Chaos Cannot Sustain Itself.

Jon Stewart's monolouge from September 20, 2001. His first broadcast after the disasters of September 11. I'm pretty sure I saw this when it was on, but those days were pretty weird. But it is worth watching again to remember how amidst all the sadness there was a lot of hope for a better America.

Hat tip to Democratic Underground. Stewart may come off as a clown and many will deride him as pandering to know-nothing slackers. But I think that behind all the sophomoric humor there are some very serious, very smart people who love this country very much. Sometimes one can only get away with saying the kinds of things they do about those in power if it is hidden behind a veil of "harmless, juvenile humor." He's dead serious here though.

Stewart: The view from my window used to be the Twin Towers. Now it is the Statue of Liberty.




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Now playing: Maps - "It Will Find You"
via WOXY

Whither the Nation State?

I'm beginning what no doubt will be a long but fruitful slog through The Shield of Achilles; War, Peace and the Course of History., by Phillip Bobbit. One of Bobbit's key theses is, the Nation-State -- which he defines as the democratic, capitalist, parliamentary states that arose after Napoleonic and U.S. Civil Wars -- are failing in to deliver those things on which their core grasp on legitimacy hinges, that the state will better the welfare of the nation. Around the corner, and arising to take the place of the Nation State, is the Market State which will secure legitimacy by ensuring maximization of opportunity for its citizens.

But all that comes later. First I must wade through 700 pages or so of Bobbit's detailed and fascinating history of nations, states and their phases from about the Hundred Years' War to the present.

A perspective that he brings forth is that essentially the entire 20th Century from August, 1914 to December, 1990 consisted of one-long war, which he calls...

The Long War.

The Long War consisted of the struggle between three ideologies; liberal parliamentarianism, fascism, and communism. Although the victory of liberal parliamentarianism is generally to be lauded as a step forward for civilization, these states have failed to change along with the vast changes in the geopolitical landscape post-Long War. The weakness of the victor nation states in the present, Bobbit describes:

The reason the traditional strategic calculus no longer functions is that it depends on certain assumptions about the relationship between the State and its objectives that the end of this long conflict has cast in doubt. That calculus was never intended to enable a state to choose between competing objectives; rather, that calculus depends upon the axiomatic requirement of the Sate to survive by putting its security objectives first. We are now entering a period, however, in which the survival of the State is paradoxically imperiled by such threat-based assumptions because the most powerful states don not face identifiable state-centered threats that in fact imperil their security. Having vanquished its ideological competitors the democratic, capitalist, parliamentary state no longer faces great-power threats, threats that would enable it to configure its forces by providing a template inferred from the capabilities of the adversary state. Instead, the parliamentary state manifests vulnerabilities that arise from a weakening of its own legitimacy. This constitutional doubt is only exacerbated by the strategic confusion abroad for which it is chiefly responsible. So the alliance of parliamentary great powers, having won their historic triumph, find themselves weaker than ever, constantly undermining their own authority at home by their inability to use their influence effectively abroad.

This weakening of authority and legitimacy is can be seen externally in the sorts of 4th Generation War effects being used by anti-coalition forces in Iraq, as well as the big-picture issues that the great-powers seem unable to contain, from Iran to a rising and newly feisty proto-oligarchy (or Market-State?) in Russia.

The consensus of the reviews of the book is that Bobbit is somewhat less than clear on what a Market State might look like -- understandable as one does not yet exist -- and this provides an unsatisfactory payoff for the long slog through... well like the title says, the Course of History.

More anon.

Study War Some More

Brad DeLong on the value of military history:

The highly intelligent David Bell gets his arrow into the target, but nowhere near the center. He writes:

Open University: The founders of [the modern social sciences]... believed that warfare was something fundamentally irrational and primitive that would disappear.... War was simply not something whose processes could be usefully elucidated....

As long as history remained as much an art as a science... it was not really affected.... The great nineteenth century historians--Michelet, Macaulay, Parkman, Ranke--all gave pride of place to war, and did a great deal of what would now be described as "operational" military history. But when historians embraced the social sciences... they took on the social sciences' assumptions and interests, and therefore turned away in large part from military questions....

Now, we can deplore all of this, and we should--the great narrative historians had a much better sense of the fundamental importance of military history than we do. But we can't simply ignore it. The fact is that "operational" military history remains separated by a large gulf from... our most important intellectual traditions in the social sciences and humanities, and to the questions.... On the whole, it tends to be more technical, less open to interdisciplinary dialogue, and less self-aware than most other areas of history. As Sir John Keegan, who is a very very good military historian, once complained: "Not even the beginnings of an attempt have been made by military historians to plot the intellectual landmarks and boundaries of their own field of operations." This is not a statement that could possibly be made about cultural history, social history, economic history or political history....

In short, yes, this is a question of liberalism. But the "liberals" who are really to blame here are not the familiar American "tenured radicals" whom the National Review so loves to hate. They are named Montesquieu, Condorcet, Benjamin Constant and Karl Marx.

