Shelby Steele has an interesting thesis, but first he asks an interesting question:
"There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
Why this new minimalism in war?"
Interesting question. He has an interesting answer, too, one that dovetails nicely with today's set: "What Moussaoui Portends," Callimachus' "Heroes and Neighbours" re: Ayaan Hirsi Ali's tribulations, and "Europe's Shame, Europe's Suicide." Over to black scholar Shelby Steele:
"I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group's former sinfulness. So when America--the greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past--two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.
The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world...."
It does. On the flip side, it also provides a License to Kill for innumerable Third World regimes and evildoers, who do so without condemnation or reaction.
Poke a bit, and one generally finds a mental model with the implicit grounds that yellow, brown, or black people cannot really be held responsible as moral agents, and so the evil must be traceable back to white/western sources. Yehudit recently encountered a small piece of that syndrome re: Darfur, and such ideas extend into a number of domestic debates as well.
Lee Harris, in Our World-Historical Gamble:
"The irony of Richard Butler's attack on America's "double standard" is that we have in fact practiced a double standard, but not the one that he had in mind in his critique of American policy. Our double standard has been one in which we allow others to attack us out of blind hatred, animated by the barbarous principles of the vendetta or blood feud, while we, on our part, strive in every way to minimize any unnecessary loss of enemy life, even at the risk of endangering our own. They murder innocent Americans in the pursuit of their wretched fantasies, simply because of who we are, while we refrain even from subjecting them to airport searches, out of fear of making them feel unwelcome in our society.
If we are to teach others a sense of the realistic, it is imperative that we not lose our own. We must not let our noble ideals betray us into betraying our very ideals. The only way that these ideals will find a place in the world of tomorrow is if we are prepared to defend them today - and to defend them at whatever cost is required.
But perhaps our greatest challenge will be to our own thinking. We must take a hard look at every idea we hold dear and ask, Does this idea even fit any more? And does it any longer make sense to speak of conservatives in a world in which a catastrophic change of some kind looms, or liberals when it is the core liberal values of all of us - even the most conservative - that are being threatened?"
There are many manifestations of the syndrome Steele describes, including the leftist funhouse version of multiculturalism used to echo a monolitic western leftist view via "diverse" sock puppets - but he may have put his finger on the root of the problem.
What do you think? If he's right, how do we reduce the syndrome's killing influence on our society and culture? How do we create a future in which morality is not dependent upon race?
UPDATE: Yehudit's "Case studies in love and shame" offers some thoughts.
Regarding
"minimalism in war" and "white guilt" ...
I had to pause there.
I believe a better description would be democratic or liberal white guilt. Seems that's where it originated. Unfortunately they've been able to spread it through use of the liberal media (just as they are able to gain popularity for their other causes and ideologies) and it has infected some of the republican conservatives.
I'll continue to read now ...
Steele's perception of "white guilt" would seem to be the counterpart to Walter Russell Mead's jacksonian strand of US foreign policy.
Where the jacksonians have no compunction about the massive use of force once force is seen as justified, Steele's conception of "white guilt" would suggest that the anti-jacksonians (for want of a better term) would consider few uses of force justified, and if justified, the less used the better.
Lurking,
Change "anti-Jacksonians" to "liberals".
its got nothing to do with guilt, white liberals, or anything else.
You fight an insurgency differently than you fight a conventional war. Its the nature of counterinsurgency. Max Boot, IIUC, goes into that in some depth. Its USMC doctrine. A counterinsurgency is essentially a political war, and you MUST pay attention to hearts and minds.
We havent really fought a conventional war that stretched us, since Korea. If someone wants to debate the rationale for keeping Korea, limited, they are free to, but its not real relevant to anything we're doing now.
btw if youre taking from Yehudit that the Save Darfur coalition didnt insist on the responsibility of the Sudanese govt, either you are misreading her or she is intensely mistaken.
Seems to me youre confusing moral responsibility, with leverage. To the extent we have leverage directly against Sudan, we will use it. However as citizens of the US, our greatest leverage for change in Sudan is to influence our own govt.
And that approach seems to be working. There is now an agreement in Sudan, and, I hope, an opening for a UN force.
White guilt, perhaps. It matters not, though, for in a couple of decades America's wars will be fought by robots of every description, which (who?) will be unencumbered by guilt of any kind. Evil doers, beware.
liberalhawk:
It is one thing to suggest that one fights a counterinsurgency differently from a conventional war.
That is not the same thing as suggesting, however, that one should necessarily use less force, so much as different force.
Consider the history of COIN operations. In the most successful cases (e.g. Boer War, US wars against Indians, Filipino insurrection, Malay insurgency, US efforts against the VC post-Tet, to name but a few), there were several things that were consistently done:
1. Concentration of population, effectively draining the sea within which the guerillas/insurgents swam.
2. Mass propaganda, including manipulation of the press, touting of good news, etc.
3. Extreme restrictions on freedom of movement of civilian population.
If we were to move the population of even smaller Sunni cities, do you think this would be well-received?
Judging from the reaction to simply pushing for more good news being published, do you think Coalition use of propaganda would be tolerated?
Given the reactions to incidents involving civilians at checkpoints, including the Sgrena case, do restrictions on freedom of movement strike you as likely?
Now, why are these tried-and-true methods no longer used?
Why don't we use our full strength?
??
