The Committee of Public Safety

The first principle Walter McDougall proposes as part of his “Old Testament” of American foreign affairs in his 1997 book Promised Land, Crusader State is that of “Liberty, or Exceptionalism (so called)”. McDougall (and others) have argued that the War for American Independence was fundamentally conservative, especially when compared and contrasted with the revolutions that followed in France, Latin America, Russia, and elsewhere in the Great Wide World outside the United States. As a conservative revolution, the American Revolution was primarily a war of defense fought to preserve the century old Whiggish institutions and mores then existing in the Thirteen Colonies from the dangerous constitutional innovations of King George’s Tories, innovations that would lead to the Second, more illiberal, British Empire of the nineteenth century.

This radical defense against the encroachments of the King in Parliament was conceived in the fevered imagination of America’s Lenin, Samuel Adams, years before it became politically palatable to the Colonies or their leaders. There was a real danger of British oligarchic encroachment on colonial affairs. The Parliament of George III was less representative of the English (and Scottish) populations than the Parliaments that battled King Charles the Headless and his constitutional innovations 14o years before. In fact the earlier battles of the English Civil War were themselves a conservative revolt against a King intent on governmental innovations that would destroy existing English institutions and liberties. Both the English and American revolutions threw up their share of crusading radicals who wanted to make the world anew under a Leveling wind but in both cases the Establishment kept the crazies from taking the entire endeavor over the edge and into a Jacobin abyss.

The Founding Fathers were looking backwards at the English Civil War; the resulting dictatorship of Cromwell, his major generals, and his standing New Model Army; the Restoration of the Stuarts through the intrigues of General Monck; the attempt to subvert Parliament again in the interests of Stuart autocracy, French pretensions, and Popish plots; the Dutch Invasion of 1688 and William of Orange’s coup against his uncle/father-in-law James II, the menacing corruption of Sir Robert Walpole, and the pretensions of George “Be King” Hanover III, Defender of the Faith. Benedict Arnold, looking backwards, conceived of himself as the second coming of George Monck, rounding up the crazies of the New New Model Army, with Washington as the new (inconveniently alive) Cromwell, and restoring King and Colonies to their proper harmony. George Washington, looking backwards, played the role of the anti-Cromwell, the anti-Monck, and, even further back, the anti-Caesar. Due to myriad socio-political factors and the will of Almighty God, the liberty of white Protestant males had been miraculously preserved in the Colonies and, darn it all, Americans were going to keep it that way.

McDougall argues that American foreign policy from the earliest days of the First Continental Congress to the disastrous regime of Thomas Woodrow Wilson (may he burn in hell) was based on this simple formula:

American Exceptionalism as our founders conceived it was defined by what America was, at home. Foreign policy existed to defend, not define what America was. In given circumstances all sots of tactics might be expedient save only one that defeated its purpose by eroding domestic unity and liberty.

This creed was famously summed up in a Fourth of July speech delivered by John Quincy Adams in 1821:

If the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.

America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.

She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.

She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.

She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…. [America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

McDougall argues that the fundamental worldview of the Founders was Manichean: the world was divided into a House of Peace and a House of War:

So what did American Exceptionalism mean wben it came to foreign policy? That the United States would make no alliances, fight no wars, spurn all intrigue? Of course not. If anything, America’s vulnerability from 1776 to 1820 only proved the timeless wisdom of the Roman motto Si vis pacem pare bellum (If you desire peace, prepare for war), and you will find that dictum in the writings of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Jay, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, James Gadsen, and Richard Henry Lee. Did American Exceptionalism mean that the Founding Fathers embraced none but idealistic ends sought by scrupulous means? Jefferson might have wished it were so. but in the end even he bowed to reality in defense of the national interest.

Inside the House of Peace, McDougall asserts, the man in power must walk softly to preserve the liberty and unity that already exist at home. Outside, in the House of War, a state of nature among nations that is red in tooth and claw and follows only the law of the jungle, all means are on the table except those that threaten liberty at home. American liberty is a gift from God for its citizens to treasure and exercise at home. It is not a spear for our enemies to impale us upon or a rope to go hang ourselves with while abroad.