Three points here:

First, simply no, there should not be more "operational" military history. "Operational" military history of the style beloved of the National Review tells us relatively little about war. If you want to know about the American Civil War, you need to hear something like this:

Not even the deep South was strongly for secession. Those voting for delegates to Georgia's secession convention, for example, were almost evenly split--and you can bet that the African-Americans who did not get to vote for delegates were overwhelmingly against secession. Because there was no Southern consensus for secession, Lincoln was able to hold the border--Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee--by making it a war for the Union. And the war began with a Confederacy of 5 million whites (and 4 million African-Americans) and a Union of 21 million whites (and 1 million African-Americans).

The Union mobilized 2.6 million soldiers--24% of its total male population. The Confederacy mobilized 900 thousand soldiers--36% of its white male population. Armies would march down secured railroad lines or navigable waterways until they ran into other armies. Because they could not function far from railhead or water-based supply depots, strategic outflanking moves were rare. When armies clashed, casualties were horrendous, but decisive victories impossible. The rifled musket was too good in defense, and the large size of the armies made them too clumsy in pursuit.

The result was that the armies fought, and soldiers died in battle, afterwards of wounds, and in camp of disease. By April 1865 300,000 Union soldiers were dead, 300,000 more were disabled by wounds, about 200,000 had deserted and returned home, and 400,000 had been discharged--leaving 1.4 million with the colors. By April 1865 300,000 Confederates were dead, 300,000 more were disabled by wounds, and 300,000 had deserted or returned home--leaving next to nobody with the colors to surrender to Grant and Sherman. The war was then over.

That's the history of the American Civil War wie es eigentlich gewesen. That's not the history you get by reading "operational" military historians like Shelby Foote or Bruce Catton. They do what they do excellently, but it is a distorted vision of the war.

Second, the current state of military history looks, to me, extremely good. I think that better military history is being written now than ever before. Why, from where I am sitting right now I can see six excellent recent books of military history: Robert Citino's The German Way of War, David Glantz and Jonathan House's When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army, Gordon and Trainor's Cobra II, Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites, and Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain. It is much easier to get an education in military history than ever before.

That's the past history of warfare. To study the future of war, go here

The Lost World: Israel, Palestine and Lebanon Pre WWII

http://community.livejournal.com/vintagephoto/656051.html

Amazing photos! Check out the zepplin over Jerusalem! How about those modernist/Bauhaus buildings in Tel-Aviv and Haifa? T.E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill. The beautiful seaside of 1930 Beirut and the Buick dealership in Jerusalem.

Chamberlain Bush Churchill and Gore

Sounds like a white shoe legal firm.

Due to a lack of any recent fiction works which have captured my interest I've been wending my way through some history books lately. From William Manchester's great Churchill biography, The Last Lion; Alone 1932-1940 comes this passage on p. 470

The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so, once it has become the past, succeed only in making it seem implausible. Among the perceptive observations and shrewd conclusions of the Churchills and Sargents were clutters of other reports and forecasts, completely at odds with them. All of it, the prescient and the cockeyed, always arrives in a promiscuous rush, and most men in power, sorting through it, belive what they want to belive, accepting whatever justifies their policies and convictions while taking out insurance, whenever possible against the possibility that the truth may lie in their wastebaskets.

Neville Chamberlain required a very large wastebasket...

It is merely coincidence that just a couple of weeks ago I referenced a post by Billmon which deconstructed the argument of those few remaining in the Administration's Amen Corner that punting or playing for time on the issue of Iranian nuclear research would be equivalent to Chamberlains's doe-eyed sellout of the Czechs to der Furher. We all know that George Bush requires a very large wastebasket as well. But, the above passage and, well the entire first five hundred pages or so of Alone are a treatise on two themes.

One, that no matter what evidence to the contrary, most people in uncertain times will continue to believe that the good times will go on right up until the moment where the good times literally die in flames before their eyes. Would that our generation had a Churchill; an elder statesman, currently in disgrace for poor judgement, who would nevertheless continue to eloquently condemn the current government's folly and sound the alarm for action.

I look now... no I issue a call to Al Gore to step into the role of Churchill. I will leave it to the reader to decide if this is a sign of my (and no few others') desperation or if this is another case history's ability to rhyme. Nonetheless, mark my words, he once derided as Ozone Man will yet have a part to play in history's great drama whether he will it or not.

Two, that the Bush Administration does not hold the all-time record for folly, stupidity and obstinate obedience to cherished -- and tragically wrong -- world views. Yet.

America has had its share of dismal presidential failures; men whose lack of courage and perverse vision of how the world works resulted in pain, desperation and death for thousands: Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover. But these men live on in infamy almost solely in American minds and in darn few of those. However, mention the name Neville Chamberlain to almost any reasonably educated person in the world and you will instantly receive a look of recognition. Chamberlain's name is synonymous with idiocy and selling upwards of 30 million people down the road to hell in the name of political expediency and faith-based reasoning.

