

What an exciting fallback Fraser makes!  It makes me so glad I chose him as my example of a man governing his passions in our day. Reason, demanding fairness and accuracy, was clearly in control.

hawks and dovesMalcolm FraserPutintestosterone managementUkraine crisiswar and peace

253. The Case of the Transformed Leader

 
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I'm talking about public intellectual leadership, like that of Le Monde in Paris.  I thought the editors of The Economist were providing that for us.  When they decided to back the invasion of Iraq their spokesman, in the leading "leader" (editorial), stuck to what mattered in international relations.  Only once did he (or she) refer to Saddam Hussein's personal qualities ("violent and murderous") and not once did he refer to his behavior inside his country, like gassing his people.

Contrast that with the leading leader in the current Economist, urging more forceful action in the Ukraine.  It's all about Vladimir Putin — trying to get an "unwilling" world to see him "as he really is."  That is, basically, as a liar, a point reinforced by the picture of a sinister-looking, grey-faced Putin looking out from the middle of a spider web on the magazine's cover.

Yet theirs is not just a case against a person.  It ends with a recommendation for action.   America has been "talking tough but has done nothing new."  Then the rock-em, sock-em conclusion: "Bridge-building and resets will not persuade [Putin] to behave as a normal leader.  The West should impose tough sanctions now, pursue his corrupt friends and throw him out of every international talking shop that relies on telling the truth."

Which international, truth-reliant talking shops, we wonder, does The Economist have in mind?  The UN Security Council, with Colin Powell laying out the evidence for WMD?  The General Assembly, where Andrei Gromyko denied the shipment of offensive weapons to Cuba?  Or maybe just the world television theater, where Lyndon Johnson explained the aggression against us in the Tonkin Gulf? "

Suppose the Economist editors win on this issue.  Suppose they get the West to impose really severe sanctions.  And then, when they don't work, more severe sanctions, and more.  Isn't there a point where Putin will ask, "How much more have I got to lose if I just invade and take over the place?"  After he bites the bullet on lost trade he can do that so easily.  For this job he's got overwhelming military weight, his countrymen are behind him, and the battlefield is on his doorstep, not ours.

I see the Economist editors gathering in the office the next day.  They see that those responsible in our government face the choice of a backdown or World War III.  In any case, another gigantic mess — with the promise of worse in a renewal of the Cold War.  My guess is that somebody in that room will be conceiving the kind of blog post recently produced about the decision to support the Iraq invasion.  It's titled "Anniversary of a mass delusion," and the author, M. S., was apparently privy to the discussions at the New York Times when its editors decided to back the war.  His post, http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/03/iraq-war,  is said by The Economist  to come from "one of our blogs."

It is so full of regret.  What they had taken as justification for war is now seen to be "all a fever dream" in the minds of "otherwise intelligent men."  The author is left with a very sad conclusion:

that all of us, including those of us considered the most responsible, well-trained and serious, are entirely capable of talking ourselves into lurid fantasies; that the actions we believe constitute difficult but necessary choices may in fact be the gestures of sleepwalkers battling phantoms.

He has in mind discussions in which the thinking looks very much like the thinking of the present Economist editors.  Just as much concentration on irrelevancies (Putin's and his country's vices), just as many ideas presented in inflammatory way (Putin in a spider web on the cover).  It's not too much of a stretch to see the editors as Cold War sleepwalkers.

I think our last thoughts, though, should be on this blogger's regret.  What he's regretting is hawkishness that's different from the hawkishness in The Economist's present leader.  In its leader on Iraq The Economist reasoned its way into a position we had to call "hawkish."  In its leader on the Ukraine the Economist argued in a way we can hardly distinguish from that of the emotional hawks writing for the newspapers we once cast aside in favor of The Economist — because it was more balanced and thoughtful, more focused on the relevant.

252. How do you get the most peace with the least change in human nature?

 

The title question asks us to see the world as cynical utilitarians see it, and that's not an attractive way, but for a while let's do it, and conscientiously.  We'll have no minister, no priest, no eloquent President, no teacher bringing out the best in people, no moral rearmament, no inner transformations whatsoever.  Yet we've got to do something to end all this warring.

What we utilitarians go for is quantity, not quality.  People on one side can be as hostile, menacing, intimidating, abusive, exploitative, domineering, mean, and selfish as they can be, and on the other as cowering, intimidated, exploited, resentful, envious, grudging, mean and selfish as they can be, and both can set records for worried, tense, sleepless nights, but, as long as they are not killing each other in a big way, we are going to say they are enjoying the benefits of peace.

Since terrorists kill people only in a little way they do not deprive us of the benefits of peace.  Show-killing, gaining TV publicity, may deprive us of serenity and ease, but that only lowers the quality of the peace.  We've got to keep our eyes on the numbers.

That means not listening to people with high standards.  "You call this peace?" they ask.  They'll go to war for a better peace.