I’m a big fan of historian Walter McDougall. In my opinion, McDougall is in the midst of writing the best series of histories about these United States. The two volumes he has completed thus far are Freedom Just Around the Corner : A New American History: 1585-1828 and Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877. Since he is a generalist dipping into many far-flung domains, devotees of a particular area of focus may be appalled by his conclusions within their chosen bailiwick. As a Mormon, for example, I’d quibble with his portrayal of Joseph Smith, the founder of my faith. However, his treatment is more nuanced than other portraits I’ve encountered. In balance, his judgments are usually sound and balanced, and he’s not afraid to offer them.

Another McDougall book that throws some interesting light onto recent discussions in the stratesphere over American grand strategy is Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, published back in 1997 but still relevant. Following an approach that reminded me of Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, McDougall identifies two main themes in United States’s relationship with the outside world. Both are referenced in the title of his book: the Promised Land and the Crusader State. The Promised Land theme refers to the earliest tradition in American foreign policy that focused on preserving American liberty from threats abroad, especially those which, by the domestic response they triggered, could lead to internal corruption, despotism, and division at home. The Crusader State theme covers a later foreign policy tradition where America went abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The first tradition was the dominant influence for most of the nineteenth century and the second dominated the twentieth and into the twenty-first. McDougall refines these two themes into further subdivisions, identifying four sub-themes under the Promised Land theme and four under the Crusader State theme.

McDougall, with a strong awareness of the impact of religion on American history that shows up in this and many of his other works, relabels the two traditions as the “Old Testament” and “New Testament” of American foreign policy:

Our Old Testament:

1. Liberty, or Exceptionalism (so called)
2. Unilateralism, or Isolationism (so called)
3. The American System, or Monroe Doctrine (so called)
4. Expansionism, or Manifest Destiny (so called)

Our New Testament:

1. Progressive Imperialism
2. Wilsonianism, or Liberal Internationalism (so called)
3. Containment
4. Global Meliorism

More later…

• Know when to hold them.
• Know when to fold them.
• Know when to walk away.
• Know when to run.
• Never count your money when you’re sitting at the table. There will be time enough for counting when the dealings done.
• The secret to surviving is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep. Because every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

Roasted Chicken is a Quagmire Anyway

(via Isegoria) Porphyrogenitus had this interesting post On Asymmetric Warfare: The Sources of Insurgent Power:

If war is diplomacy by other means, asymmetric warfare is politics by other means. We’re told that the Western Alliance is in danger of losing in Afghanistan, an alliance that represents the most advanced states of the world, consisting of three quarters of a billion people and over half of global GDP, fighting in a country of 25 million people. While reliable data is hard to come by, I believe that at least a plurality of that country’s population would prefer to see the Alliance’s foe, the Taliban/insurgents defeated, rather than see them return to power.

Why is this absurdity, the possibility of the alliance’s defeat, not only considered possible, but actually likely? If we assume that the leaders of the Taliban are rational actors, why have they always held the belief in their ultimate victory?

Let me first assert that, as it is commonly understood, “Asymmetric Warfare” is a fallacy. If you have two forces, and the one whose power appears insignificant compared to that of its opponent, and yet is considered the likely victor, then you are only seeing a fraction of its real power. Like an iceberg, you see only the tip, but the rest is invisible under the veil of the sea.

Only when this Camouflage is drained away, and the whole is visible, can you see why the apparently weaker party not only has a chance of defeating the materially stronger, but is considered the likely winner among those who shape conventional wisdom even in the homelands of its opponents (in this case, the Western Alliance). The ostensible power of the Western Alliance’s military forces is obvious, because it is primarily material and direct. The power of the insurgents are primarily political/propagandistic and indirect, consisting largely of the ability to manipulate mindsets, rather than battlefield outcomes.

To examine how this works I’ll make another unoriginal observation, but one at odds with conventional wisdom. The drafters of Geneva Conventions a century ago and those who described international law during that same time were decent men (they were all men) who wanted to make an inherently inhumane activity, warfare, more humane, less brutal and bloody. The fact that the century of warfare that followed was the bloodiest in human history is not their fault. They were indeed intelligent men, no less intelligent than the men and women responsible for interpreting the Geneva Conventions and “international law” today. The gentlemen of a century ago knew that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

Therefore, in order to de-incentivize certain forms of warfare, they did not extend the protections of international law given to lawful combatants to insurgents, terrorists, and the like. The Geneva Conventions did not cover those who did not themselves follow them. In that era, it was accepted as a given that it was necessary to give such persons less protection, to deter people from engaging in activities that would make conflict less clear, and thus more destructive and more prolonged. Thus the Geneva Conventions, for example, declared that such combatants could be shot when captured.

