Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Ominous signs

UPDATE: Well, OK, that was a bit screedy. I should have left it for a morning read. Nonetheless, I will keep it posted so that, as Matt Welch once said to me, I am "reminded me of how I felt at the time."

Here's my beef: Schlesinger complains that the war debate has been left in the hands of "infantile leftists", yet he trots out all the ridiculous arguments employed by those same folks to whom he condescends. He is Michael Moore in a tweed coat with worn elbow patches. So here's a more serious critique. For those of you who prefer untempered late-night ire, skip to the original post.

1. Instead of comparing Bush to Hitler, he compares the administration to Imperial Japan. So instead of painting finger mustaches on the president's upper lip he puts him in tails with circular wire-rimmed glasses. As you can see below, I found that offensive.
   
2. He over-demonizes Ashcroft (no favorite of mine either) with the same "infantile" exaggeration that protesters use, claiming massive curtailment of civil liberties and damping of free speech even while disproving the point himself.
   
3. He conveniently avoids addressing the United Nations' ineffectiveness in dealing with Saddam for twelve years, declaring the blind "rush to war" meme of the willingly uninformed.
   
4. He attributes spurious and trivial motives to the administration with his comments on the weather, a poor substitute for oil as the magic word that explains all administration wrong-doing.
   
5. He conveniently overlooks the many polarizing military actions of prior administrations.
   
6. He invokes Cold War-style deterrence, a practice he abhorred while it achieved, in his words, "peaceful victory". Yet he offers this now Shlesinger-credited technique as the solution to a completely different problem, ignoring the facts that neither the Kuwait invasion, nor the 1993 WTC bombing, nor Iraq's WMD development program nor September 11 seem to have been deterred during a decade in which we proved that our conventional forces were as superior as our nuclear weapons. While I don't expect a game-theory essay, I would expect someone who pretends to be this sophisticated to admit that the era of asymmetrical, non-sovereign, unattributed warfare might require a few new techniques. Or he might even suggest what constitutes a credible threat if, as he did, you even opposed action in Afghanistan.
   
7. Finally, he invokes, of all people, John F. Kennedy to admonish against ill-advised idealistic military misadventures. The mind reels.
   

The last point below, which is really where the post started before the Japan analogy got me all worked up, is simply that both Desert Storm and Afghanistan seemed to go nowhere for quite some time, so I am uncertain how to think aboutt the progress of the campaign so far. I believe there is a vast and unseen military effort banging away at the very foundations of the Baathists, and we have yet to really see it unfold.

So there you are, if you prefer the drier, caffeinated, ante meridian Dreck. On the other hand, if you want to get in the mood of the original post, read this symphony of moral equivalence I cited ("braying ass") below. I have another 14-hour day ahead of me, so don't expect a reaction to any further comments soon.

Oh, and "Uncle" - you haven't really read Jane that much, have you? Perhaps my calling Schlesinger a "twit" hit you like a ....2X4? It's a weblog, friend.

*******original post*****

My co-blogger inquires about my health.

I am fine. I've been quite concerned about our progress in Iraq. You see, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has hinted that "our intervention will be swift and decisive, and that victory will come with minimal American, British and civilian Iraqi casualties", and a man with his track record has to be taken seriously....as a contra-indicator.

Schlesinger conveniently ignores and reverses several of his own stated principles in this little 'bay of digs' article.

...But let us continue to ask why our government chose to impose this war. The choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.

First, let's congratulate Schlesinger for realizing that we achieved a peaceful victory during the cold war. This is an entirely different telling from Cycles of American History, in which he lambastes Reagan for being an immoral warmonger and soon to be erased from the pages of history. It doesn't sound like a retraction, nor was it intended as such, but I'll take it.

On to his comparison - we have a more formidable military than during the cold war, and it seems not to have deterred some rather damaging action. Schlesinger has a reputation for understanding the nuances of power politics, but it has somehow escaped him that we are facing an entirely different enemy and weapons that might follow a path that erases their origins, rendering the now 'classical' deterrence employed against the Soviet Union unwieldy. That is why we "impose" a war over the minority of congress who voted against it, the minority of U.S. citizens who support it and the three European nations and sundry other non-members of the coalition of 46 countries imposing alongside us. Pardon the imposition, folks!

