[lbo-talk] Learning to be stupid

Jacob Conrad jakub at att.net
Sat Sep 13 23:23:20 PDT 2003


Dwayne Monroe wrote:


>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



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