It’s not controversial, but simply factual, to observe that today insurgents are extended more rights than lawful, uniformed enemy soldiers would be, and that the argument is whether or not to extend them even more. Most of the Alliance’s members send small forces to Afghanistan and compel them to operate under such restrictive rules of engagement that they are militarily useless, and indeed would be hostile to fortune if deployed in a combat zone, so they are kept out of harms way. Even those members whose forces are used in combat (primarily Anglosphere nations and the Netherlands) operate under rules so increasingly constrained as to nearly, but not quite, tie their hands with an ever-tightening cobra. The enemy’s propaganda complaints of collateral damage are listened to, and thus they are encouraged to use that as one of their main weapons in the conflict to thwart the Alliance.

We are told we need to accept these constraints, less we lose the “hearts and minds” of the local population. But the enemy quite clearly does not have to operate this way. The intimidation tactics and outright brutality which insurgents use to cow the population is also one of their weapons. Why? Because the “hearts and minds” strategy concentrates mainly on the hearts of those sympathetic to the enemy, their collaborators, and not on the minds of those who oppose them or are otherwise innocent, simply wanting a better life than the Taliban offers, but afraid they’ll be left to die or otherwise suffer when we pack up and abandon the area, after concluding that our efforts are futile or even counter-productively “alienating people”. This mindset involves listening primarily to the complaints of those sympathetic to the insurgents, rather than those who would be our natural allies. Again, mercy to the guilty becoming cruelty to the innocent.

Highly constrained rules of engagement that limit the effectiveness of the Alliances armed forces also serve to prove the point of those who shape conventional wisdom, who always assert that military force is not effective. This is not to say we should be bloody-minded and be indiscriminate. Indeed, the Armed Forces of the West are the most discriminate forces in human history. But warfare is warfare. A deranged mind might conclude therefore that these rules exist to prove the point of those shaping conventional wisdom, who are also the ones prodding for ever more restraint, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The conventional wisdom suggests that an insurgency cannot be militarily defeated, and yet the historical facts belie this. Insurgencies have been defeated militarily: The Philippines, the Malay Insurgency, among others. Even Vietnam: It’s no longer even controversial, outside of direct discussions of insurgent warfare in the arena of conventional wisdom, to acknowledge that, after Tet, the Viet Cong ceased to be a viable force, and that the North conquered the south in a classic armored offensive of tank columns and regular troops, rather than any sort of indigenous insurgency in the South. But the converse view is still prevalent in the conventional wisdom on the subject of guerrilla warfare, not because of its historical accuracy, but because of its political utility in present-day policy controversies in the West.

Defeating insurgents requires a combination of strictness, firm rules on the enemy and their sympathizers, not just our own forces, and employment of local troops under western officers, something done in a coy way during the Anbar Awakening (when we paid local militias, thus gaining some influence) as a means of discipline. “Advisor” programs, where Western soldiers mentor local counterparts, are another way of reproducing this in a coy way.

Why it is in the interest of the Western Alliance to enact policies that have the practice not only of tying the hands of their own armed forces, making them less effective, but in practice making warfare less humane on the whole by incentivizing a pattern of warfare by its opponents based on practices that the original drafters of the Geneva Conventions and international law did their best to deincentivize, because of its bloody results, becomes a key question. But a controversial one indeed.

This has to do with conflicts internal to the West itself, as one faction uses its own ability to manipulate procedural outcomes and guide conventional wisdom in order to defeat their domestic political opponents. This has the side-effect of providing the primary power of the insurgents themselves, which is, as mentioned above, primarily political and indirect.

Carl von Clausewitz famously asserted that war is the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means. The Anabasis of Cyrus puts this assertion to the test, reducing the phenomenon of war to a single petri dish filled with Ten Thousand wayward Greeks. The Ten Thousand descend into Mesopotamia for a purely political purpose: Cyrus the Younger wants his brother’s throne. Cyrus calculates that a quick strike into the political heartland of the Persian empire will allow him to catch his brother at a disadvantage. The initial descent is calculated to roll from Asia Minor down to Babylon with such momentum that Artaxerxes II’s political decision loop would be overwhelmed. Most of the political impact that Cyrus’s military strategy is calculated to produce will be produced by strategic shock alone.