We can only hope that for future generations, the name of Bush remains a slur that is recognizable chiefly to Americans as a member of a sadly lengthy list of electoral mistakes; of disasters narrowly avoided or eventually overcome at great cost mostly to ourselves. But he is making his break for the Big Time -- surely his name will ring through the ages in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, as he gins up a crisis in Iran and closes his eyes to the state of the worlds energy markets and climate he stands on the cusp of overtaking the seemingly invincible Chamberlain for the title of The Worst Idiot In History.

Al Gore may not be the Churchill figure (okay, Last Jedi, if you insist). But we desperately need SOMEONE to fill that role, to speak out with bona fide courage from a position of authority and put themselves in the wings awaiting Bush's evenutal fall. Perhaps, to be a Churchillian figure one must first be in the wilderness, which is why I logically gravitate to Gore as opposed to say, Russ Feingold.

But need him or her we do. Churchill was not able to prevent Chamberlains's folly, but without him the world probably have entered a long and dark age. We have a choice to make in November of this year that may yet keep the name of Bush a (mostly) American slur. Let us hope that we make the right choice so that our apparent lack of (rhymes with) Churchill does not plunge us into a long, dark age.

The Eternal Struggle Pt. 1

No, I'm not talking about God vs. Satan. You should know me better than that. I'm referring to a much more secular topic, the struggle between individual liberty and totalitarianism. Lately I've been enchanted by the unusually clear-eyed, libertarian-tinged, liberalism of David Brin as he methodically demolishes Neoconservativisim and all its works.

Brin's key thesis is that we have emerged from the (somewhat false) Hegelian Left vs. Right world of the Cold War but have failed to realize one key thing. Just as in most post-dictatorial states, age-old conflicts once kept under control by the jackbooted heel of the dictator instantly resurface as virulent as ever; so too has that age-old struggle between those who would declare they know what is best for the masses and those who would put the state under the control of the people.

The essential problem for those of us on the progressive end of things is that we and most of the public have not successfully adjusted to this shift back to the default state of politics. However, the Neocons never left it and successfully use the old left-right rhetoric to keep progressives on the defensive while continually edging themselves forward.

More soon. But for now...

EXHIBIT #1 THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE
From a post over at Brad Delong, an excerpt from the end of C.V. Wedgewood's William the Silent, a biography of William of Nausau, Prince of Orange, 1533-1584, proof that it was ever thus.

The work to which [William] had devoted his life, and for which he had died, was never to be accomplished. The Netherlands, as he had known them, were never to be one nation. The struggle for their liberation had transmuted the past and destroyed the possibility of its revival. What he had done was to create a new State, the United Provinces of the coming century, the 'Holland' of the future. Even though it fell short of what he had wanted, his achievement was very great. For it was a hard and desperate task, to restore the self-respect and freedom of a people borne down by apparently inescapable doom, to fight a great power with such small instruments, and to fight it for five years without hope and alone.

It was a strange, almost a unique, thing to be the idol of a nation and remain uncorrupted, to be yourself the guardian of the people's rights sometimes against the emotional impulse of the people themselves. In times of emergency and war, in political crisis and national danger it is often expedient to sacrifice the forms--even the spirit--of popular government. Was not this one of the chief reasons why popular governments [have] withered in so many lands during this stormy [twentieth] century?

There lies his greatest claim to recognition: he sought not to impose his own will on the embryo nation, but to let the nation create and form itself. He belonged in spirit to an earlier, a more generous and more cultured age than this [late sixteenth century] of narrowness and authority, and thin, sectarian hatred. But he belongs also to a later age; his deep and genuine interest in the people he ruled, his faith in their development, his toleration, his convinced belief in government by consent--all these reach out from the mediaeval world towards a wider time.

Few statesmen in any period, none in his own, cared so deeply for the ordinary comfort and the trivial happiness of the thousands of individuals who are 'the people'. He neither idealized nor overestimated them and he knew they were often wrong, for what political education had they yet had? But he believed in them, not merely as a theoretical concept, but a individuals, as men. Therein lay the secret of the profound and enduring love between him and them. Wise, wary, slow to judge and slow to act, patient, stubborn, and undiscouraged, no other man could have sustained so difficult a cause for so long, could have opposed with so little sacrifice of public right, the concentrated power of a government that disregarded it. He respected in all men what he wished to have respected in himself, the right to an opinion.

There have been politicians more successful, or more subtle; there have been none more tenacious or more tolerant. 'The wisest, gentlest and bravest man who ever led a nation', he is one of that small band of statesmen whose service to humanity is greater than their service to their time or their people. In spite of the differences of speech or political theory, the conventions and complexities which make one age incomprehensible to another, some men have a quality of greatness which gives their lives universal significance. Such men, in whatever walk of life, in whatever chapter of fame, mystic or saint, scientist or doctor, poet or philosopher, and even--but how rarely--soldier or statesman, exist to shame the cynic, and to renew the faith of humanity in itself.

Of this number was William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, called the Silent.