Arms and influence

Why I hate the World War II memorial

While in DC, I finally got to see the World War II memorial. While we were resting our feet, Queenmommy asked me what I thought of it.

"Um, I don't know if there's any good way to say this, but..."

She immediately jumped in: "It looks like a Nazi memorial!"

Queenmommy knows whereof she speaks, having written a dissertation on totalitarian art and architecture, including the Third Reich's. Even someone who is less learned in the arts, and just has spent his life reading about the Nazis and World War II, could see the similarity. Why didn't the people who approved this structure?

If you have doubts, take a look at this side-by-side comparison. On the left is the Ehrenhalle, part of the Nuremberg rally grounds. On the right is a picture of the WWII memorial in Washington.

Not convinced? Take a look at this aesthetic comparison:

And then there are the eagles:

Even if the resemblances were completely superficial, the designers of the WWII Memorial should have avoided them altogether. In fact, the two monuments on either side of it suggest alternatives. The Washington Monument, like the Vietnam Memorial, has a distinctive simplicity, without any faux classical pretensions. The Lincoln Memorial has a more human element, unlike the tiny reliefs in the entry pathway to the WWII Memorial. (If you enter from the other side, you may miss them altogether.)

There were alternatives to the design, but now we're stuck with something that the very people we defeated in WWII would have applauded.

UPDATE: Garrison Keillor doesn't like the WWII memorial either.

Pants against Nazism

Dunkin' Donuts decided to cave into the silly, attention-grabbing boobs who accused Rachel Ray of sending secret pro-Jihadist signals by wearing a checkered scarf in a recent ad. As Poliblogger says, this "protest" makes about as much sense as a Monty Python skit. Especially since millions of people in the Middle East who are definitely not Jihadists--including Israelis, and even US troops stationed in Iraq--also wear the keffiyah to protect themselves from the desert sun, wind, and sand.

OK, let's start a silly, attention-grabbing protest of our own.

• Hitler wore pants.
• MSNBC's Brian Williams, Tim Russert, and Chris Matthews wear pants.

Draw your own conclusions.

Special ed for special operations

A book I picked up during my recent trip to DC, Derek Leebaert's To Dare And To Conquer, is a prime illustration of the difference between useless and useful forms of military history.

For someone like me, Leebaert's book was irresistible. A broad historical survey, from ancient to modern times, of special operations? I'm there!

Unfortunately, Leebaert doesn't deliver what he promises. Reading this book, you might get a feel for some important elements of special operations. However, you have to wade through a swamp of muddy ideas and vague historical allusions. When you finally arrive at the book's ill-defined destination, you won't find much of substance there.

How to write useless history
Leebaert undercuts his own argument almost from the beginning. It's clear that he knows that special operations are different, just as special operations forces (SOFs) are different from other units. For example, he observes that conventional military leaders have a love-hate relationship with SOFs. Given their elite status, SOFs often appear as the tool for every tough job, when in fact they're best suited for a particular set of tough jobs. Small, mobile, creative units may be good at raids, rescues, and psychological warfare, but they're not the right forces for taking and holding every well-defended position.

Leebaert has obviously read a creditable number of books about special operations, to reach this kind of insight. However, he doesn't share the benefit of his scholarship with his own readers. His "theory" of special operations is a muddle of characteristics ("picked men") and principles (the element of surprise) that could apply to a lot more than just the SOFs.

When his book moves from special operators to special operations, Leebaert gets even more confusing. Special operations encompass tactical and operational techniques that, over time, increasingly became the province of a specialized kind of military unit. Leebaert correctly cites this trend, but makes it unclear what these specialized units are doing that makes them different.

Not every instance of surprise is special operations. Therefore, it's pointless for Leebaert to cite Hannibal's victory at Lake Trasimine, when a hidden detachment of Carthaginians helped surround and destroy a Roman army, as an instance of "special operations." Nor does every attempt to play on the fears of the enemy qualify as a "special operation." Soviet soldiers infiltrating behind German lines to confuse, harass, and terrify the enemy achieved the same results as, years earlier, the Nazi armored spearheads. What makes one operation "special," and the other not?

Without a clear, precise definition of special operations undergirding it, Leebaert's book devolves into a mishmash of historical anecdotes. However, even these bits of information are allusions, not full  accounts of operations like the raid on the Tirpitz. You'll have to go elsewhere for these case studies.