This strategy, fed by what seems to be a decided tilt in Cyrus’s character towards rashness, nearly works. Cyrus’s seemingly rash attack mano a mano against Artaxerxes early in the Battle of Cunaxa could be charitably interpreted as a political act as well. By committing the ultimate political atrocity of lese majeste himself, Cyrus is asserting his superior claim as ruler by physically and therefore politically invading Artaxerxes’s sacred space, that splendid apartness that elevates a divine monarch in the eyes of mere mortals. Cyrus seeks to knock Artaxerxes off his pedestal, revealing him as an ordinary, physically vulnerable, and, hopefully, dead human being. Through the myth created by dispatching Artaxerxes through his own prowess, Cyrus will take on a new aura as the biggest man in Persia not only symbolically but physically as well.

Cyrus, as shown by the spectacles that he repeatedly puts on as motivation exercises for his reluctant mercenaries during the descent to Babylon, is a showman. Many citizens of modern liberal democracies miss the subtlety of manufacturing consent in a traditional hereditary monarchy. Monarchy relies on spectacle as much or in fact more so than a liberal democracy. Masters of the form, whether continent spanning tyrants like Louis XIV or petty princelings of the Holy Roman Empire, rely on symbol, spectacle, and sacralizing as much as the naked violence to which they often resorted. Traditional state violence, whether it be an execution, a military campaign, or jousting, served a theatrical, educational, and propagandizing purpose on top of its pure manifestation of brute force. Cyrus was putting on a performance intended to symbolically and morally knife Artaxerxes almost as much as he was seeking to literally shove eight inches of wrought iron into his own brother’s chest. That Cyrus signally failed in his attempt is no argument against the fundamentally political nature of his warfare. Failure is as much a part of politics as success. If Cyrus failed in his aspiration to become a potent symbol of political success in life, through the freshly rendered pieces of Cyrus meat conspicuously displayed by his brother, Cyrus became a potent symbol of political failure in death.

The remainder of the Anabasis is devoted to a political community whose war is waged for that most naked of political motives: survival. As Victor David Hanson pointed out in one of his more lucid moments, in the Anabasis we are presented with another species of political spectacle from the monarchial pomp and circumstance that Cyrus greets us with at the beginning of Book I. The Ten Thousand are a movable polis, the raw incarnation of Plato’s political animal. Artaxerxes and his minions attempt a decapitation strike on the Ten Thousand, expecting the loss of such high quality individuals as Proxenus, Menon, and Clearchus to reduce the Ten Thousand to the milling peasant rabble. In an Oriental context this strategy made sense: most Asiatic armies were composed of impressed peasants who would eagerly flee the scene of battle if their kings and lords were slain. But the Greeks of this time, before the Persian virus of autocracy transferred through the medium of Macedon hegemony rendered free Greece into slavish Byzantium, were different. Being a distributed command of more or less free men, they selected new leaders including the silver tongued Xenophon, debated their options, and retreated into the mountains of the Kurds and Armenians.

The entire ascent of the Ten Thousand is marked by the intensely political nature of its organizational structure. Leaders such as Xenophon go to great lengths, summoning all of the power of the century old art of sophistry, created just for such occasions of political deliberations by bodies of citizens, to keep the troops together. Discipline seems in many cases to be only imposed when the Ten Thousand want it. Xenophon, for example, is notably called to account for striking a soldier, something the soldiers found appalling. Much of the discipline imposed on the march up to the Euxine is imposed by the pressure of marching through hostile territory but much of it is imposed because the troops have heard the various options, discussed them openly, voted on them, and agreed that that vote is binding upon all. Those that deviate from the agreed consensus are not only scorned by the officers leading them but by their fellow soldiers. The Greeks practiced majoritarian tyranny in its purest form in a state where political questions were at their most stark: one road survival, one road death. Convinced that deviation from the general consensus physically threatened the survival of all, slackers were dealt with harshly.

