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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (42200)	9/5/2002 3:05:34 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

You are stuck with playing "Alan Alda" . . . My neighbor. Part of the year.

To: LindyBill who wrote (42200)	9/5/2002 3:46:20 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

A bit about books. 1. A page turner, Kate Wilhelm, Desperate Measures. Courtroom drama, written to keep you reading. Lost most of a night because I couldn't stop. 2. Eliot Cohen's book about civilian-military issues. I read it and recommend it only to folk who genuinely care about such issues or know enough to read it critically, since he manages to ignore opposing arguments throughout the text. The overall argument is sufficiently conventional, at least to my untrained thought processes, to be unobjectionable. The present theory of the relations between civilians and the military, Cohen calls it the "normal theory" is wrong. The normal theory is GHWB's (Bush I's) theory of the Gulf War. Set the goals, pick the generals, let them run the war. Cohen attacks that position in several ways. a. "State of the art" argument. Cohen argues that if you look at civilian leaders who were successful wartime leaders (he uses Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben Gurion), they not only did not keep their distance, they were involved down to the level of procurement. b. "But it doesn't take genuises to do this" argument. He tackles this obvious rejoinder by arguing, on both prudential and principled grounds, that, in all cases, it's best for the civilian leadership to get very messy in terms of reaching down. Democracy requires: a political culture makes better political decisions than a military culture and a war is suprisingly political thru and thru (Clausewitz is quote frequently, as one might guess); the problem, this will surprise anyone, with the Vietnam War was that the civilian leadership did not involve itself enough rather than the opposite--interesting argument here; the problem with the Gulf War was Colin Powell blunted Dick Cheney to diminish the role of the air force and, with the help of Schwartskopf, to end the war before the US went into Baghdad (again, not enough civilian leadership). One of the problems with the book is that it's two different not quite books. I had the feeling Cohen wrote some interesting articles, the last part of the book, which friends suggested he combine them with some more readable material for the general public. So he chose the material on Lincoln, et al. As for those chapters, the Lincoln material was interesting, the others much less so. Either that was the case because I know enough about the history of Lincoln's involvement in the civil war to have a conversation with Cohen but did not on the others; or, and this is more likely, Cohen knew his Lincoln material much better so could write clearer and livelier. Without the repitition that also marred some chapters. Again, if you like to worry about these issues, you might wish to skimit before reading it carefully; if you don't this is not the book that will convince you to worry about them. Finally, the only way, it seems to me, to argue with his thesis is to attack the Clausewitzian framework, that war is simply the continuation of politics with different means. And to argue, as much ethics and theology does, that war is such a disruption of life, it is not politics; it is something that requires it's own justifications and procedures. I have no idea how to make such an argument but it might be embedded in just war theory. 3. Have started rereading Giles Kepel's Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Rereading Michael Doran's piece from Foreign Affairs last week convinced me that I now knew enough to read this kind of material with a bit more depth than previously and thus learn more. Just started but Kepel reads much better second time around.