RESPONSE TO COMMENTS (1)

A number of comments have come in, all friendly and some (a second category) going beyond congratulations and encouragement (gratefully received) to make perceptive points in the spirit of the posts that I originally made and usefully enlarging upon them. I have published all in the second category on the blog. I would like to add something here on the difficulty, brought up in one comment, of telling who has appropriate expert judgment and who does not. There is no general solution to this important practical problem. In many cases it is easy: There is a well-defined issue (how to conduct an amphibious assault) and people with a good track record in dealing with just such issues (someone who has conducted amphibious assaults on similar targets). At the other extreme, there are issues that even people with the most relevant experience cannot be counted on to deal with successfully. The generals who in 1916 were making strategic decisions on both sides of the First World War had the most relevant experience but went on making gross mistakes. No one would have listened to a child who told them, "You’re getting nowhere, just slaughtering young men to no purpose; stop the offensives and demand that the politicians bring the war to an end." The generals did not think this way. A pity: the child would have been right. We cannot in such cases rely on the experience that some people claim; we have to judge for ourselves the plausibility of their approaches to strategic judgments. We have to seek a minimum of experience, certainly; but also openmindedness, a readiness to experiment, a willingness to admit mistakes and correct them. Claims to judgment based on experience have to be examined skeptically, more skeptically than McCain’s rivals have been examining his claims, more skeptically than McCain himself has examined them.

BOXED-IN, SET-UP FOR GOTCHA

The media and the candidates, blindly working together, have boxed-in debate to exclude talking to Iran "without conditions" (say, with only an agreed-agenda) and likewise exclude talking to Hamas. Even Obama, who avoided being trapped with regard to talking to Iran, has allowed himself to be boxed in like the others with regard to talking to Hamas. Are we to talk to no one who has bloody hands, or, who short of that, makes bloodthirsty speeches? We could choose to express our (justifiable) displeasure with their deeds and their words by taking such a stand, but is that going to be helpful? Sooner or later, we may expect peace will look better than purity; and then strive to turn the terrorists of time past into respectable citizens of time present and future, as happened finally in Northern Ireland and decades ago with the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. What the candidates should try for is to keep as free a hand for negotiations as possible, steering clear of traps that invite Gotcha..

TALKING WITH IRAN

It is obvious that if you want negotiations, you must not approach the other party in a way that prevents it from agreeing to negotiate. Obvious – all too obvious. But politicians taking tough stands find it embarrassing to climb down from them, even when it becomes clear that the tough stand is not working. Iran evidently will not be brought to talks by demanding that it accept conditions that might be difficult for it to accept even in reasonably open-minded talks. Do the people making U. S. policy about talking with Iran imagine that it can awe Iran into accepting such conditions beforehand? Why should Iran fear the United States so much? It could bomb Iran; it could nuke it, but it could not, bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, follow up with boots on the ground. Moreover, Irand could retaliate in devastating ways, against U. S. troops deployed in those two other countries; or against Israel. If the U.S. will not follow the example set by Israel, beginning public comprehensive negotiations with Syria after years of fruitless clamor, let us hope that beneath the public bluster of Bush and McCain, cooler heads are working to create an agenda that Iran would be ready to negotiate.

IS IT SENSIBLE TO TALK TO IRAN WITHOUT CONDITIONS?

Both McCain and Hillary Clinton have tried to rule out talking to Iran without demanding that Iran satisfy various conditions first. If the Iranian government is not impelled to accept those conditions, then insisting upon them dashes any hope of having talks with it. Is having talks without conditions naive appeasement, or a sensible thing to do? What does the United States lose by talking without conditions? Some appearance of self-righteousness, no doubt, but self-righteousness is no advantage in diplomacy, especially in dealing with a power that is self-righteous, too. Talks without conditions might not work. On the other hand, there is a chance that the overheated rhetoric on one side or the other would not arise if representatives of the two powers met face to face, ready on both sides to make a genuine effort to find points of agreement on nuclear proliferation and other issues. Moreover, we should be prepared to try again, and again. The alternative – ceaselessly uttering threats -- is too dangerous.

WHAT DOES "APPEASEMENT" MEAN? THE MEDIA DOES ITS OWN RECTIFICATION

Occasionally, the media takes care of its own problems with logic. Chris Matthews discovered a witless radio talk show host who was freely making the charge of "appeasement" and asked him repeatedly – a dozen times or more – what did some who "appeased" do in the course of appeasing. The host clearly had no idea, not even the debased idea that "appeasement" was the same thing as just talking to the enemy. He just kept repeating the word, assuming that whatever it was it was a bad thing. Keith Olberman followed up the point on his own show by having Matthews come on to report it again. Appeasement, of course, implies making, or at least being ready to make, a concession to the enemy, in the hope of avoiding something worse. Sometimes it’s foolish to do this; sometimes, not. Even when it doesn’t work, it is sometimes worth trying. The IRA, in the end, kept its word; Herr Hitler did not and we now know it was not reasonable of Chamberlain to expect him to.

