On Tue Dec 19, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> according to Thucydides, the Athenians took at the island of Melos about
> halfway through the Peloponnesean war. Athens wanted the allegiance and
> tribute of of previous neutral Melos. The Melians, originally (I believe)
> a Spartan colony, demurred. They appealed to justice and the Athenians
> replied that that was the argument of people without superior arms, and
> "the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must." After
> a brief, furious, futile battle, the Athenians then put all the men on the
> island to the sword and enslaved the women and children.
It just occurred to me that there is a Melian parable to the Iraq war beyond the arrogance of power -- it's how arrogance breeds disastrously misinformed grandiose schemes that destroy an empire.
The entire Melos episode happened during a truce between Athens and Sparta that was supposed to last fifty years but was instead a 4 year hiatus in the middle. The problem was that Athenians just couldn't sit still, and so kept on coming up with new schemes that made new trouble. They considered the neurality and previous Spartan loyalty of Melos as a slap in their face because it was island and they were the ruler of the sea while Sparta was a land power. So they crushed it just to feel their power. And then, after it made their blood rush to their head, what did they do? In the very next book, in the very next sentence in fact, they begin their stupendously disastrous invasion of Sicily, a catastrophe so enormous it becomes the turning point of the war that ends in Athens's defeat after 50 years as the dominant power among the Greeks.
Lastly, if you had only these two examples to go by, you might be excused for thinking that "intelligence failures" have a simple, obvious origin in overwheening arrogance. Here's the next paragraph of Thucydides, as he introduces the matter that will take up the rest of his book and be its climax:
<quote>
In the same winter the Athenians resolved to sail again against Sicily with larger forces than those which Laches and Euryedon had commanded, and, if possible, to conquer it. They were for the most part ignorant of the size of the island and of the number of its inhabitants, both Hellenic and native, and they did not realize that they were taking on a war of almost the same magnitude as their war against the Peloponnesians [i.e., Sparta].
<unquote>
Michael