Why, then, would you read To Dare And To Conquer? Good question. It provides neither a carefully-delineated theory of special operations, nor illustrative examples of this theory put into practice.

How to write useful history
For a stark contrast with Leebaert, check out William McRaven's Spec Ops. McRaven's prose may be less arty than Leebaert's, but he has a lot more useful information to convey.

Spec Ops starts with a simple, clear definition of special operations. Here's how they achieve specific military objectives in a particular way. You might have to puzzle over his diagrams, but after a couple of tries, they make sense. For example, his "inverted pyramid" of special operations--planning at the bottom; security and repetition in the middle; surprise, speed, and purpose at the top--is really a cone of events, radiating from planning through execution.

The rest of his book provides eight case studies, from the daring German glider attack on the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, to the Israeli rescue raid at Entebbe. Each case study provides enough information that you actually learn something about the event, if you're not already familiar with it. Even if you're already an expert on, say, the British raid on the Nazi-held port at Saint-Nazaire, you get McRaven's analysis applied to this operation. Here's where the operation followed the theory of special operations; here's where it didn't. Here's why it succeeded; here's why it failed.

This approach makes McRaven's book useful to a variety of audiences. Military planners can use it to re-think the doctrine that goes into training and manuals. Military historians can better understand the reasons why one side won, and the other side lost. An interested public can better appreciate when the nation should contemplate sending its "picked men" into combat, and when it shouldn't.

Now that's a book worth reading.

A difference between the US and Europe

On the same day in The Washington Post:

• Furious over high gas prices, protesters in the UK and France shut down intersections and ports.
• The former White House press secretary accuses the press of faltering when it should have been asking harder questions about the Iraq war.

In other words, European democracy looks more muscular than ours.

HRC in the bunker

Warning: There's a lot of salty language in this very funny video. But it's also very funny.

Softies

There are two levels to this news story about US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay "softening up" Uighur prisoners before handing them over to the Chinese. First, of course, there's the fact that we are handing them over to the Chinese, even though we know that the majority of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay shouldn't be there in the first place.

Second, there's the equally uncomfortable question, if the Chinese were not holding a huge amount of the US government's staggering debt, would US officials be transferring these prisoners into Chinese custody at all? If US foreign policy is at all being distorted by this debt burden, the next President and Congress need to make the reduction of this debt a high priority.

Public diplomacy 101

You're campaigning to be President of the United States. Your campaign tells you that a Christian minister who is supporting you once called Islam as a "conspiracy of spiritual evil," and regularly makes similar disparaging remarks about that religion.

You know that, if elected President, Muslims around the world will remember how you handled this situation. What do you do?

(A) Drop him faster than a greased bowling ball.
(B) In preparation for the inevitable press conference, craft a statement that rejects the minister's words without denouncing the minister personally. (Kinda like, "Hate the sin, love the sinner.")
(C) Describe the minister as "one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide."

Sigh. Sadly, McCain answered C. After eight years of not-even-half-baked efforts at public diplomacy with the Islamic world, McCain isn't exactly signaling that he'll do a substantially better job.

Keffiyah Kreme

When you spend all your time in a state of manufactured outrage, you start seeing the Devil in every shadow on the wall. That's how, if you see the perky Rachel Ray in a scarf, you might conclude that she is sending secret signals, in a Krispy Kreme ad, to support keffiyah-wearing Jihadists.

By that measure, Barbara "Barafat" Bush yearns for a return to the Caliphate. How else can you explain her choice of dress patterns? Eternal fashion vigilance, everyone!

Constant State of Antipathy (CSA)

Americans are too damn polite.

That's what I thought while reading a "pity the poor Confederates" screed in the designer's notes section of a wargame rulebook. Normally, that's where the designer talks about the decisions that went into a game simplifying the complexity of historical events, without being so complex that the game becomes unplayable.

We can study military history via the medium of a wargame without giving our approval or disapproval to the contending parties. No one should be confused, when playing a game about the European theater in WWII, that the German player is inherently pro-Nazi--just as reading a book about the Holocaust doesn't mean you approve of genocide.

In the case of the wargame C.S.A., however, the designer's notes take a very different turn, musing about whether both the North and South would have been better off had the South won its independence. Here are the key lines from the designer's notes, titled (I kid you not) "The South Was Right...":

But what if the South had won? What if all the rage and resentment over defeat, reconstruction, and civil rights had never happened, and the South were free to find its own road out of the heathen barbarism of slavery?