After the Greeks reach the sea, Xenophon’s strategy has a clear political purpose: the Ten Thousand must acquit themselves in such a way that they can be easily reintegrated into the contemporary Greek world. Not only that, but they had to be able to be reintegrated into a contemporary Greek world ruled by Sparta. This meant the Ten Thousand had to conduct themselves in a manner that fit Greek norms and accommodated Spartan interests. This meant that if they pillaged other Greeks they would draw the hatred of the entire Hellenosphere and if they got on the wrong side of the surly Spartans, they not only couldn’t go home but they might be attacked by the Spartans. In accommodation there was the possibility of pay and provisions. In crossing the Spartans, there was the possibility of poverty and starvation, the common lot of the ancient world. Relations with barbarians were less important but the Ten Thousand politically exploited local disputes to win themselves provisions and passage as they hacked, slashed, sailed, and marched their way across northern Asia Minor. Even when Xenophon plays with the notion of founding a city he clearly is expecting to found a city that would be well integrated with the Greek world. Military operations contrary to that goal of integration are contrary to the political end that Xenophon consistently seeks.

The denouement of the Anabasis with its petty squabbles with the Spartans and Thracian warlords can sometimes seem anticlimactic after the drama of the initial descent and the retreat up to the sea. However, in micro, they present the close intertwining of politics and its servant war. Watch the fun of Xenophon seeking to gain leverage with the Spartans by keeping the Ten Thousand together even if it means slumming with the Thracians. Witness the Thracians maneuvering for political advantage even while they are fighting in the field. See Seuthes try and cozy up to the Spartans while attacking the reputation of the Ten Thousand. In the end the Spartans accommodate the Ten Thousand for their own political purpose: they want to loose them upon the Persians. The Ten Thousand march off to fight in another hazy war under yet another Spartan general.

Politics is nothing if not circular.

NerveAgent over at Visions of Empire has made some recent posts worth reading:

The Benefits of Stupidity

NerveAgent links to my post America’s Grand Strategy Deficit…Solved!!! and points out that Edward Luttwak supports the Friendman Theorem in the revised version of his Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, Revised and Enlarged Edition, namely that:

America’s grand strategy is to be so big and so powerful that it escapes the consequences of its own stupidity. (Listening to the podcast again, Friedman actually says that America’s grand strategy is to be so big and powerful that it can afford to be stupid).

In a strange coincidence, I had just read the final chapter of Strategy (as recommended by Adam Elkus) last week and was struck by the same point that NerveAgent makes. I was going to post on it but NerveAgent already has so go read it. His points are well in the spirit of Mark Safranski and Adam Elkus’s recent article for Small Wars Journal Theory, Policy, and Strategy: A Conceptual Muddle.

Thoughts on Rupert Smith’s “Utility of Force”

NerveAgent reviews Sir Rupert Smith’s The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World and finds it more commonplace than others have found. Another book in my library I need to finally read. Interestingly enough, Smith quotes the inferior Graham translation of On War rather than the superior Paret-Howard translation. What is it with the British? First Keegan and now Smith. Sheesh. Amazon doesn’t help when it lists 5 Graham translations in its search results. It’s like they don’t want people to read Clausewitz at all.

War: Ends and Means, Part I

NerveAgent also reviews War: Ends and Means by Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla. This is another book I own but I haven’t read. I admire Angelo Codevilla after listening to this podcast. I especially admire him after reading his smackdown of Sith Lord Darth Crevald during the Q&A portion of this Crevald lecture at the same event. Anyone who wipes the floor with Darth Crevald can’t be all that bad.

Why does anyone pay attention to the monkey? Pay attention to the organ grinder. Pay no attention to the monkey.

Unless the monkey is a radioactive baboon. In that case, pay close attention.

Eye of a Needle

America now has a single, unified, cohesive grand strategy. It turns out that even a five year old or equivalent (like an NSC staffer) can understand it. As formulated by George Friedman of Stratfor:

America’s grand strategy is to be so big and so powerful that it escapes the consequences of its own stupidity.

Cunaxa is an interesting counter-point to the three traditional pillars of Herodotus’s Histories, Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. While those three confrontations took place in or near Attica, the cradle of democracy, Cunaxa happens in Mesopotamia, the cradle of despotism. Herodotus skillfully built a narrative of the clash of East and West, Freedom and Slavery, Democracy and Despotism out of the Persian attempts to conquer an obscure people on the fringes of the Known World. His account looms over those of his successors, even the works of the prickly Thucydides, who considered himself superior in every respect to the world traveling gossip from Halicarnassus.