As for the Pearl Harbor comparison, let me address my remarks directly to the author: Arty you doddering twit! That crap is beneath you and you know it. If not, I hope you join this braying ass in moral equivalence purgatory, condemned to alternate weeks in 1937 Nanjing and a contemporary U.S. P.O.W. camp in Iraq.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Demonstrations around the planet, instead of denouncing the vicious rule of the Iraqi president, assail the United States on a daily basis.

The Bush Doctrine converts us into the world's judge, jury and executioner -- a self-appointed status that, however benign our motives, is bound to corrupt our leadership. As John Quincy Adams warned on July 4, 1821, the fundamental maxims of our policy "would insensibly change from liberty to force ... [America] might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit." Already the collateral damage to our civil liberties and constitutional rights, carried out by the religious fanatic who is our attorney general, is considerable -- and more is still to come.

Yeah, Ashcroft's initiatives make putting Japanese-Americans in camps and suspending Habeas Corpus look feeble. Ashcroft must have started detaining incoherent Episcopalians while I wasn't looking. By the way, did any of the other military adventures of the Post-War era make us "dictatress" of the world? Desert Fox? Kosovo? Vietnam? Or is there something about a Republican President that makes Arty start thinking of a dominatrix?

What drove the rush to war? Hussein has a significantly smaller military force than he had in 1990, and he has grown weaker as more weapons have been exposed and destroyed under the United Nations' inspection regime.

All four of them! What a relief.

The cause of our rush to war was so trivial as to seem idiotic. It was the weather. American troops, our masters tell us, will lose their edge in the Persian Gulf's midday sun; so we had to go to war before summer. This is a reason to rush to war? We have, after all, a professional army -- and a professional army ought not to lose its edge so quickly and easily.

Just because you say "rush" three times doesn't make it so. Twelve years is a long time, even if Saddam's mortality hasn't come into play (see below). I thought it was all about oil, but now Arty informs us it is all about the weather. Even if the premise of the weather were true, the remark about "losing its edge" is pretty awful. It clearly doesn't change the ultimate outcome, but better weather might still speed the campaign and save a few lives. Is that what Schlesinger calls an "edge"? I'll take it.

There is a base suspicion that we are going to war against Iraq because that is the only war we can win.

Arty misses the days when we went into wars we could lose. It's that Kennedy nostalgia (and "grace" - see below).

We can't win the war against Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda strikes from the shadows and disappears into them. We can't win a war against North Korea because it has nuclear weapons. Indeed, the danger from North Korea is far more clear, present and compelling than the danger from Iraq, and our different treatment of the two countries is a potent incentive for other rogue states to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

Indeed, If we can't find all potential Al Qaeda operatives in twenty different countries, we might actually have to cut off potential sources of arms - rogue states, such as Iraq and, the bigger threat (and known exporter) North Korea. Right, let's attack North Korea! No, wait, let's appease them. OK, no, go back to first paragraph - we deter them like our "peaceful victory in the Cold War". Wait..that's what we're doing now, under Bush, so it can't be right. It will "be a potent incentive to rogue states". We better rush to war. But only a "hard" war - a war we can lose, dammit!

How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate?

It sounded to me like Arty had a searching debate with himself in the last paragraph.

No war has been more extensively previewed than this one.

Previewed, but not debated. It's been in the headlines since we won in Afghanistan. The country's largest newspaper has been on a crusade to oppose it. A "searching" debate is apparently more like when you can't find your eyeglasses or remember what you said two books ago.

Despite pro forma disclaimers, President Bush's determination to go to war has been apparent from the start. Why then this absence of dialogue? Why the collapse of the Democratic Party? Why let the opposition movement fall into the hands of infantile leftists?

Maybe because a lot of reasonable people believe the President has a point here? Nah...can't be. Only Democrats have a point when they go off on missions against world opinion.

Isn't it amazing that the same guy who thinks lots of Iraq's WMD's were destroyed by inspectors (and I thought inspectors only inspected, silly me) thinks there has been no war debate. I don't know if there's an award for selective perception, but Schlesinger's in the running if there is. He could find someone using the wrong salad fork at a pie-eating contest. Or maybe, as his "rush to war" thesis suggests, he only started noticing our hostility to Iraq a few months ago.

