Comments on: War In A Time Of Peace

OK, finished the book on the flight back from Oakland.

Had a long talk with Biggest Guy today - he's going back to UVA Saturday, and signing the 'official' ROTC papers - and somehow it tied too-neatly into my read of Halberstram's book, 'War In A Time Of Peace'.

Honest to God, I don't map little personal stories to my blog topics deliberately. I don't think that I'll become a better blogger by channeling Lileks. I'm not sure whether it's just that when I'm thinking about something, I tend to see it everywhere - so it manifests in my personal life - if there is some creepy Truman-show explanation, or if I just have the power to impose my will on reality - in which case I'll be concentrating really hard in the future on my bank account and Uma Thurman...or maybe I ought to reverse that...

He and I were talking about Big Stuff to a college sophomore, identity and striving, and I started to explain to him about my view of contingency, of the complexity of human action, and I started to talk about Halberstram (which I'm giving him to show what decision making at the highest levels of the military is like).

First, let me echo my earlier comment, and say that this is a great book, and you should read it. After finishing it, I still think so, and in fact even more so.

It's good, to me, not only because it lays out much of the political and social dynamic that explains our current politics around Iraq, and because it serves as a convincing history of an important history in a way that manages to both show the context within wider history, and highlights important human truths that have application beyond what the book shows.

The most important, I deeply believe, is the - inexactitude - of human effort, especially in the political arenas. As we sit here and solve the world's problems at our keyboards, things are clear, they are consistent, they are exact.

The world - the world of the crooked timber of humanity, which we inhabit - is one in which histories are written in blurry pencil, rather than with a ruler's precision. Halberstram goes through one documentable, relatively simple and minor historic event...the decision by the Western powers to use military force in the former Yugoslavia...and demonstrates this.

I've marked about two dozen quotes, but in the interest of brevity, and hopefully convincing you to go get the book from the remainder stack or from the local library, I'll just retype three:

One moment that had seemed to symbolize the supreme confidence of the Bush people during this remarkable chain of events. It came in mid-August of 1991, when some Russian right-wingers mounted a coup against Gorbachev and Bush held firm, first trying to support Gorbachev and, unable to reach him, then using his influence to help the embattled Boris Yeltsin. The coup had failed. A few days later, Gorbachev, restored to power in part because of the leverage of Washington, had resigned from the Communist Party. To the Bush people, that attempted coup had been a reminder that with the Cold War officially ended or not, the Berlin Wall up or down, the world was still a dangerous place, which meant the country would surely need and want an experienced leader, preferably a Republican, at the helm. Aboard Air Force One at that time, flying with his father from Washington back to the Bush family's vacation home in Maine, was George W. Bush, the president's son. he was just coming of age as a political operative in his own right, and he was euphoric about the meaning of these latest events. "Do you think the American people are going to turn to a Democrat now?" he asked.

...

[Journalist Roy] Gutman's interview with Seselj left him with no doubt about Serb intentions. He filed his story on Seselj but felt that what he'd written was somehow hopelessly inadequate. The calm, understated nature of professional journalism had not been equal to the sheer horror of the deed and the threat. Something sinister was beginning to happen, with no restraints to limit the brutality.

...

Watching the intense byplay between those two [Albright and Cohen], Berger thought that one of the differences between Cohen and the activists in the administration like Albright, Clark, and Holbrooke, who was making occasional appearances at the principal's meetings, was that Cohen had not experienced the terrible human wrenching of Balkans One, in which they had stumbled, failed, and agonized over three years before finally patching together a policy that worked. None of the more senior principals ever wanted to go through that again.

Do read the book.