Xenophon was no exception. The Anabasis almost reads like a strange mirror version of the Histories. Instead of the Ascent of Darius, Xerxes, or Mardonius into the heart of Hellas, it’s the descent of the Greeks into the heart of Achaemenid power. The squabbling Greeks, under the less than inspired figures of Clearchus, Proxenus, and Menon, appear rather shabby compared to the heroic generation of Miltiades, Themistocles, and Pausanias. Cyrus in his foolish death and disfigured body and Artaxerxes II in his pettiness and undignified scramble to keep his throne fall far short of the power and majesty of Darius and Xerxes, so exalted that Herodotus portrayed them as living embodiments of hubris, pride that not only rivaled but threatened that of the gods themselves.

Herodotus portrays the mighty Xerxes, in the full flower of his pride, flogging the Hellespont as punishment for destroying his first pontoon bridge from Asia into Europe. Artaxerxes II, on the other hand, barely escapes with his life and throne, blusters at the Ten Thousand, flees cravenly when the Ten Thousand post him up, and proceeds to engage in all sorts of gutter intrigue. With great insight, Xenophon convinces the leaderless Greeks that the Great King would never negotiate with them in good faith. Artaxerxes II knew he looked pathetic. If I were Artaxerxes II, I wouldn’t want my vulnerabilities broadcast to all the world either, especially when I’d been shown up by a bunch of country bumpkins from Arcadia, the armpit of Greece. I would kill every last man, woman, child, beast of burden, or slave of the Ten Thousand. Being routed is one depth of humiliation. Being routed by rednecks, however, is a depth of humiliation that Persians hadn’t faced since the Spartans reacted to a demand for earth and water by throwing the Great King’s emissaries down a well into the bowels of Mother Earth.

Xenophon continues Herodotus’s amateur anthropology by observing the Oriental Other. However Xenophon lacks the cosmic depths of Herodotus’s cosmopolitanism. Xenophon goes up country a Greek and comes down it a Greek. The locals are primarily defined by their non-Greekness, suffering from the irreversible disease of original high barbarity. Bar bar they all say. Bar we are shifty. Bar we are treacherous. Bar we betray even the gods with our lies. Bar we are unable to rule ourselves. Bar we are slaves. Bar we are sheep. Bar we are strange. Some of the Oriental world is familiar, a terrain populated by agrarian villages bursting with provisions and ripe for plunder. Some of it lies behind an iron cage that Xenophon, trapped in his Greekness, is barred from opening.

Everything Xenophon does is in deadly earnest. While this is largely because Xenophon’s fate and the fate of the Ten Thousand were delicately balanced on the edge of a knife blade, Xenophon doesn’t strike me as a bon vivant in any of his other works. In contrast, Herodotus is a damned hippie, cheerfully imbibing and inhaling whatever the locals would offer. Herodotus is Mr. Fun, painting the world in bright fun Deluxe Crayola colors, a literary Expressionist for all time. Xenophon is more like Thucydides, a gloomy and bitter exile justifying the vagaries of his career by pouring out apologia galore. Like Seurat, he paints the world as a summation of pinpricks, with himself cast as the most prominent prick.

I’m more sympathetic with Herodotus, who toiled away making his living through readings before a democratic mob, than with Xenophon, who spent much of his career as a literary Vyshinsky for the totalitarian Spartans. But with his descent into Mesopotamia, the birthplace of autocracy, Xenophon demonstrates that there are differing degrees of tyranny and even the citizens of Sparta had not fallen to the depths of the Great King’s slaves, driven into battle and corvee with whips. Of course tyranny, like influenza, is catching and the Ten Thousand may have brought the virus back with them from Mesopotamia, setting the scene for the passing of vigorous Greek liberty at Chaeronea a mere 63 years later. It is not without a touch of truth that the great historian Arrian’s history of the first flowering of Oriental despotism in the free soil of Greece is called the Anabasis of Alexander.

Live Long and Boogie

George W. Bush wasn’t the brightest bulb in the lighting store. But he had one thing going for him: a visceral understanding of power, human relations on the most fundamental animal level, and the meanings of signals. Where this nation’s elite was talking itself in circles over Iraq, Bush recognized that backing down would be bad for America. Even the signs of weakness revealed by our wallowing in Iraqi quicksand was enough to get America’s enemies excited. That was a mere preview of what would happen if we had withdrawn under obvious disgrace from Iraq, no matter however cleverly papered over by State Department papers and blue ribbon study groups. That much was understood by Bush.

