Unlike some American presidents, however, Eisenhower learned from his mistakes. In 1958, five years after being sworn into office, he reversed course. Rather than suck up to Egypt, Ike deployed American Marines to Lebanon to shore up President Camille Chamoun, who was under siege by Nasser’s local allies.
“In Lebanon,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, “the question was whether it would be better to incur the deep resentment of nearly all of the Arab world (and some of the rest of the Free World) and in doing so risk general war with the Soviet Union or to do something worse — which was to do nothing.” That is almost verbatim what the British said to justify their own war against Nasser when Eisenhower slapped them with crippling sanctions.
Reality forced the United States into a total about-face. Ike’s entire Middle Eastern worldview collapsed. Even before sending the Marines to Lebanon he announced that America was taking Britain’s place as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East. He had to start over even if he didn’t want to. “Nasser,” Doran writes, “the giant who rose from the Suez Crisis, crushed Eisenhower’s doctrine like a cigarette under his shoe.”
What happened between the Suez Crisis and Eisenhower’s intervention in Lebanon? A couple of things.
Ike’s hope to bring Syria into the American orbit alongside Turkey and Pakistan collapsed in spectacular fashion. So many Syrians swooned over Nasser after Egypt’s victory in the Suez Canal that Syria, astonishingly, allowed itself to be annexed by Cairo. Egypt and Syria became one country—the United Arab Republic—with Nasser as the dictator of both.
Washington’s attempt to groom Saudi Arabia as a regional counterbalance to Egypt also hit the skids when Nasser accused the Saudis of trying to assassinate him and foment a military coup in Damascus. The Saudis responded by shoving King Saud aside and replacing him with his Nasserist younger brother, Crown Prince Faisal.
The final blow came with the brutal overthrow of the pro-Western Hashemite monarchy in Iraq and the mutilation of the royal family’s corpses in public, thus toppling the last pillar of America’s anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East. Eisenhower had no choice but to stop being clever and return to the first rule of foreign policy: reward your friends and punish your enemies.
Michael J. Totten, “We Are Still Living With Eisenhower’s Biggest Mistake”, The Tower Magazine, 2017-02.
January 14, 2019
QotD: Eisenhower’s Middle East policy about-face
January 13, 2019
January 12, 2019
QotD: Cosmopolitanism and “world citizens”
… as I’ve noted before, the idea of being a “citizen of the world” is nonsense. If you get into trouble in a foreign country, it’s the U.S. embassy that’s required to swoop in to bail you out, not “the world.” Don’t get me wrong; there are many fine people abroad, and many of them may help you. But the U.S. government is the only one that has to, and that makes all the difference.
This should be obvious at a time when that cosmopolitan ideology is failing everywhere. Elites somehow got the idea that national loyalties would fade away and be replaced by a gentle globalism. And indeed, some of the old loyalties did fade away. But it turned out that the alternative to nationalism was not globalism, but particularism — the fracturing of polities into angry tribes that passionately loathe each other. And many in those tribes now demand to know why they should let cosmopolitan elites run things, when those elites declare, as a matter of pride, that they feel no greater loyalty to their fellow citizens than they do to strangers far away.
Megan McArdle, “In Defense of Trump’s ‘Day of Patriotic Devotion'”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-26.
January 11, 2019
QotD: Libertarian “co-ordination”
… advocates of liberty are about as good at coordinated action as a bunch of cats. I pretty much laughed myself (physically) sick when I read that the Sad Puppies “strictly enforced slate voting.” Not only did the numbers completely deny this (the only lockstep voting was no award) but the idea of anyone on our side doing anything “lockstep” just about… Giggle, snort.
If you told most people on our side “you have to do it this way, it’s the only way” you’d get “Who’s gonna make me, you and whose army?” And if you said “you have to do it this way or we’ll kill you,” you’re still likely to get “You’re not the boss of me.” We should have “Stupidly individualistic” stamped on our foreheads.
So long, coordinated marches like what the left (they of the collectivist will) executed are really impossible for us.
On the other hand… On the other hand, we seem to do pretty well in our long uncoordinated march of building under and building around and building over.
We might all be marching in different directions and to the tune of a different kettle of fish, but the other side is so profoundly incompetent, that even so we can still replace the moribund institutions they took over.
It’s just going to take a little while. Not a hundred years, but probably twenty. Not three generations, but one and a half.
In the end we win, they lose, but you can’t stop when your ankles first start hurting.
The last mile of the long march is always the hardest one, but the goal is almost in sight.
Sarah Hoyt, “The Long March”, According to Hoyt, 2015-12-20.
January 10, 2019
QotD: Pacifism
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
January 9, 2019
QotD: When the solution to one problem becomes a bigger problem
A couple of weeks ago I posted an article about the important of “junior leadership” in the military, especially, but, by extension, in all enterprises. My point was that if one lays a good, firm, foundation of “junior leadership” (tank and rifle section and troop and platoon commanders in the Army) then everything else ~ senior leadership, management, operations and even strategy ~ will probably thrive, but, if the foundation is weak, poorly laid, then success is unlikely in anything, and, if it does occur, it will be by accident.
I am reminded that back in the 1960s one of the (many) problems than then Minister of National Defence Paul Hellyer wanted to solve was pay. The Navy, Army and Air Force were having some trouble recruiting in the late 1950s and early 1960s: the post war recessions were over, the economy was growing, the threat of war seemed to be receding and military pay was quite low … all those things made recruiting and retaining the right people more difficult ~ especially for a military that was changing, rapidly, into a technologically sophisticated organization. There had been several boards and panels, reporting to both Prime Ministers Diefenbaker and Pearson, recommending new, better, higher pay scales for the military but little action had been taken because there was no public appetite for military pay raises. Paul Hellyer decided to ‘work around’ the problem by changing the definitions of “junior leadership.” Whereas, prior to the mid 1960s, the tank or infantry section commander had been a corporal (a rank that one could, theoretically, achieve after only 18 months of training ~ and 20 or 21 year old corporals were not rare, I was one) and the platoon or troop commanders were lieutenants, Mr Hellyer changed the rank of tank and section commander to sergeant (a rank that, typically, takes 10 years to achieve) and made promotion to corporal automatic, subject only to passing a trade/speciality skill course, and he made troop and platoon commanders captains and lowered the time that had to be spent as a lieutenant.
The effect was to debase the rank of corporal ~ which still retained its status as a “non commissioned officer” rank in the National Defence Act and Queen’s Regulations ~ by making privates and corporals interchangeable as “workers,” and, equally, to debase the captain rank by making captains and lieutenants interchangeable as first level combat commanders. In effect, while trying to solve one problem, Mr Hellyer created another ~ which I believe might be more serious.
Ted Campbell, “The foundation (2)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-02-21.
January 8, 2019
QotD: RINOs and other soft conservatives
The RINOs you complain about are RINOs now but they weren’t always. I don’t know how many of you remember the seventies. The right here was kind of like the right in Europe. It assumed that in the end communism would not only win, but DESERVED to win, and what the right disagreed with was the way to get there. It is useful to remember this was a time when William Buckley’s dictum that conservatism was “Standing astride History yelling stop” found deep resonance. Unpack that phrase. It assumes history comes with an arrow, that it’s not going our way, and that at best we can get it to pause.
Those RINOs who, by the way, took immense flack back then were as conservative as anyone dared to be. Because everyone knew in the end the reds won.
Then the wall fell down and we knew what true horrors lurked on the other side.
Individuals process these things fast enough. Well, my generation, at any rate, awakened by Reagan and shown that the win of the dark side was not inevitable, was more pro-freedom than people ten years older than us.