WHAT DID THE DEPARTURE OF ADMIRAL FALLON SIGNIFY?

Gates has said that it is "ridiculous" to take Fallon’s resignation as a sign that the chances of our making war on Iran have increased. Does that mean that from where Gates sits the chances are already so great that any misgivings expressed by Fallon come too late to make a difference? Or that they are obviously too low? But that is not obvious to the public, who have not been given periodic assessments in depth by the media of what is really going on in thinking by the Bush Administration about making war on Iran. Are we being sleep-walked into a war likely to be even more catastrophic than Bush and Cheney’s adventure in Iraq?

WHAT IS THE CONNECTION BETWEEN EXPERIENCE AND JUDGMENT?

A silly discussion on CNN of experience and judgment left unexamined the relation between the two. Many sorts of experience do not lead to having sound judgment in strategic military decisions. Following orders as a fighter pilot is not that sort of experience, any more than front line experience as a company cook. People who do have the relevant experience make big mistakes, for example, MacArthur and Churchill. Moreover, when the red phone rings in the White House, it will be too late to exercise judgment. We must ask the candidates for President to demonstrate their judgment when they pick advisors and consult with them to arrive at a repertoire of effective reactions to crises coming over the phone.

LEAVING IRAQ NOW - COWARDICE AND ABSURDITY?

McCain charges absurdity as well as cowardice, because at last the war is being managed effectively. But other priorities may without absurdity call us away and we have expended enough blood and treasure to refute the change of cowardice. Nor should we go along with the partisan effort to vindicate the misbegotten policy of war in Iraq by trying to get to a position in which we could somehow speak of "victory" there. "The war" there is not just one war, but three. The three intersect, but we should not have an indefinite commitment to any of them.

CAN OBAMA THINK SOME VOTERS HAVE BECOME BITTER WITHOUT BEING AN "ELITIST" PATRONIZING THEM?

When Obama declared that some economically hard-pressed voters had become bitter about the neglect of their economic troubles and turned accordingly to clinging to God and their gun-rights, he was declared to have been an elitist. Some (including Hillary Clinton) managed to interpret him as saying that all religious people are attached to their religion for the same reason. He did not, however, say this. Nor did he say that all hard-pressed voters had become bitter or that all who had become bitter had turned to religion and their gun-rights. To be sure, he did not spell this out, but when we say things like "People are not taking their full vacations" or "People are driving as much as they ever did in spite of high gas prices" it is understood that we are speaking of tendencies to which there may be many exceptions. His basic point was that the parties in power had offered no economic remedies for hard-pressed voters, just distracting issues.

CAN PETRAEUS’S ADVICE ON IRAQ BE WELL-CONSIDERED IF HE KNOWS OF NO PLAN FOR WITHDRAWAL?

Given that the way any withdrawal of US troops from Iraq proceeds will make a difference to the situation left behind, the testimony that Petraeus and Crocker have given about the dire consequences of withdrawal are unreliable. For, as became evident under questioning by Congress, they have not considered any plan for quick withdrawal (withdrawal within three months, for example). Some plans would identify sources of instability and violence and make provisions for forestalling their activity, at least in part. The consequences of withdrawing under a well-considered plan is what decision-makers should be focusing on.

WAS PETRAEUS JUST PRETENDING NOT TO HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT WITHDRAWAL?

An earlier post took Petraeus’s stumbling about at a House of Representatives hearing when he was asked how he would conduct a withdrawal of U. S. troops from Iraq as a sincere revelation. He had not thought out a plan of withdrawal; he knew of no plan that had been thought out. A friend – a professor of law, and hence better acquainted with the varieties of human duplicity – insisted that Petraeus knew all about such plans. He was just pretending not to know so as to escape talking about them. This interpretation may do more credit to Petraeus’s intelligence, at the expense of discrediting his sincerity. It is still the case, on this interpretation as well as the other, that we need to know the cost of withdrawal under the best plan for withdrawal to know whether it would be so bad as to justify keeping our troops in Iraq. Deliberately or not, Petraeus was thwarting debate on this subject.

CAN OBAMA LOSE IF HILLARY CANNOT WIN?

Rahm Emmanuel has just said on TV that Obama is "the presumptive winner" of the Democratic nomination. Hillary cannot win, he said, though Obama might lose. This seems a stark contradiction. If, playing under the rules, Hillary loses, the only possibility left is that Obama wins. However, perhaps Emmanuel, though he did not succeed in expressing it, had another point in mind, namely, that Clinton could not now change the game in her favor. Obama, however, could do this for her by dropping out somehow. Perhaps he would fall into a clinical depression and retire from the scene. Hillary could not as a church-going Christian hope for this. Or something worse might happen to him, something perhaps too unpleasant to name. Nor could Hillary in good conscience hope for this either. So she is staying in the race because something might happen that she cannot admit even hoping for.