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“CALLLING ALL CZARS”

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan: November 16, 1581 by Il’ia Efimovich Repin . Probably not the kind of czar everyone has in mind.

The blogosphere is abuzz with the inability of the Bush administration to find an impressive figure to become “the War Czar” having suffered four rejections from high ranking retired military officers (this mirrors an inability to fill key posts in the intelligence community). There are strong reactions from Left, Right and Center, generally negative. I will ask a different question, however:

Why are Americans in love with the “Czar”metaphor?

First, we are a liberty-loving democracy without an autocratic tradition. We like inefficient government with lots of checks and balances, staggered electoral terms, judicial review and leaks to the media. Secondly, it is not as if the”Czars” ( henceforth spelled correctly as “Tsar”) have an impressive track record that we should be following, just read the Marquis de Custine sometime.

Tsar Paul was mad and several others were feebleminded; Catherine the Great was an usurper and poseur French intellectual-wannabe; Tsar Nicholas I and Alexander III were iron-fisted tyrants; and the last Tsar, Nicholas II ” the Unlucky” was a complete incompetent who ended up being slaughtered in a basement by third-rate Bolshevik revolutionaries who threw the body of Russia’s last Autocrat down a mineshaft. Because of Nicholas, Russians suffered seventy years of Communist totalitarianism, terror, famine and poverty. Hoo-boy! I want him running the war in Iraq! He did such a great job on the Eastern Front!

Even the “good Tsars” were no great shakes. Peter the Great was a far-seeing modernizer but his namesake capital, St. Petersburg rests upon unnumbered bones of the serfs who toiled in the swampy mire to build it. Russia’s equivalent to Abraham Lincoln, Alexander II “the Tsar-Liberator” freed the serfs but left them landless and impoverished, ended his life being blown up by an anarchist’s bomb. These two top the Tsar-list; it goes downhill from there.

And then of course, there is Ivan Grozny or “Ivan the Terrible”, the terrifying medieval Tsar whom Stalin idolized as a role model. It was Ivan who drove away the ferocious Tatar hordes, unleashed Russia’s first secret police, the Oprichnina, had his nobles torn apart by dogs and even killed his own son in a fit of blind rage. Tsar Ivan was feared by all of Russia’s neighbors and none dared stand against him.

Hmmm….maybe that’s exactly the kind of “czar” we need after all.

WORTH A LOOK

A few days ago, I did a focused skim British Army General Rupert Smith’s memoir , The Utility of Force. Smith deals in detail with scenarios that readers here would recognize as “System Administration” and “4GW“, though Smith uses neither of those terms. Smith also understands that war is no longer compartmentalized but is part of a seamless arc of conflict going on at multiple levels. Interview video clip of General Smith talking to Jon Stewart here.

WINTER’S UNRELENTING GRIP

It has been a long time since Chicago has had snow in mid-April.

NEW TO THE BLOGROLL

Hoo-HA! New additions !

(Unfortunately, there’s a problem right now with Blogrolling but these blogs have been/are being added)

Albion’s Seedlings

NewsHog

The Networked Book

The Strategist

I should trim the deadwood as well. If you are alive and intend to return to blogging and wish your dormant blog to stay on my roll a bit longer, drop me an email. Inert links irritate a portion of the blogospheric audience.

ADDENDUM:

Global Frontier

IF OUR RESPONSE WAS BEING PROBED, WE FAILED

If you are a regular reader of Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye , then you know that he is a dog aficianado who raises them for show and for specialized training. Naturally, the contamination and recall of pet food was a story he had been following with a considered care that I have not. Dave has put forth an intriguing thought experiment however “Wargaming an attack on the food supply“:

“Although we have an entire enormous expensive facility within DHS ostensibly devoted to the subject of biodefense including agro-terrorism, the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, to my eyes much of what’s available in open source form on this subejct seems very rudimentary.

*a toxin or pathogen would be introduced into a basic food item either via a producer, distributor, or manufacturer

*the item would be packaged and distributed throughout the country

*the retail products would be purchased by consumers

*individual cases of injury or death would begin to appear

*complaints would be made to retailers and/or brand name vendors

*at some point relevant government agencies would become engaged

*there would be a scramble for causes and sources

*conflicts between agencies would emerge

*at some point the toxin or pathogen would be identified, its source might be identified, and a solution put into place

Some number of lives would have been lost, resources consumed in pursuing the problem, and the ultimate solution would bring that process under control but the objective of the attack would already have been accomplished: there would be a diminution of confidence in government, society, and other people.

A modern economy and modern society operates on trust.”

Dave has much more, of which you can read the rest, here.

If you recall the infamous anthrax letters, Dave is outlining a hypothetical 4GW style systempunkt test of our bureaucratic response capacity, which I am sad to say, remains obtuse and palsied in the face of the non-obvious.