Defenses of the Confederate cause usually feature some mix of bad history, non sequiturs, unworkable attempts at moral equivalency, and specious arguments. The two sentences quoted above contain at least two of those elements. Let's knock a few of them down, one by one:

• The "rage and resentment over defeat" are, of course, the by-product of deciding to secede from the United States, fight a secessionist war, and lose. Anyone starting a war risks losing that war.
• The "rage and resentment" over reconstruction might have had some justification until the election of 1876, when Reconstruction effectively ended. Nothing happened during those 22 years that was so horrible that, 132 years later, Southerners should still smarting over it. Did carpetbaggers and granting the vote to former slaves constitute a chamber of horrors?
• Here's a simpler, more historically justified explanation for the South's "rage and resentment" against the civil rights movement: racism. Not states' rights, not Reconstruction, not the loss of some mythic cavalier culture. The people who turned fire hoses and dogs on their fellow citizens, just because they wanted to sit at the same lunch counter as everyone else, hated "the nigrahs."

Ultimately, all roads lead back to slavery. Other issues may be tangled up in it, but in 1861, it was the issue. Instead of it fading away, as the Founders had assumed it would, slavery grew. The total number of slaves expanded, as did the percentage of the Southern economy invested in both slaves and the land they worked. As cotton grew more profitable, the South's defense of slavery grew more vigorous. Southern politicians fought aggressively to extend slavery to new territories and states, and to prevent their slaves from escaping to the North.

By the eve of the Civil War, there was no clear sign that the South would "find its own road out of the heathen barbarism of slavery." Whether the driving force was the economics or the lifestyle of the plantation, the plantation itself ran on slave labor. Both Northerners and Southerners believed that, barring a major historical event, slavery would persist. And even if they had believed that "the peculiar institution" was fated to shrivel and die, what exactly is the moral argument for keeping further generations of human beings in bondage until it did?

There's no polite way of saying these things. The Confederates were the bad guys. They lost. Hallelujuah. Southerners defending "the Cause" are inescapably defending an evil institution. States' rights are, in theory, a fine thing; states' rights invoked to maintain slavery are an abomination.

Politeness should have its limits. When we allow a major segment of our own population to maintain a grudge against the rest of the country, based on historically and morally unjustified fantasies, we're doing all of us a grave disservice.

[For an excellent demolition of Confederate revisionism, see this series of posts at Lawyers, Guns, and Money.]

Casual Fridays: Buy this album now

The new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, is one of the best albums I've heard in a long, long time. You've heard the phrase, "If this music doesn't make you get up and dance, you must be dead." Along the same lines, if this album's lyrics and music don't grab you by the lapels and slap you around, you must be deaf or soulless.

It helps that Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is one of Cave's most approachable albums. The songs are just as good as "Red Right Hand," "Tupelo," "The Mercy Seat," or other, earlier tunes. It's just that this album starts with  songs that aren't quite as musically off-beat as some of Cave's earlier work.

Cave knows how to write lyrics and music that both demand your attention. The first song on the album, "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!" sounds a little like the Velvet Underground, and the words have the punch of a dark Biblical parable. (Click here for an interview in which Cave explains his fascination and frustration with Bible stories.) Cave's sardonic humor reaches full force with "We Call Upon The Author To Explain," with  Steppenwolf-like bass and guitar lines. And you can't get more carnal than "Lie Down Here (& Be My Girl)", probably the randiest song since Springsteen's "I'm On Fire" or "The Fever." The lyrics from "Jesus of the Moon" are both beautiful and disturbing in the fashion of Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat."

I feel that I'm being a bit unfair to Cave by comparing this album to the work of other people. I'm definitely not saying that Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is a series of pastiches of other people's work. Quite the opposite: this album has the distinct sound and words that have made Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds one of the most interesting (and under-appreciated) groups around.

Maybe these lines from "More News From Nowhere" will show exactly how good a songwriter Cave can be:

Now Betty X is like Betty Y minus that fatal chromosome
Her hair is like the wine dark sea in which sailors come home
I say hey baby I say hey Betty X
I lean close up to her throat
This light you are carrying is like a lamp
Hanging from a distant boat

And if that doesn't convince you, here's the video for the title cut: