Tuesday, July 3, 2007

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Dead men tell no tales

While we're on the subject of historical analogies, it's worth reading a posthumous Vanity Fair essay by David Halberstam on George W. Bush's flawed view of history. First, there's this lovely paragraph on the difficulties of historical generalization:

[W]hen I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty—take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army.
The ralpunch comes in the closing paragraphs, however, where Halberstam identifies a key mispeception about the end of the Cold War that badly warped post-9/11 thinking about foreign policy:
I have my own sense that this is what went wrong in the current administration, not just in the immediate miscalculation of Iraq but in the larger sense of misreading the historical moment we now live in. It is that the president and the men around him—most particularly the vice president—simply misunderstood what the collapse of the Soviet empire meant for America in national-security terms. Rumsfeld and Cheney are genuine triumphalists. Steeped in the culture of the Cold War and the benefits it always presented to their side in domestic political terms, they genuinely believed that we were infinitely more powerful as a nation throughout the world once the Soviet empire collapsed. Which we both were and very much were not. Certainly, the great obsessive struggle with the threat of a comparable superpower was removed, but that threat had probably been in decline in real terms for well more than 30 years, after the high-water mark of the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962. During the 80s, as advanced computer technology became increasingly important in defense apparatuses, and as the failures in the Russian economy had greater impact on that country's military capacity, the gap between us and the Soviets dramatically and continuously widened. The Soviets had become, at the end, as West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt liked to say, Upper Volta with missiles.

At the time of the collapse of Communism, I thought there was far too much talk in America about how we had won the Cold War, rather than about how the Soviet Union, whose economy never worked, simply had imploded....

After the Soviet Union fell, we were at once more powerful and, curiously, less so, because our military might was less applicable against the new, very different kind of threat that now existed in the world. Yet we stayed with the norms of the Cold War long after any genuine threat from it had receded, in no small part because our domestic politics were still keyed to it. At the same time, the checks and balances imposed on us by the Cold War were gone, the restraints fewer, and the temptations to misuse our power greater. What we neglected to consider was a warning from those who had gone before us—that there was, at moments like this, a historic temptation for nations to overreach.

America remains the most powerful country in the world, but Halberstam's prose encapsulates the inherent limitations that even hegemons face in the modern world.

posted by Dan on 07.03.07 at 01:03 PM




Comments:

Yikes! This passage is vapid and basically incorrect.

The Soviet Union imploded because its economy was decaying AND because we contained, pressured, and arms-raced it into the ground. No one but Reagan (including me) thought the Evil Empire could collapse as quickly as it did. The Democrats insisted that we had to accommodate Soviet interests for the indefinite future. They saw talk of victory as immature and unrealistic.

As for the US position after the fall of the USSR, of course it was immeasurably stronger than it had been before. The interesting question was what to do with this new margin of superiority. For a decade, we sought a "peace dividend" and cut back on the size of our military forces (although thankfully not on their average quality). That looked like a reasonable course of action at the time, even though events later proved differently.

Halberstam promotes a persistent confusion that the age-old strategies of guerrilla and partisan warfare (and terrorism) are some kind of revolutionary recipe that gives superiority over hidebound conventional forces. He is still trapped in his misunderstanding of the Vietnam War. The actual arm of decision there was massed North Vietnamese conventional armor and artillery. Except in the salons of Washington and New York, the guerrilla war was a total bust for the Communists.

Only militarily superior nations get the opportunity to fight counterinsurgency wars. No one would go through the awful pain and difficulty of mounting an insurgency if there were any way to win conventionally. So it is not a matter of military might being "less applicable against the new, very different kind of threat that now existed in the world." It is a matter of our military might being so applicable that opponents are forced to use vastly inferior means of contesting us.

The huge mistake we made with respect to bin Laden and company (and I include myself in that "we") was thinking that terrorism was best confronted within the framework of civilian law enforcement, thereby denying the terrorists the status of political actors in favor of treating them as common criminals. That view underestimated the provocative effect of our weak, non-retaliatoriatory, non-preventive posture, and got us embroiled in a conflict that could have been avoided with swifter, tougher measures..

 posted by: srp on 07.03.07 at 01:03 PM [permalink]

Mmmmm, elaborate fantasy. Must be nice, srp.

 posted by: ted on 07.03.07 at 01:03 PM [permalink]

Wow, srp is smoking something strong. Nobody can predict the future but here is my opinion.
The US is like an exploding supernova, rushing out in its military might with a collapsing central core, headed for the ash heap of history. Nothing corrupts like power and the idea that one is the head of the most powerful and most advanced nation in the world is very corrupting. The process did not begin with George W. Bush. It began much earlier with the idea that we, the US, had the right to topple other governments. Was Mr. Mossadegh a threat to the US? Of course not, but he was a threat to the Anglo-Iranian oil company. Yes, it was heady for the CIA, toppling the government in Iran and putting the Shah on the throne. Few Americans minded- after all, aren’t we a superior race?

The process is autocatalytic, spending more and more money on the military, generating more and more enemies; constantly expanding Presidential power- the last 3 Presidents seriously abused the Presidential pardon power. Why would the next President behave differently? Our Congress is a dead letter, devoted only to keeping themselves in office. If we were a corporation, intelligent investors would be selling our stock.

When does the collapse come?
When the average American realizes that his/her earning power, pension prospects etc are less good than her parents’ at the same age. When the average America begins to see that the rule of law is just crap. When the average American sees that the hatred of minorities, immigrants etc. is destroying us. That day will come, but I don’t know when. I think that there is one chance in 4 that war criminal Bush will attack Iran. I dislike the Iranian government, but that is about the stupidest thing that the US could do, to grab another tar baby when we are stuck on the Iraq tar baby. However, quite a few members of Congress would support it.

The Constitution is an obsolete and deeply flawed instrument. Belief in the Constitution is like belief in four leaf clovers and heaven and hell.

 posted by: bobsnodgrass on 07.03.07 at 01:03 PM [permalink]

Wow, srp is smoking something strong. Nobody can predict the future but here is my opinion.
The US is like an exploding supernova, rushing out in its military might with a collapsing central core, headed for the ash heap of history. Nothing corrupts like power and the idea that one is the head of the most powerful and most advanced nation in the world is very corrupting. The process did not begin with George W. Bush. It began much earlier with the idea that we, the US, had the right to topple other governments. Was Mr. Mossadegh a threat to the US? Of course not, but he was a threat to the Anglo-Iranian oil company. Yes, it was heady for the CIA, toppling the government in Iran and putting the Shah on the throne. Few Americans minded- after all, aren’t we a superior race?

The process is autocatalytic, spending more and more money on the military, generating more and more enemies; constantly expanding Presidential power- the last 3 Presidents seriously abused the Presidential pardon power. Why would the next President behave differently? Our Congress is a dead letter, devoted only to keeping themselves in office. If we were a corporation, intelligent investors would be selling our stock.

When does the collapse come?
When the average American realizes that his/her earning power, pension prospects etc are less good than her parents’ at the same age. When the average America begins to see that the rule of law is just crap. When the average American sees that the hatred of minorities, immigrants etc. is destroying us. That day will come, but I don’t know when. I think that there is one chance in 4 that war criminal Bush will attack Iran. I dislike the Iranian government, but that is about the stupidest thing that the US could do, to grab another tar baby when we are stuck on the Iraq tar baby. However, quite a few members of Congress would support it.

The Constitution is an obsolete and deeply flawed instrument. Belief in the Constitution is like belief in four leaf clovers and heaven and hell.

 posted by: bobsnodgrass on 07.03.07 at 01:03 PM [permalink]

[W]hen I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence.


Yikes! This passage is vapid and basically incorrect.

The Soviet Union imploded because its economy was decaying AND because we contained, pressured, and arms-raced it into the ground.

Clearly, you don't know your history very well. You recite it sweepingly and with complete confidence.

 posted by: J Thomas on 07.03.07 at 01:03 PM [permalink]

C'mon, Bob Snodgrass, you can do better than that. Mossadegh and Iran, the beginning of the collapse? What about the Phillipines and Cuba? What about Nicaragua and Haiti? Clearly, the U.S. has been in the throes of collapse for over a century, and only a complete ignoramus would be fooled by the superficial triumphs in World War II and the Cold War. Every real student of history, like you and Halberstam, knows that the final collapse could come any minute, as soon as people like me realize that our indoor plumbing doesn't work as well as great-grandpa's outhouse worked in 1898, or that my 401(k) isn't as safe as grandpa's railroad bonds in 1930, or that CDOs are insanely speculative compared to the "nifty fifty" of the 1960s, or something.

 posted by: y81 on 07.03.07 at 01:03 PM [permalink]


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