But when we saw the wall fall down, it pushed many of us further into the liberty side of the isle. Not only wasn’t a communist win inevitable, but their vaunted “strengths” like superior planning and better minority integration didn’t exist unless you really wanted to plan for three million size thirty boots for the left foot only, and integration meant grinding the minorities very fine and spreading them in the soil.
However cultures aren’t individuals. Cultures re-orient and process startling events very slowly.
Yeah, those older Republicans are still with us, and they were over 45 when the wall fell, which means they couldn’t reorient anymore. (Studies have been done.)
Sarah Hoyt, “The Long March”, According to Hoyt, 2015-12-20.
January 7, 2019
QotD: The lifecycle of the pop music industry
… the music industry, the people involved in the business end of things, is about half the size it was at its peak. A couple of years ago I did a post on the state of music. Per capita music sales have collapsed from their peak 15 years ago. That peak was largely a bubble created by the advent of the compact disc. Everyone went out and repurchased their music collection in the new digital format. A lot of old stuff was remastered for the new format and that boosted sales too.
We are now in a time when selling songs is no longer very profitable. Often, bands will put their new releases on YouTube free of charge. The song itself is a form of marketing for their live shows. In my youth, the opposite was the case. Bands went on tour to promote their latest album. The tickets to the show were often cheaper than the album. Now, anything you want is on-line so trying to monetize the songs has become a lost cause. As a result, the focus is on making money from the live shows.
In many respects, pop music is back to where it was before the great wars of the 20th century. In the 19th century, sheet music was the item of value in the music business. Many of our intellectual property laws, in fact, come from efforts to protect the owners of sheet music. The main source of income for musicians, however, was the live act. They went around performing for customers. It is where the expression “sing for your supper” started. Often musicians were paid, in part, with a meal.
The Z Man, “The Cycle of Life”, The Z Blog, 2017-03-01.
January 6, 2019
QotD: English racism
The old-style contemptuous attitude towards ‘natives’ has been much weakened in England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasising the superiority of the white race have been abandoned. Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
January 5, 2019
QotD: Nasser’s anti-American success, funded by the USA
If you’re familiar with the history of the region, you already know that Nasser aligned Egypt with the Soviet Union anyway and whipped up the Arab world into an anti-American frenzy. Ike’s gamble failed. Nasser’s heart was with Moscow all along. He cleverly used Eisenhower as a tool for his own ambitions and planned to stab the United States in the front from the very beginning.
One of Nasser’s deceptions should be familiar to anyone who has followed the painful ins and outs of botched Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Over and over again, Nasser used a strategy Doran calls “dangle and delay.” He repeatedly dangled the tantalizing idea of peace between Egypt and Israel in front of Eisenhower’s eyes, only to delay moving forward for one bogus reason after another. He never planned to make peace with Israel or even to engage in serious talks.
Nasser did, however, participate in theatrical arms negotiations with Washington that he knew would never go anywhere.
Eisenhower wanted to equip the Egyptian army. Nasser wasn’t stupid, though. He knew that Ike would attach strings to the deal. Egypt’s soldiers would need to be trained by Americans, and they’d be reliant on Americans for spare and replacement parts. Nasser really wanted to be armed by and tied to the Soviet Union, but had to pretend otherwise lest Eisenhower side with Britain, France, and Israel. So Nasser slowly sabotaged talks with the United States in such a way that made Washington seem unreasonable. That way, when he turned to the Soviet Union for weapons, he could half-plausibly say he had no choice.
Nasser did such a good job pretending to be pro-American that he convinced the United States to give him a world-class broadcasting network that allowed him to speak to the entire Arab world over the radio. Washington expected him to use his radio addresses to rally the Arab world behind America against the Russians. Instead, he used it to blast the United States with virulently anti-American propaganda and to undermine the West’s Arab allies. “Nasser,” Doran writes, “was the first revolutionary leader in the postwar Middle East to exploit the technology in order to call over the heads of the monarchs to the man on the street. Suddenly the Hashemite monarchy [in Iraq and Jordan] found itself sitting atop volcanoes.”