I think the media are greatly to blame. There have been congressional efforts to jump-start a debate. Democratic Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia have delivered strong and thoughtful speeches opposing the rush to war. They have been largely ignored by the media. Some philanthropist had to pay the New York Times to print the text of Byrd's powerful Feb. 12 speech in a full-page advertisement -- a speech ignored by the media when delivered. The media have played up mass demonstrations at the expense of the reasoned case against the war.

Schlesinger doesn't get around much. Byrd's speech was all over the place. More papers and websites, perhaps, than another Schlesinger would have liked an ex-klansman's arguments to adorn. Well, one man's 'philanthropist' is another man's Richard Mellon Scaife, to coin a phrase. Most of us are still getting over indigestion from Carter's ponderous dud.

According to polls, a near majority of ill-informed Americans believes Hussein had something to do with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and resulting massacre of nearly 3,000 innocent people. Hussein is a great villain, but he had nothing to do with 9/11.

Except that his regime likely performed the identity-laundering for both 911 and 1993 WTC terrorists. And, you know, stuff like that.

Many, perhaps most, Americans believe a war against Iraq will be a blow against international terrorism. But evidence from the region indicates very plainly that it will make recruitment much easier for Al Qaeda and other murderous gangs.

Easier than what? Enough recruiting to create a 911 is too much for me. A foreign policy based on minute-to-minute Al Qaeda recruitment potential sounds like a "quagmire" to me.

What should we have done? What if opposition to war had received a fair break from the media? There are two strong arguments for the war -- that Hussein might down the road acquire nuclear weapons, and that the people of Iraq deserve liberation from his monstrous tyranny.

Unlike biological and chemical weapons, nuclear arms -- and their production facilities -- are hard to conceal. Inspection, surveillance, tapping telephone calls and espionage could check any nuclear initiative on Hussein's part. He is containable, and he is not immortal.

I'm not interested in waiting until Saddam Hussein dies of natural causes to reduce the chance of my children dying unnaturally. I do not consider biological and chemical weapons trivial in his hands. They are perfect weapons for the enemy we face now, and dictatorships like Saddam's are certainly not inherently stable.

The more powerful argument is humanitarian intervention. This comes with ill grace from an administration that includes people who showed no objections to Hussein's human rights atrocities when he was at war with Iran. But do we have a moral obligation to fight despicable tyrants everywhere?

You might also consider that in Cycles, Schlesinger claimed that "moral" military action can be justified based on "human rights, atrocities and genocide." Arguments provided with "ill grace" should be discarded, apparently. What is it with the leftist establishment "intelligentsia" these days? If they lose on logic, substance or consequences, they always go to the "style" gambit as a backup.

Hussein is unquestionably a monster. But does that mean we should forcibly remove him from power?

No, we should leave monsters in power. They are, after all, an endangered species.

"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled," Adams said in the same July 4 speech, "there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." We are now going abroad to destroy a monster. The aftermath -- how America conducts itself in Iraq and the world -- will provide the crucial test as to whether the war can be justified.

Everybody take note, Schlesinger has just come around to the morality of consequences. Don't let him deny it.

America as the world's self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? "We must face the fact," President John F. Kennedy once said, "that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient -- that we are only 6% of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."

I guess that must be why we haven't made the slightest threat of attacking Iran or North Korea.

On a more serious note, I fell ill-equipped to analyze the war thus far (The NY Times apparently does, and it is going incredibly well by their own benchmarks). Desert Fox didn't have a very coherent mission, so I wasn't sure how to evaluate it. I remember in both Desert Storm and the War to oust the Taliban that the initial news of the war was disheartening. Both times we were warned "wait 'til the troops come in", and cautioned about the success of the air campaign. Only after the final ground campaign was moving rapidly did we see how well the foundation had been laid for a victory.

While this action unfolds with boots on the ground immediately, I am sure we are missing much of the foundation-building going on right now. It is quite possible that the real action is in special operations, which are working to weaken Baghdad's ability to coordinate resistance and lay traps for our forces when they arrive. So I think the success or setbacks of this campaign will be made obvious at a later point.

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at March 23, 2003 11:20 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>