Here’s Part Three. One more part to follow. Part One is here. Part Two here.
Backing up here to get a running start at catching up with where I left off at the end of Part One.
Generally, people don’t argue the facts. Or with the facts or to get at the facts. We don’t even argue ideas. We argue in favor or our opinions. We champion what we already believe, and it’s usually the case that we believe something because it confirms something else we need to believe, usually that “I’m right to think what I think and live as I live.”
Read a blogger or a pundit approvingly citing a “new study” and you’re probably reading a sentence that should have been written more honestly as “Here’s a study that proves everything I already know about how the world works is right, so there!”
Or to put it another way. We’re in the habit of believing what we need to believe in order to justify what we want to do.
But beyond that, an awful lot of what we know we know we don’t really know. There isn’t even anything there to know. It’s just something we think. It’s something we picked up somewhere and let stick in our heads, and we continue to think it only because we’ve never thought about it since we first thought it---we haven’t bothered to re-submit it to any tests against the facts---or because it’s convenient to think it. It’s as I just said. It confirms something else we know we know.
I just finished reading Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad
So, I was reading along with interest, trusting I was getting the facts, enjoying the book as history, journalism, and an adventure story, when I ran headlong into this, Bergen’s explanation for why a Democratic President seemed as aggressive and determined about the use of force as only Republican Presidents are supposed to be:
Perhaps [President Obama’s] views on national security had to do with when he came of age. Obama was the first major American politician in decades whose views about national security weren’t deeply informed by what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam. Too young to have served in Vietnam as the senators John McCain and John Kerry did, he was also too young to have avoided service in Vietnam as Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush had. For Obama, Vietnam was a nonissue, and it is possible this fact contributed to his greater use to his willingness to use military power in comparison to an older generation of Democrats. It took Clinton two years to intervene in Bosnia, which was on the verge of genocide, whereas it took Obama only a week or so to intervene in Libya in the spring of 2011, when dictator Moammar Gadhafi threatening large-scale massacres of his own population.
At first glance, this might come across as plausible but commonplace. After all, we know that not just liberals but the U.S. Military high command was traumatized by the war in Southeast Asia. “No More Vietnams” became not just a rallying cry for antiwar protesters. It became part of the basis of our foreign policy. It is, essentially, the Powell Doctrine.
But two things pulled me up short here.
A flash of memory and a longstanding prejudice.
Here’s the prejudice: Any use of events or issues from the 1960s to explain anything, including events and issues from the 1960s, is pure shinola.
I’m not about to defend that. I don’t recommend it. I’m not apologizing for it either. It’s just one of those things I think without thinking. What matters is that it made me stop reading and start arguing.
What are you saying, Bergen? Shadows of Vietnam were why it took Bill Clinton two years to send troops into Bosnia?
We know that, do we?
How do we know?
That’s when the memory kicked in.
Here’s what I remembered. The Bosnian Civil War began in 1991.
Bill Clinton inherited our policy in Bosnia from George Herbert Walker Bush.
And Bush’s policy was based on several factors, including that, unlike his son, the first President Bush wasn’t keen to wage one war on top of another---he didn’t want to commit U.S. troops and resources to another war so soon after the Gulf War--- but mainly on Bosnia’s being seen as a Europe’s problem and it’s being up to the Europeans to solve it. The Europeans were saying so themselves. The UN was brought in, but NATO was to stay out of it, so that we’d stay out of it, so that the Russians would stay out of it. It wasn’t Vietnam that was weighing on people’s minds. It was World War III.
That’s what I remember. Not what I know. I know what Bill Clinton says decided his approach to Bosnia, because I looked it up in his autobiography:
My own options were constrained by the dug-in positions when I took office. For instance, I was reluctant to go along with Senator Dole in unilaterally lifting the arms embargo, for fear of weakening the United Nations (though we later did so in effect by declining to enforce it). I also didn’t want to divide the NATO alliance by unilaterally bombing Serb military positions, especially since there were European, but no American soldiers on the ground with the UN mission. And I didn’t want to send American troops there, putting them in harm’s way under a UN mandate I thought was bound to fail.
Sounds to me as though Clinton wanted to send in our troops right away and that what took two years was not his having to exorcise any ghosts of Vietnam that might have haunted him but his having to untangle the diplomatic knots created before he took office. Once that was taken care of and Bosnia became a NATO operation, we went right in.
What’s more, a few years later, when Kosovo was on the brink of genocide, the only thing that slowed Clinton’s decision to send our bombers into the air was resistance from the Republicans who controlled Congress. By this point, all the GOP cared about was running Clinton out of town.
As for Vietnam being a nonissue for President Obama, that may or may not be so. What is so is that his administration’s military strategy in Libya was modeled on Clinton’s success over Kosovo.
It’s a theme of Bowden’s The Finish, in which Bowden is generally admiring of the President’s decision-making in dealing with al Qaeda and going after bin Laden, that he’s been able to act more forcefully because he has more and better forces at his command. Vietnam has nothing to do with it, not because the President came of age that much later but because he became President after technological and tactical advances had improved the reliability and effectiveness of drones and special ops to the deadly degree they’ve now achieved. When President Clinton went after Osama bin Laden he had to throw cruise missiles at him and hope that bin Laden didn’t see them coming and was still in the general vicinity when they arrived. President Obama had the option of sending a single, small drone that would have fired a pencil-sized missile to kill bin Laden. He chose not to because there’d have then been no body left to prove to the world that we’d gotten him. When President Carter ordered the attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran, the military practically had to invent the kind of commando unit that has since evolved into the Seals and Delta Force. On the night Seal Team Six went into Abbottabad, about a dozen similar missions were underway in Afghanistan, Waziristan, and Yemen.
However the Vietnam War might have shaped their characters and thinking, the fact seems to be that both President Clinton’s and President Obama’s approaches to using military force were mainly based on the diplomatic and military exigencies of the specific moments when they had to make their decisions.
My point isn’t that Bergen doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s that here it doesn’t appear he’s talking about what he knows. He’s writing about something he thinks and passing it along as if it’s something he knows.
It happens. And if it happens to someone like Bergen, a meticulous, diligent, professional journalist of long practice and experience, it could happen to anyone. It does happen to anyone. It happens to anyone who writes and argues for a living. Most political analysis, op-ed writing, and blogging is a matter of passing along thoughts as if they are facts. It’s a hazard of the job. The writing’s often done in a rush. We have deadlines. We have other commitments. We have colds, backaches, stomach bugs, ulcers, mosquito bites, the flu. There isn’t time to check and re-check every little fact. Maybe we do a quick google. Maybe we run down to the library or reach over to the bookshelf to pull down one book, scan the index, skim a chapter or two. Maybe we do the most unreliable thing of all and ask a colleague or a friend, “Hey, does this sound right to you?” Mainly, though, we rely on our memories of stored facts. And we pride ourselves on our memories. “I have a head for the facts,” we brag to ourselves. “If it’s in here,” we say, mentally tapping our foreheads, “It’s in there for a reason.” The reason being that smart guys and gals like us wouldn’t bother to remember it---wouldn’t bother to know it---if it wasn’t true.
To the consternation, chagrin, and infuriation of the Washington Press Corps, one of the goods the rise of blogging did was spread news that critics of political journalism had been trying to get across for decades---there’s a narrative. Journalists don’t go out and uncover stories as much as they go out and cover the story they’ve already told themselves over lunch or at parties or while passing time on the campaign bus. And that story is concocted out of a shared store of memories of past campaign narratives, skimmed articles and books, retold conversations with “reliable” sources, lessons drawn from high school and college history and political science classes twenty, thirty, and forty years in the past now, shopworn anecdotes, received opinions, badly digested polls, gossip, the plots of movies and television shows, alcohol-fueled flashes of insight, untested and unthought-through theorizations and sudden inspirations by people who haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a week, facts everybody knows---a fact being something everybody on hand knows to be a fact without having to check it with Siri---the occasional, actual fact, and even some intelligent and original reporting uninfluenced by the narrative.
It doesn’t matter how smart, how skeptical, how diligent, how intellectually disciplined any individual reporters are. For almost all of them, including the best, their chief research tool is some explicit or implicit variation of the question, “Does this sound about right to you?”
Naturally, members of the press corps have not been happy to have had this pointed out. Naturally, many denizens of the blogosphere have been more than happy to do the pointing out.
But bloggers concoct their own narratives too and out of the same sort of gumbo of shared memories and “facts”. (Don’t get me started on the influence of The West Wing on the the left side of the bandwidth’s understanding of how politics works.) We like to think we’re dealing in facts, that even when we’re just giving an opinion, we’ve got the facts to back us up. But, really, when it comes down to it, we’re just telling stories.
This isn’t because we’re just as bad as the Beltway Insiders. It’s because we’re just as human.
This is how human beings think.
People don’t naturally or easily think in carefully constructed debating points or in bar graphs or mathematical proofs. We think in stories. And when we debate, discuss, argue, or exchange ideas, we exchange stories, although sometimes we do it at the top of our lungs or through clenched teeth.
We may have facts to back ourselves up, numbers, math, science. But we don’t usually use them. Instead, we tell stories about there being these facts. We tell stories about how other people have gathered and interpreted them. And these stories aren’t even stories we’ve created ourselves. They’re stories we’ve been told, almost always by people who were told them by others who were told…you get the idea.
The personal narratives that make up out thinking are made up of twice-told tales and received opinions.
We didn’t think a lot of what we think we think. We just heard it someplace.
Many people will read Manhunt and not even have that paragraph register. It registered with me because of my prejudice. But others will take it in without a second thought, because they already know it, know what I mean? Others will read it and it will lodge in their brain because it tracks with something they know from somewhere else or because it confirms one of their prejudices. And others will read it and nod and file it away in a mental drawer because, well, Peter Bergen put it in his book and he wouldn’t have put it in there if it wasn’t true, would he?
And at some point, somewhere, these facts will be passed along, in an op-ed, in another book, in a blog post, in an argument in a bar. Bill Clinton was skittish about using force because of his draft dodging youth during the Vietnam War. Barack Obama has no qualms about it because his cohort of late Baby Boomers was spared having to worry about the war.
Now here’s the thing.
I’m fairly certain that Bergen is passing along an opinion up in that paragraph. And I’m willing to bet it’s not his opinion. I mean that it’s not original with him. It’s something he heard somewhere. After all, it’s based on something I’ve heard somewhere. We’ve all heard it. Many times. I’m not certain he doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing. He opens with a seemingly cautionary “perhaps,” but that might be hedging. Still, he may have sources that back him up, interviews with President Clinton or President Obama or with people close to them who know to what degree Vietnam figured in their decisions. I’m surprised he doesn’t list Clinton’s autobiography in his bibliography, but how smart am I to trust a politician to give a straight-forward, non-self-serving version of any event in his career?
I know, because he’s said it many times, that Clinton still feels guilty over his failure to intervene in Rwanda. It could be that in describing how he handled Bosnia he’s implicitly excusing how he didn’t handle Rwanda. He could be trying to polish his legacy by balancing off a failure with a success. And if Vietnam did figure in his thinking as a drag on his willingness to use force, how certain is it he would know it? Perhaps he was not conscious of it and still wasn’t when he sat down to write My Life.
And then that paragraph of Bergen’s seems to be contradicted by points Mark Bowden makes in The Finish, but, although, like I said, a reason I trust the overall factuality of Manhunt is that it tracks with the story as Bowden tells it in The Finish, a reason I trust what’s in The Finish is that I had the story confirmed by having immediately followed up reading it with Manhunt.
And another reason I trust what’s in The Finish is that I read and enjoyed and trusted other books by Bowden. Black Hawk Down. Killing Pablo. The Best Game Ever. And that last one I trusted because it expanded upon a story I already knew from a comic strip I read in Boy’s Life when I was around eight or nine.
So I don’t trust Bergen on this. But I can’t trust Clinton either. And I probably shouldn’t trust Bowden as much as I do. In short, I don’t know enough to know Bergen is wrong. I only know enough to make think he might be.
It’s possible Bergen doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But it’s even more possible that I don’t either.
Possible?
Probable.
But this is what marks me as a card-carrying member of the Reality-based Community and helps pay my dues.
A healthy dose of self-skepticism and a, I hope, cheerful willingness to be proven wrong.
End of Part Three. Part Four on the way. Yes, there’s going to be a Part Four. But that should be it. I appreciate your putting up with this. I’ve had a logjam of posts in my head and I need to write my through this to unjam it.
Thanks for this. You realize that you've described about 80% of a pundit's job here (I think the other 20% is divided between misrepresenting conclusions of studies and going to parties).
Posted by: Cheez Whiz | Monday, March 18, 2013 at 05:45 PM
Cheez Whiz,
There's an economy of awesome to your second sentence that ought to get mentioned in the "Best Comment" section of any number of web awards. (No, really. Given what I'm about to say that bears clarification.) It also has the virtue of confirming something I already believe to be true ;)
Lance,
The whole "ghosts of Vietnam/no more Vietnams" thing is a very interesting canard, and unfortunately for you it's one where I have some research background :) I think there are really three "homes" for that particular narrative:
1) The culture wars, where it is just one more part of the Doxology on each side, for the right "No more Vietnams because we coulda won if only..." and on the left "No more Vietnams because it degraded our national character in these ways...." Do I have more sympathy for the left's case? Damn right. And it's not like it didn't hit home right where I lived: one uncle who was branched armor as an Army officer, his kid brother with a high draft number waiting every year, my mother's first fiance (she was married to Dad by the time of this event, but still) killed in the Ia Drang early on. But the language of "Vietnam ghosts/never again" has a particular place in the living-room set of the Culture Wars.
2) The culture of the military itself, where "no more Vietnams" quite specifically meant "no more conflicts where we get thrown in by the politicians and then hung out to dry when it gets intractable or unpopular." This involved a fair amount of historical misrepresentation, and also meant placing responsibility for politicians' fecklessness in places it did not always belong. In particular that meant blaming Democrats when Republicans (especially Kissinger and Ford) were as much to blame for what bothered the serving officers, but in that day and age, much as the Church of England was once described as "the Tory Party at prayer," the senior officer corps was even more than now the Republican Party in uniform, there's some fudge factor on facts there.
3)The really big one -- them there media folks. It's a quick, universally grasped, emotionally wrenching notion that grabs people's attention, plays to their assumptions no matter what those happen to be(every salesman who ever lived wants you to seem them as being on your side) and generally does every other thing you've sketched out in these pieces of late.
The difficulty of course, is that it has only one basis in actual fact over the past forty-odd years: the collection of strategic sentiments that got summed up in the Weinberger Doctrine (later renamed the Powell Doctrine because Colin was always good at cadging off other people's ideas and passing them off as his own. It's what the most politically-successful staff officers do for a living for which see also Petraeus, David.) The friction is there, on that front, but this notion of American caution or aversion, and specifically Democratic caution or aversion (again the only way this works is Carter/Hippie Derangement Syndrome and God knows there was plenty of that in two generations' worth of reporters.) It's just not there in the actual record.
Forty three years ago this September, my beloved late uncle (died last December of a sudden, massive heart attack while snorkeling in the Caribbean because he knew how to live, dammit) sat on two different runways on two different occasions, one in Turkey and one in West Germany, at the head of his troop of airborne-qualified light armor attached to the 1st (Airborne) Brigade of the old 8th Infantry Division in Europe, waiting for the runway light to go green so they could fly the long way round various countries that wanted no part of the politics and jump into Jordan to, in the brigade CO's words, "hold Jordan for King Hussein." This was Black September, and we got that close to our first shooting war in the Middle East, still eyeballs deep in Vietnam, and it was this part -- launching off into another conflict in a place the uniformed Pentagon considered a strategic backwater vis-a-vis the Soviets while we were still trying to "win" Vietnam, that probably did as much as anything to develop a working model of the syndrome. In other words, the sentiment existed specifically because over the coming decades it was violated in practice so very, very often.
It just goes on from there. The October War in 1973? There was a huge desire not to get involved but when it went south Nixon and Kissinger stepped on the gas of the resupply airlift and it turned (needlessly) into a Cold War confrontation by the end, with the Sixth Fleet bumping prows with Soviet ships and B-52s in the air just to make the point. Even Vietnam was not immune to "no more Vietnams" because one of the graduated series of options in the evacuation of Saigon was landing the Marines used to evacuate as a beachead and sending an Army division from Hawaii to cut off the North's supply lines before starting another round of bombing. It took Eisenhower-like sangfroid from Ford, to his credit, to tamp down the crazy on that one. Hell, even the Mayaguez incident was supposed to kick the "Vietnam syndrome": look at the newsmags' headlines from then, or Barry Goldwater's comment about the US finally getting back to its customary business of kicking ass and taking names. 'Round the same time you get the "Paul Bunyan" incident in Korea that would, at least, have ended up a brutal firefight in the DMZ if fingers on either side had gotten itchy, or the detailed plans (drawn up on Ford/Kissinger's instructions by one Donald Rumsfeld) to put American troops in between the Israelis and Syrians in Lebanon's civil war in 1976, long before Reagan.
As for Carter? We were a couple of rickety DC-3s owned by an American mining company, used to pull the company's US employees out of a war zone, from ending the rebel invasion of southern Zaire in '78 with the 82nd Airborne plus some Belgian paratroopers in tow. (The company got the Yanks out, the French charged in for reasons of state, and we were able to get by doing the airlift.) And Iran? There are so, so many ways that it's incredible that did not end up with Carter -- who often wanted to -- unleashing the Strategic Air Command and various bits of the US Navy. Carter wanted a blockade, and the port at the Kharg Island refinery mined, in November. Had to be talked out of it by his ultra-hawk Zbigniew Brzezhinski: Brzezhinski pushed for the April rescue to reinvigorate national pride and found a receptive audience, but talked Carter down from heavier force (which might have had more leverage against the chaotic, factionalized politics in Tehran) because Brzezhinski feared it might push Iran towards the Russians and queer the pitch on his master plan to "hand the Soviets their Vietnam" in Afghanistan. We were even luckier with the actual revolution the February before, when north of six thousand American corporate gypsies and technical advisors to the Shahs' regime were stuck in hotels in downtown Tehran waiting for flights out when Khomeini came home. A few armed crowds blockading the lobbies and it would've made the Embassy crisis look like a teddy bear's picnic and, at that point in the Cold War, demanded a response a frustrated Carter would willingly have given. At the end of his administration he even asked for a formal declaration of war to be drawn up in case the Iranians (who didn't have an actual political process for deciding what to do with the hostages until after Iraq invaded) reneged on the deal that ultimately freed our diplomats.
Saint Ronnie? Don't get me started. Including the fact that, in a delightful cognitive disconnect (one of so many in those eight years) he foisted a Vietnam-syndrome-in-miniature on the military in Lebanon. Then there are the if-necessary plans for invading Libya during the skirmishes of '86, the near-war on the Nicaraguan-Honduran border (the 82nd Airborne parachuted in expecting to fight) a year later, or the "tanker war" in the Gulf that started as a far larger plan to lay waste Iran's commercial and military ports with aircraft carriers and our recommissioned battleships. Makes "Poppy" Bush's three wars in four years (Panama, the Gulf, Somalia) look more of a piece.
And Bubba? He took office with U.S. Marines physically trading pot-shots with Somali bandits in the Horn of Africa's back country, and in less than a year staged his first round of "cruise missile diplomacy" with Saddam Hussein. I would say -- and it's a very specific thing, one Bill would talk his way around the other side of -- that the roots of his haphazard policy on degrees of military intervention lay in Somalia. And they lie there because of his desire to outflank the Mighty Wurlitzer on his draft dodging, to show he was an LBJ rather than a Carter, and pursued the disastrous extension of the Somalia mission past the Marines' famine-relief/peace enforcement gig. That effort to have a big swinging foreign policy of course went south, through no direct fault of his own, in the Bakara Market that October and afterwards it was not at all Clinton himself, but Clinton and his political advisers' response to the media's response -- things we think we already know rear their head again -- that guided the unforgivable handling of Rwanda, the Grenada-like heavy hand on Haiti (although to be fair it was a far better thought-through, vastly less shambolic operation at both the political and military levels), and the various contortions of Bosnia and Kosovo policy. It also started the whole business about the American public "not tolerating casualties." We lost more people in one Beruit barracks than in the Battle of Hue, and in one of his moments of human decency Reagan showed up at Dover to pin the Purple Hearts on each casket. We lost roughly that many people in the Gulf in what seems like a fit of absence of mind between Schwartzkopf's press conferences. We've argued and protested over Iraq because it was criminal foolishness (the Dubya remix) and Afghanistan because it profoundly lost its way. The problem about casualties was that they became a problem when a President the Republicans needed to have the media tar as un-masculine (Bubba? Really? I don't actually like the man much but I've never gotten that vibe) and useless on national security happened to suffer unexpected casualties one day in October 1993. Now that is a genius piece of building a first draft of history out of whole cloth.
Sorry for the ramble; like I say it's a bit of a pet subject, one of many I fear ....
Posted by: El Jefe | Tuesday, March 19, 2013 at 12:42 AM
"It’s a pretty good book, well-written, informative, factual, or at least I trust that it is factual. Bergen has a good reputation as a journalist. His previous books on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were well-received and, as far as I know, haven’t been shown up as bunk."
Often books that are called "factual" ought to be more accurately described as "bibliographied." The certainty of the "facts" of the items footnoted in turn is based on their legacy of facts, and so on, as in the barber's mirror where you are really just looking at yourself. Tradition as a force is a generally accepted theory to base one's "facts" on, and as you point out, this bias is everywhere.
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Tuesday, March 19, 2013 at 06:55 AM