The world system is ruled by the dance of pretense and violence. The majority of the world’s population is neither with us or against us: they’re with the winner. Bandwagoning rules the day. After the end of the Cold War and the stunning denouement of the Gulf War, everyone was on America’s side. After the screwups in the Iraq War, everyone was on any side but ours. Victory is a social feast. Defeat is lonely. Reagan was lonely in 1985 but had lots of friends in 1991. Such is the feckless creature known as man.

Afghanistan is always written Afghanistan* where the asterisk goes like this:

* Afghanistan has defeated every historical figure that Americans have ever heard of, like Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Hitler, Leonardo da Vinci, that dude with the mustache, and Skeletor.

The truth is most of those people never even visited Afghanistan (with the exception of Skeletor). In fact, Afghanistan has spent most of its history as someone else’s plaything. As I like to say, no outsider has successfully conquered Afghanistan with the exception of this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and maybe this one. In truth, Afghanistan has spent the majority of its history as a Persian sock puppet. In honor of this truth, I will henceforth refer to Afghanistan as “East Persia”.

East Persia is like Belgium aka Europe’s Scenic Invasion Speedway™. Everyone’s always passing through. So what if they have angry tribesmen and high mountains? Angry tribesmen are designed to be culled by the Maxim Gun and mountains are meant to be avoided. My ancestors were angry tribesmen who lived in the mountains. With time (and the liberal use of the gallows), even they were cured. I live amidst high mountains and arid valleys filled with a tribe that most people consider strange religious fanatics. However, we’re really nice people once you get on our good side. You just need to be there for forty years. Erosion works on social formations as well as geologic formations.

The price of withdrawal from East Persia is greater danger in the world for America. This wouldn’t come from a resurgent al-Qaeda, even though line noise always wants its chance to sing in the bright glare of the nation’s largest media market. Everyone will know precisely which buttons need to be pressed to get America to back off, the lessons of Vietnam updated for the 21st century. That knowledge can be operationalized in unpredictable ways. There was a Soviet surge after America’s humiliation in Vietnam. Sure, you can argue that Soviet adventurism helped lead to its inevitable collapse. However, that collapse was not inevitable. As Red China has demonstrated, communism is perfectly compatible with hypocrisy. If the United States had continued to wallow in its state of malaise, Soviet Russia may not have suffered for taking too many cookies from the cookie jar or at least suffered terminal illness. The Soviet Union was cursed by having someone who believed Communism could work as its leader at the wrong time. Most tyrannies have taken note and keep their Gorbachev’s far away from the reigns of power.  The inconvenient idealist is a black swan that can come upon the most prudent of realpolitikers.

The Taliban believe they can out wait the fickle West. That’s probably the case with decadent Europe, tied to East Persia only by the barest of liturgical ties from an ancient charter intended to keep the Fulda Gap plugged. With the American people, it’s an open question. East Persia was the (ahem) Mecca of the hip Takfiri set. Eight years ago, people commanded and controlled from East Persia demonstrated the awesome power of terror inflicted in a major media market. Though not as deep or lasting as other cataclysms of American history, 9/11 caused a significant amount of psychic damage to the American people. Vietnam, though many greeted our withdrawal with relief, caused great damage to the American psyche that the Miracle on Ice and Reagan could only partially heal. The riptide from a withdrawal from East Persia would be just as large and deep, especially since our intervention in Afghanistan was entirely justifiable as a defensive war (not that I believe in just war theory). The result would not be an America free to return to its sanctified splendid isolation or to wage a renewed war on poverty and greenhouse gas. The result would be a large, dangerous power with a chip on its shoulder, a proto-revisionist power. Look at contemporary Russia with its dangerous inferiority complex, massive post-Marxist hangover, and monster sized grudge. Bring it home to Main Street, Mom, and her bitter apple pie to swallow and you have the makings of an even more bellicose America, the America that marches below the banners of Old Hickory instead of Tommy Jeff, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, and James Edward Carter, hippies all.

East Persia requires little cleverness at all. Here’s the strategy.

1. Put Taliban in headlock.
2. Noogie head until they yield.
3. If they truly yield, stop noogying but don’t release them from headlock.
4. If they were playing for time, continue noogying.
5. Repeat.

Anything else is too clever by half.