>Joanna posted (essay by Luciana Bohne from PEN-L):
>
>No one knows what socialism or fascism is, so I spend
>time writing up digestible definitions. No one knows
>what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is
>
Well, evidently _some_ people know what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is--at least, "one military analyst" does. From Maureen Dowd's column today: <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/opinion/14DOWD.html>
Secretary Pangloss at Defense and Wolfie the Naif are terminally
enchanted by their own descriptions of the world. They know how to
use their minds, but it's not clear they know how to use their eyes.
"They are like people in Plato's cave," observed one military
analyst. "They've been staring at the shadows on the wall for so
long, they think they're forms."
Perhaps one further reflection of elite discontent with the Dubyites, signs of which are proliferating lately, prefiguring their demotion from the ranks of the Rulers, though Guardians they shall always be. For a concise expression of elite "prudence," albeit without illustrative analogies drawn from the Classics of World Literature, see the following, quoted in Tom Engelhardt's e-mail dispatch <http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/>
"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an
occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not
changing objectives in midstream, engaging in ‘mission creep,' and
would have incurred incalculable human and political costs.
Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find
Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been
forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition
would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and
other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there
was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our
principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set
a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going
in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United
Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of internatio!
nal response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone
the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an
occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a
dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome." (This quote
was spotted by the eagle-eyed editor of the History News Network
website in George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed
(1998), pp. 489-90.
Do "military analysts" of the kind likely to be quoted by Maureen Dowd know what socialism or fascism is, I wonder, and if so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Jacob Conrad