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HEY ! DICK MORRIS READS ZENPUNDIT !

Just kidding but I did get the drop on him by two days minimum.

ON MY READING TABLE

I cruised through Border’s recently and netted a few good catches that I have read or am starting to read. First off is BOYD – the Robert Coram biography of fighter pilot turned master military strategist, John Boyd. Skeptical of the tendency of biographers to oversell the importance of their subject, I emailed Dr. Barnett and asked him in his capacity as a professional military expert to give me an assessment of Boyd’s contribution to American military thinking. Tom sent me a one word reply:

” Substantial”.

With that endorsement, I began reading and Coram, a talented writer, draws the reader in just a few pages. It reminded me a little bit of I how I felt when I read Caro’s Master of the Senate.

Secondly I also finished Michael Scheuer’s Through Our Enemies Eyes ( I had already read Imperial Hubris ). You read Scheuer for the trees, not the forest. He’s a detail man on radical Islamist terror groups and al Qaida in particular. You learn useful things but you don’t walk away wanting to put the guy in charge of the GWOT ( reforming CIA management, yes – grand strategy, no). The book is ready for an updated edition to encompass recent events but it remains valuable to anyone intersted in al Qaida and Islamism.

My third book is a two-for-one translation of Japanese classics – The Book of Five Rings by Myamoto Musashi and The Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War by Yagyu Munenori. I am re-reading the first, having done so once before about twenty years ago and look forward to the second which I have never read. The translator, Thomas Cleary, is noteworthy for translating works in Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Pali. Whoa ! I don’t even know what Pali is ( I’d guess an Indonesian or Indian language) and Japanese, Chinese and Arabic are all notoriously difficult and subtle languages to master. Where I come from, Cleary is what we’d call ” learned”.

Lastly but far from least is The Coming of the Third Reich by Cambridge historian, Richard J. Evans. The only reason I’ve left this one for later is that I’m fairly deeply read in the Nazi period already and I’m trying to raise my knowledge level in other subfields these days. Evans is accomplished at his craft and has a sharp, analytica,l mind. In his In Defense of History, Evans managed to make historiography interesting and relevant to the non-specialist ( a task which takes some doing, trust me) as he deconstructed the deconstructionist and pomo attack on History as a discipline.

Ah, if only there were ” Reading Fellowships ” to sit home and dive into the books. That would be something.

RULES OF A MASTER STRATEGIST

1. Think of what is right and true.



2. Practice and cultivate the science.



3. Become acquainted with the arts.



4. Know the principles of the crafts.



5. Understand the harm and benefit in everything.



6. Learn to see everything accurately.



7. Become aware of what is not obvious.



8. Be careful even in small matters.



9. Do not do anything useless.



Miyamoto Musashi

DIPLOMACY IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE

The infamous Diplomad has passed from the blogospheric scene but the State Department Republican Underground Torch is in the hands of a worthy successor, The Daily Demarche. Today Dr. Demarche has posted an important piece on the public diplomacy problem. Reacting to a report that critically assesses the state of America’s international image, Dr. Demarche writes:

“This “relief” is the very connection that we should be looking to strengthen from a feeling of “better America than China” into a sense that we are serious when we speak about the spread of democracy and freedom. As our Embassies become more fortress like and we have less and less direct, personal, contact with our host country neighbors it becomes even more imperative that we maximize every resource to communicate with the world. Whenever possible officers should be engaging the host country population directly, coupled with exchanges and grants for host country nationals to visit America and learn first hand. Beyond that we should be using the Internet, television, film and radio as much as possible to provide information about America and Americans. “

Americans, who have a streak of crusading idealism mixed with self-absorbed pragmatism, tend to forget that a good measure of our previous popularity ( or assumptions of good intentions) that did exist in other nations resulted from the fact that our enemies were scary and aggressive dictatorships. Self-Interest is a magical thing. Standing next to Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. the Imperial Japanese Army, Mao ZeDong, Kim Il-Sung, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein made it hard not to look like the guys in the white hats. Now with the would-be world-rulers a memory, we are the big, hyperpower, interlopers allegedly standing squarely in the way of New Yugopotamiastan’s day in the Sun.

Our behavior really hasn’t changed much since 9/11. Imagine the reaction of Harry Truman to that event and you will realize that history will praise George W. Bush for his sense of humanitarian restraint. Pearl Harbor bought the Axis nothing but total war, the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No, what has changed is the self-interest of our friends and neighbors, most of whom see themselves as safe from the Islamist tide. They aren’t but that fact has yet to hit home with most of them. Patience, it will.

Until it does our appeals to anything but their practical national interests will fall on deaf ears. Our public diplomacy should hammer away at democracy and liberty but it should also be nuanced to the vanity and particular venality of our listeners. Men will walk a little further if the pot of gold is just around the corner.