We're doing numbers so that we can compare benefits.  How does the Pax Romana fare against the Pax Mongolia?  So many Mediterranean people living without war for so many years vs. so many Asian people living without war for so many years.   Plot it, number of people against number of years, and you can see it clearly.  And measure it.  It's the area under the curve.

It's when we're most intensely suffering under war, and most aware of the great difference between low-quality peace and any kind of war, that we look most longingly at periods producing the highest scores, and inquire most carefully into how they were made.  That Pax Romana.  That Pax Mongolia.  And that long, golden peace during the Han Dynasty in China, called the Pax Sinica.  How were they brought about?

Variously, we see, but in all the variables I think we have one constant: a recognized monopoly on killing.  One person (emperor, king, ruler — the hegemon) says, "If you kill on your own I'll kill you," and the others (nobles, warlords, rivals, satraps, everybody in the region affected), believing him, refrain from killing.  You get peace in the region the same way you get peace in a nation, where the government has to have a monopoly on killing.

So, do these hegemons show us the way to a long Pax?  Not quite. Their countries could kill on their single say-so.  Our country, a democracy, has to wait for its citizens' (or their representatives') say-so.  Even in apparent autocracies rulers now have to be much more responsive to the people.

That makes our question harder but in one respect it makes it easier.  We know a lot more about our fellow citizens than we do about hegemons.  We can question them.  "What, friend, is necessary inside you for you to vote for a war?" 

It might take further questioning but, judging by my own reaction, I'd guess that the eventual, most common, answer would be, "Belief that my nation can win."  I think instinct forces that ground answer, instinct as in male lions, between whom fights (with the destructive weapons predation has built) could drain the gene pool.  They glare at each other, estimating capabilities, and one of them backs down.  You can see alley cats back down, though less often, for the same reason.  Humans may not do that but if they don't we are going to call them "foolish," the right word for people who start wars they expect to lose. 

You can see where this leads: if every nation accurately measured a potential enemy's capabilities against its own, no foolish wars would be started and the total number of wars would be reduced by subtraction of the foolish ones.  That would leave a much smaller number.  There's your utilitarian payoff.

You're not going to get that payoff, though, unless (assuming democracy) your people make that accurate measurement of capabilities.  How do you get that?  

I think there's only one way: through study, study of what gives nations military power, study of what gave them power in the past, study of what constitutes power now, study of present choices in the light of what you have found out.  Somebody has to do that.

But how do you get ordinary people to listen to people capable of this study, and act on what they say? 

There'd have to be more widespread study of history.  More citizens going to college, and there more of them taking history courses.  Until you've got an electorate able to use, realistically, what the past can teach.

That may be asking a lot, but if we're going to avoid military folly that's what it will take.  Whatever it takes, though, it will have us asking for a lesser change in human nature than if we ask people to overcome their acquisitiveness or pride or whatever else moves them to go to war.  It's always easier to change the mind — filling it with knowledge, the lessons of history — than it is to change the heart, the change utilitarians don't want to take any chances on.

Do we want to be utilitarians?  Well, do we want to pass up our best chance at a long peace?  A Pax Americana , decades, maybe centuries, with no big killing going on?  Utilitarians clearly offer it. 

What will we lose if we accept their offer? 

For one thing we will lose many chances to act in admirable, wonderful, even thrilling, ways.  As the Nazis invaded Greece the British heart said, "Help them! Help the Greeks."  The British mind said, "Folly.   Our army will be thrown into the sea."  The help was sent, and it soon became clear that the British Army was, unless the Navy responded to their calls for help with an evacuation that would cost it dearly, going to be thrown into the sea.  After the Navy had responded, and met the cost, Admiral Cunningham said, "You can rebuild a ship in three years.  It would take three hundred to rebuild a tradition." 

It's a tradition longer than that of the British navy, it's the tradition of selfless service, the tradition Birhtwold acted in when he chose to die fighting the Vikings, though the battle was lost and his leader was dead on the ground.  "By my lord's side I intend to die."

Choose what the mind tells us, choose not to risk being called a fool, and we will pass up so many chances to satisfy the heart, so many chances to be called noble and honorable.

So do we want to be utilitarians and call Cunningham and all who, out of honor or respect for tradition threw themselves into a lost cause, fools?  Do we want to call the Melians fools?   "We are not prepared, in a short moment, to give up the liberty our nation has enjoyed from its foundation for 700 years," they said, defying the Athenians, who then, as they expected, destroyed their city, killed the men, and made the women and children slaves.  How about the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, throwing themselves at machine guns?  The Spartans at Thermopylae?

There's a test for you, a good, character-revealing test.  The utilitarians will be calling all of those people fools.  Will you join in?  Or will you call the utilitarians, these people who know the best way to a long peace, will you call them fools?

251. In the Grip of Our Highest Priority

 

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi?  Get used to him, fellow Americans.  We're in the grip of our highest priority.

I know, it's pretty hard to take, a dictator telling John Kerry one day that he's on the path to progressive government and the next day letting his  kangaroo court sentence journalists to jail for doing nothing the public will be told about, but you've got to understand: this all follows logically from America's priorities, as confirmed by its Secretary of State.  It differs from other plays on those priorities only in that this dictator (I use the de-euphemized term) is a little smarter than other players and a little quicker to take advantage of them.

