----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
> Moreover, the quality of personnel is also high. Mr Kennedy, a
> visitor to the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, where
> mid-level officers from all the services go, says he has been very
> impressed by the intellectual quality of what goes on there, a
> standard to which he says only the British even come close. "These
> people are studying Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Basil
> Liddell Hart, and asking, 'What does this mean for us?'"
=========== Too bad they aren't taught about Solon and how many carry good old Pericles in their packs....
"...And we pay special regard to those laws that are for the protection of the oppressed and to all the unwritten laws that we know bring disgrace upon the transgressor when they are broken."
...
"Again, in nobility of spirit, we differ from most others in the way we conduct ourselves toward other peoples. We make friendships not by receiving kindness from others but by conferring it on others. Helping others makes us a more trustworthy friend, because we then act so as not to lose the good will that our help created. A city that makes its friendships by accepting help is not so trustworthy. Its conduct toward other peoples is going to be governed not by good will, but merely by its grudging sense of obligation. We alone do kindness to others, not because we stop to calculate whether this will be to our advantage, but in the spirit of liberality, which motivates us."
...
"...wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless..."
>
> The discomfort for allies comes in their increasing inability to
> contribute to the US war effort. The military contribution of allies
> in the campaigns of Desert Storm, Kosovo and Afghanistan has
declined
> progressively. That is in part because Kosovo exposed the
> shortcomings from the US perspective of having military targets
> vetoed in political capitals. But it was primarily because most of
> the offers Washington received were not of much use to its
> high-technology war effort, or could even have got in the way.
>
> Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, took political risks to win
> domestic approval to dispatch German forces that have not been
> needed. The French government was also unhappy that its offer of
> forces were not required.
>
> "You are talking about a Potemkin military alliance where the US
does
> 98 per cent of the fighting, the British 2 per cent and the Japanese
> are steaming around Mauritius," Mr Kennedy says.
>
> Other governments will have been watching closely too. Wayne Merry,
a
> former senior US diplomat in Moscow, says the US successes have
> further weakened the Russian general staff, who predicted disaster
in
> Afghanistan. It is likely, he says, to give President Vladimir Putin
> further ammunition in his efforts to shake up top military echelons.
>
> China, astonished by American technical prowess in Kosovo, is also
> likely to take note. Military specialists said China had been anyway
> undergoing a military modernisation, partly helped by Russia, but
> believe Afghanistan may serve to emphasise military caution in
> Beijing.
>
> Both countries, fearing a possible future strategic confrontation
> with the US, may decide that their only answer is their nuclear
> deterrent, such specialists said.
>
> Meanwhile, they argued that America's non-state adversaries - such
as
> Osama bin Laden and his successors - might find it increasingly
> difficult to find a safe haven around the world. But after watching
> the Afghan cam paign, they might be increasingly convinced that the
> only way to attack America is to replicate Mr bin Laden's strategy.
> This so-called asymmetrical warfare may thus continue to be the main
> threat to the US in the coming century.
>
> But the Afghan campaign may have an effect also on US policymaking.
> Some foreign policy observers believe US domination will encourage
> Washington to use its military as an instrument of diplomacy by
other
> means. Such an outcome would disturb many around the world, not
least
> the US military.
>
> Already Afghan successes have encouraged some conservatives to urge
> the administration to turn its military attention to Iraq, and
> replicate the combination of air power and local ground forces to
> oust Saddam Hussein from Baghdad. Mr Merry points out that the
US-led
> victories of the last decade have been against forces that had
> already been weakened by years of war. It would be perilous to
> extrapolate from that and assume victories elsewhere will come so
> cheaply. He cites Pericles, whose funeral oration was recorded by
> Thucydides, still studied in American war colleges: "What I fear
more
> than the strategies of our enemies is our own mistakes."