16 January 2006
An Instinct for War
An Instinct for War
may have just butted its way to front of my ‘to do’ list. This interview is a must read for every voter, if they can’t be bothered to track down the book.
War continues to rage in Iraq. President Bush recently declared that America is winning. Knowing what you do as a military historian, do you think anyone, at this point, can make this statement with certainty?
Not in my opinion. It is just too soon to tell. I can’t say that I’m particularly optimistic. There is a kind of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle operating when you go to war. You go to war for one set of reasons, and you may be deluding yourself or not. But then the war changes out from under you. And if you start off with a kind of reality deficit, you fall farther and farther behind. I’m not sure we’re keeping up with reality.
Reality has never been a part of this administration's plans. Attack, attack, attack, spin, spin, spin, we're winning, if you're not for us you're against us, repeat.
Do you think we started out realistically?
No. I think the war began with a whole lot of preconceived notions about what the future held in the Middle East. Way back in the early ’90s, Paul Wolfowitz (former deputy secretary of defense) wrote an article essentially criticizing the administration for not having gone far enough in Desert Storm. In some ways, that was a kind of a starting point, a preconception that Iraq could be a democratic bellwether in the Middle East. I think it had more to do with a set of beliefs than any sort of knowledge about Iraq. Paul Fussell, the terrific literary historian and critic, said that the precondition for understanding war is a keen sense of irony: the difference between what you expect and what you get.
Never mind that even if we get what we want, a democratic islamic republic, it has never been argued that it will be good for the United States. Going to war so people who hate us can vote freely for people that hate us would have made a better Monty Python skit than foreign policy.
I'm working on links to amazon.com, until then read the interview.
may have just butted its way to front of my ‘to do’ list. This interview is a must read for every voter, if they can’t be bothered to track down the book.War continues to rage in Iraq. President Bush recently declared that America is winning. Knowing what you do as a military historian, do you think anyone, at this point, can make this statement with certainty?
Not in my opinion. It is just too soon to tell. I can’t say that I’m particularly optimistic. There is a kind of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle operating when you go to war. You go to war for one set of reasons, and you may be deluding yourself or not. But then the war changes out from under you. And if you start off with a kind of reality deficit, you fall farther and farther behind. I’m not sure we’re keeping up with reality.
Reality has never been a part of this administration's plans. Attack, attack, attack, spin, spin, spin, we're winning, if you're not for us you're against us, repeat.
Do you think we started out realistically?
No. I think the war began with a whole lot of preconceived notions about what the future held in the Middle East. Way back in the early ’90s, Paul Wolfowitz (former deputy secretary of defense) wrote an article essentially criticizing the administration for not having gone far enough in Desert Storm. In some ways, that was a kind of a starting point, a preconception that Iraq could be a democratic bellwether in the Middle East. I think it had more to do with a set of beliefs than any sort of knowledge about Iraq. Paul Fussell, the terrific literary historian and critic, said that the precondition for understanding war is a keen sense of irony: the difference between what you expect and what you get.
Never mind that even if we get what we want, a democratic islamic republic, it has never been argued that it will be good for the United States. Going to war so people who hate us can vote freely for people that hate us would have made a better Monty Python skit than foreign policy.
I'm working on links to amazon.com, until then read the interview.