The priority here is the survival of Israel.  That makes us favor governments who let us exercise that priority over governments who don't, or possibly won't.  Mubarak's and el-Sisi's  governments let us; Morsi's government possibly wouldn't.  We favor the dictators over the democratically elected president because our ideals of democracy have a lower priority than our commitment to the survival of Israel.

When our number one commitment was the containment of communism we subordinated our democratic and humane ideals in the same way.  Smart dictators played this to their advantage.  They knew that, whatever our idealistic talk, we would have to stomach their abominations. 

Not that we wouldn't be allowed to relieve our indigestion from time to time.  In an Arab Spring, when pressure for democracy builds up worldwide, we, the leader, may have to expel a dictator or two, but the smart ones know that this is temporary.  The dictator, Mubarak, will be back with a new name, el-Sisi.

And the smarter he is the more he will squeeze out of us, materially and psychologically.  He will get money, he will get arms, and, maybe best of all, he will get flattering rhetoric.  The dictator will, judging by what our Secretary of State said about el-Sisi yesterday, give him "a very strong sense of his commitment" to "a re-evaluation of human rights legislation" and "re-evaluation of the judicial process" (NYT 6-23-14), or something like that.

If the dictator is exceptionally smart he will know how to play on American fear of being culturally intolerant.  When he uses the iron fist he will say, "Look at us with Egyptian eyes" and "don't apply your culture, your regimes, your development"  (NYT 6-24-14)

And he will be able to get away with that.  You know why? Because he knows how firmly we are attached to our priorities, and how rigorously, how rationally, we, in our Western way, make deductions from this one.  With that knowledge he can squeeze us to the last drop.  "Complaining are you?  Well, do you want protection in the Sinai or don't you?" He's already seen that our attachment was strong enough to bear such things when, on the occasion of his coup we refused to deny his aircraft spare parts, the action that could have defeated that coup.  He knew he had us.

I know of nothing that describes his so far successful dismissal of our ideals better than the vulgar expression used by CIA realpoliticians to dismiss idealists during the Viet Nam War.  The idealists thought we should win minds and hearts and elections first, before we used our overwhelming military force.  "When you've got 'em by the balls," said the realists, "their hearts and minds will follow."  Well, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has us by the balls of our highest priority, and unless we, unthinkably, change that priority, we might as well get used to the squeezes.

250. To Arms, America, Against the Boko Haram!

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You know my kind.  Every time our president gestures toward action abroad we start yelling, "Hold back! Hold back!"  Well, it's time to change.  With these guys who, because little girls are trying to get a Western education, kidnap them and try to sell them, with these guys I say go all out. 

Sic the CIA on them, drop SEALs on them, grind them with your boots (there, on the ground), drone them, bomb them, make grease spots of them.  Anything to get those girls back.  And if you wipe out their culture in the process it's OK with me.

That's the passion of it.  Here's the reason: you can be a hero in the world's eyes and you've got nothing to lose. The deed can be done without any of the hazards of any of the other interventions we've feared or experienced. e

First, you're not going to get bogged down.  Not in Nigeria.  It's a friendly country.  And these guys have no constituency there, not any that counts.  Nigeria is nothing like Viet Nam or Iraq or Somalia or the Balkans.

Second, you're not going to get any flak from the American people.  On Twitter they're going nuts for action already. 

Third, you're not going to get any clucks from foreign heads of state.  Their people are out-twittering the Americans.  No intelligent leader is going to go against a Twitter-tide like the one moving now.

Fourth, and best of all, you're not going to get any flak from Congressmen.  Not any that won't take down their own planes.  Say you do all the stuff the opposing party loves to show shock at, like breaking your word and putting American boots on the ground.   Weren't those troops you sent there?  Did you lie about their presence?  Or did you simply rename them, as "advisers" and "trainers"?  Did you COVER UP?

"Yes, I did.  To save the girls.  And I did it the way you have to do such things these days," admits Obama, less tersely.

Can you picture a Republican getting huffy?  "Well, I certainly wouldn't have done such things."  Can't you hear the twitter?  "What kind of naive idealists speak for this party?  Are they afraid of dirtying their hands in a good cause? Do they think saving little girls is not good?"  Republicans, Republicans, will be coming off as wimps.  Heartless wimps.  They're not going to let that happen.

Of course you have to do this with the permission of the Nigerian government.  Will you get that permission in an open and upright manner?  Will you exceed its terms?  Will you cover up your maneuvers and excesses in dealing with them?  Maybe.  But have no fear.  When he's riding a Twitter-tide a politician can do practically anything.

If you're in doubt, picture the Congressional hearing.  "Did you get clear permission from the Nigerian government to do this?"

"Well, yes and no." 

"Aha," thinks the Congressman, "we've got a cover-up." 

Let him think it.  You need think only of the birds on Twitter: "Screw permission.  Get those girls."