We used our full strength in the American civil war, and WWI, and WWII. Those were the wars that took our full strength.
We did not use our full strength in the mexican war, or the spanish-american war, or the philippines. We did not see that those wars required that level of effort. As it turned out, we were right.
If Bush had announced that we needed an all-out effort to attack iraq, with a large draft, rationing gasoline, civilians make a big effort to recycle tin and aluminum cans, the whole works -- would we have gone to war at all?
The biggest part of the time since WWII we were in the cold war. We were careful not to pick a hot war with the USSR. If we had, could we have mobilised? Could we have drafted ten million civilians and shipped them to europe in time to affect a conventional european war? But when we got into little hot wars we couldn't possibly afford to fight all-out. Put everything we have into a little regional war when the soviets were looking for weakness in europe? The russians didn't put everything into afghanistan, much less the invasion of czechoslovakia.
We have waged no war since the cold war was over that could use our full strength, except possibly iraq. We trained as many troops as we could in panama but the country just didn't have room for everybody. No reason to expose a lot of troops to haiti. Etc.
Iraq is our first case that could use more strength than we chose to use. It's true that we've never used our full strength since WWII. But arguments that there's some irrational reason for that are really arguments from one single example -- iraq.
Joe Katzman: "What do you think?"
I think he's right to seek the root of the problem in some great international event, not in national history. If anything, British and Australian troops work under more restrictive rules of engagement than the Americans do. So this can't be due to the Civil War or the history of slavery in America.
Broadly, not in every detail, and with reservations about limited war doctrine, I think he's right.
However, it's worth remembering that the French have successfully given themselves a free pass to kick around Africans and other natives all they like.
Joe Katzman: "If he's right, how do we reduce the syndrome's killing influence on our society and culture?"
I don't know.
It seems if you brazenly reject any need for apology and apologetic behaviour, you go along way to immunise yourself. If you start our completely shameless and go on as you've begun, it's harder for the political correctness industry to get going.
But even if your record is much, much better - and it was the British Navy, not the French, that cracked down on slavery, and the British were far, far more benevolent imperialists and colonialists than the French - then the machinery of institutionalised self-hatred gets built, fundamental institutions like the state church get irretrievably corrupted (again I'm referring to the United Kingdom), and the potential power of the global white guilt complex is mobilised.
Once it is, it's a monster and very hard to stop. It's not just a bad habit. It does draw on a cataclysmic historic defeat.
Joe Katzman: "How do we create a future in which morality is not dependent upon race?"
I don't know if let alone how we could do that.
What I've seen is attempts to reach across racial divides break down in bitterness over racial finger-pointing. When people come on with the attitude that you're white so you're guilty and you must pay, and they're serious as too often they are, goodwill dies.
Steele's article struck a chord with me, and put into focus my disconnect with the various leftist arguments that I've had thrown at me most of my life.
My POV: I'm a first-generation American (parents German, my father an escapee from the russian zone). I could see the point of a past wrong but that was all. I might consider the past in order to obtain a solution, but dwell on past mistakes? Pointless, and have said as much [what could be more pointless than feeling guilty over something you had no personal part in!?!].
Steele's article bring into focus all the horrified stares from liberal leftists I've ever gotten when I've responded with: 'that was then, this is now.'
From my POV, levels of force isn't the issue; it's ruthlessness. That has always been the critical balancing act. In the past, America has mostly faced foes with similar cultural values: that makes the 'understood' rules on the battlefield easy.
When does warfare get nasty? When dissimilar values manifest themselves.
That is Islam's peril: can they show me that the animals that carried out Beslan is NOT their combative norm?
I won't share the planet with ANYONE who acts like that, thinks like that, nor talks like that.
Period.
I'm afraid that I find the article utter tripe. I'm reminded of the Doonesbury series where it turned out that America lost Vietnam because "we didn't want to win".
America's policies are dictated by America's needs. And one of the most important of America's needs is to see itself as "That Shining City on the Hill". Sure, it could win the war by liquidating two million Sunni's in Iraq, heck, maybe it could do so by simple tactics such as executing whole towns were attacks on Americans took place.
But the cost to Americans of such maximalist war practices is way, way, way higher than most Americans are willing to pay, especially when there's no clear certainty about the importance of Iraq to America's survival.
I'll quote the War Nerd here:
You've got to realize how horrible this kind of war is, and that the horribleness is the whole point. If you really hated somebody, you'd wish on them a guerrilla war in their hometown. Guerrilla warfare is the real "dirty bomb," the low-tech answer to hi-tech invasion. It doesn't just occasionally involve killing civvies -- killing civvies is the whole durn point. Both sides have to torture, terrorize and kill as many locals as they can, and the sicker, crazier, more evil bastards will win.
Americans for the most part don't want to be the "the more evil bastard". Iraq simply isn't worth the hit to American's self esteem.
As for racially motivated searches, etc. That's not avoided there to keep foreigners happy, it's there to keep Americans happy. Even if the practice were to make America safer (a somewhat dubious proposition), the cost to American society would be too high for most Americans. Nobody has discussed streaming Mid-Westerners for special treatment, although Mid-Western Americans have killed a lot more Americans than Muslim Americans...
No, such racial profiling makes it clear to everyone that there are real Americans, and then the various other groups who happen to have American citizenship. And that's not a society that most people are eager to see built.
Why do we travel our current path? Guilt over the past? Ha. Try our best hope for current success.