zenpundit.com

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.

WHY ZEALOUS POLITICAL ACTIVISM IS NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH SCHOLARSHIP

Ward Churchill’s academic career, such as it was.

WAR AND BLOGGING

You may or not be aware of the huge flame-war that has broken out between Juan Cole and Jonah Goldberg recently. I’ve never been involved in one of these internet vendettas ( though, frankly, in the interest of increased site traffic maybe I should try -LOL ). Even on H-Diplo, where certain characters, like Eric Alterman, were worthy of a good old-fashioned flaming, I tended to stick to a policy of ” soft words turneth away wrath”. Overall, this practice has served me well because I often ended up with cordial relations with the people I was debating, Juan Cole among them, from whom I’ve learned not a few things about the Mideast.

One of the jabs Cole made at Goldberg was the following judgment:

” I don’t think there is anything at all unpatriotic about a young man opposing a war and declining to enlist. But a young man (and this applies to W. and Cheney too) who mouths off strongly about the desirability of a war is a coward and a hypocrite if he does not go to fight it.”

Strong words. And something of a moral free pass for anti-war activists since if military service is a duty incumbent upon citizens in a time of war this duty exists regardless of the political opinions held by the citizens. If this duty does not exist then we have a military composed of professional warriors who signed up for at least the possibility of action and the moral objection to war does not apply.

My view is that military service works well as a system either with elite volunteers or on an egalitarian basis of conscription to forge an army of citizen-soldiers with the fewest exemptions possible. I’m older than Goldberg and younger than Cole and, lacking prior military experience or critical skills, I probably would not be accepted as a volunteer today though I’d have made it in under a very broad-based draft. I have some reservations about a draft on libertarian grounds and for reasons of military efficiency but if we truly need a larger military to wage the war, middle-aged people like myself should at least be eligible for service and not merely 18-22 year olds kids.

A logical extension to Cole’s argument would be the military service should be a prerequisite for political leadership. The ancient Romans certainly thought so – Praetorship with the legions was required for eligibility for filling higher offices in the Republic like the consulship. Machiavelli, in his Discourses on Livy argued that this tradition produced a more virtuous and vital citizenry for Rome – something of an idealization given the cutthroat nature of Roman politics.

In our history, prior military service seemed to serve a number of our presidents well- Washington, Jackson, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK and Bush the elder. On the other hand, serving in wartime had little apparent impact on the presidencies of LBJ, Nixon, Carter and Reagan. General Ulysses S. Grant, the savior of the Republic, ended up as one of America’s worst presidents while Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, with nominal or no military experience, were our greatest.

There is some overlap between war and politics but excellence in one is no guarantee of wisdom in the other.

SEE CONDI RUN ?

Earl at Prometheus6 says ” No”.

“Might as well run Alan Keyes.

She’d get the Republican version of the Dean treatment at best. It will be discussed so folks can feel all warm and multiculturally color-blind. But as the primaries progressed they’d realize she “can’t win.” All those racist Democrats would crawl out of the woodwork to vote against her, you see.



Or worse, everyone would mouth the right words all the way up to election day, like they did in New York when David Dinkins first ran against Rudolph Giuliani. And great hordes of Southerners would just not vote.”

Of course that depends on who the Democrats put up.



If the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party manages to pull off their intended Deaniac coup and nominate an anti-war true-believer in 2008 to warm the hearts of the Moveon.org donors – say a Barbara Boxer type of liberal – Rice will get a hard look by some unlikely Republican voters. Not just the bloc of under the polling radar bigots Earl referred to in his post but also professional women and disenfranchised moderate Democrats. Would Rice pull in significant numbers of African-American voters ? She would not be Barack Obama but she would do better than Bush did.

And that would spell doom for the Democratic ticket. African-Americans are not a group they can even lose a slice of and remain competitive.