Nasser strode the Arab world like a colossus after his American-made victory in the Suez Crisis, and he became more brazenly anti-American as he gathered strength. Conning Ike was no longer possible, but Nasser didn’t need the United States anymore anyway.
Michael J. Totten, “We Are Still Living With Eisenhower’s Biggest Mistake”, The Tower Magazine, 2017-02.
January 4, 2019
QotD: The modern C.V.
Take that ghastly soul-destroying document, the curriculum vitae. It is as inherently inflationary as clipping the coinage or fiat money. A friend of mine, whom I knew to be competent and conscientious, consistently failed to be appointed to positions for which he was eminently qualified. My wife, who knew the ways of modern appointment committees, asked to see the curriculum vitae he was supplying with his applications for the jobs.
She was horrified: He would never get a job with such a curriculum, it was far too old-fashioned. It gave merely his formal qualifications and the positions he had previously held, with references. No, no, said my wife to him, what you need is to boast. You have to make out that your piddling research might be chosen very soon for a Nobel Prize, that your occasional good deeds were as at great a personal sacrifice as those of Mother Teresa, and that you are a person whose outside interests are carried out at levels equal to the professional; in other words that you are multitalented, multivalent, and quite out of the ordinary. Moreover, your ambition must be to save the world, to be a pioneer and a path-breaker, not merely to do your best in the circumstances. You must be grandiose, not modest.
Of course, every other applicant would be similarly boastful, and so, like star architects trying to outdo each other in the outlandish nature of their buildings, my friend’s boasts had to be preposterous, quite out of keeping with his admirable character. But once he had swallowed the bitter pill of realism, he was appointed at once. We all have to be Barons Munchausen now.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Merits of Nepotism and Boasting”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-12-08.
January 3, 2019
QotD: Distorting history for political ends
Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should — in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 — and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied. In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn’t count’, or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.
Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
January 2, 2019
QotD: The early United States
I’ve been reading Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty (2009), the best one-volume history of the very early American republic in the years between the enactment of the Constitution and the end of the War of 1812. In many ways, I notice, this story has the structure of an enormous joke. The American revolution was wrought by wealthy landowners, many of whom hoped to reproduce the hierarchical, agrarian lifestyle of the English countryside in the New World. These people became the early Federalists: they largely wanted to mimic the world of old Europe, only with themselves on top as rentiers, eschewing labour and trade alike.
But they had sown the wind. The commercial and intellectual forces they set in motion created a new, chaotic, competitive, egalitarian kind of society. And one way this manifested itself was as a media crisis. The Revolution overthrew all established authority, or tended to, and created the conditions for an unfamiliar kind of unregulated, rampant press — an ecosystem full of lies, partisanship, personal abuse, and scurrility.
Even those who made sneaky use of this new system, like Thomas Jefferson, left testimonies to their overall exhaustion and confusion as literate, curious people. You get the impression that being a reader in that time and place, with rumours of wars and tales of corruption zinging around, was hard work.
Colby Cosh, “In 2017, when the shooting stops, the media warfare begins”, National Post, 2017-02-02.
January 1, 2019
QotD: The hallmark of civilization
The true mark of the civilized society is not that it defends the rights of people who are loved by the bulk of the population, for those people need no defense. No one, after all, will arrest a popular person for saying or doing popular things. The true mark of the civilized society is that it defends the rights even of those who are universally reviled.
Indeed, in a truly civilized society, there would be no question but that you would defend the rights of people who disgust you provided they do no violence to others.
Our society is not civilized.
Perry Metzger, “On Civilization”, Samizdata, 2017-03-30.
December 31, 2018
QotD: Political convictions induce a distorted perception of reality
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians. It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell’s soldiers slashing Irishwomen’s faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the ‘right’ cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities — in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna — believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
