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• Wednesday, May 14, 2008 10:06 AM

  @thomas_c

  That was a very smart post. You laid out a part of the dynamic that does not get discussed nearly enough and gave it some good historical context. Thanks for that.

  I'd add that after 1973, our security establishment was in a panic over what the soviet-trained Egyptian and Syrian armies could accomplish. Shifting the containment burden to diplomacy ... detente in this case ... was also a reflection of that panic over the threat and our sudden loss (due to our own stupidity) of options and strategic flexibility. Sounds familiar, eh?

  You also spoke to one of the things that's frustrated me for the past several years (just one, all the unnecessary carnage, the destruction of our institutions and evisceration of the constitution and rule of law may have actually produced more nausea, but I digress), which is just how unserious the Serious discussion is.

  If you're serious about fighting a war, you use all the tools at your disposal ... the 'total war' doctrine, our inheritance from Clausewitz, again, doesn't mean we bomb the shit out of everyone, it means engaging the entire spectrum of resources ... economic, legal, political, diplomatic, intelligence, and those of allies ... to achieve your political purposes, and that what you engage should be proportional to those.

  But all we ever talk about is bombing and invading, the must crude tools available with the greatest risk and most likely unanticipated and undesirable side effects. The 'debate' is whether to Bomb OR Invade, do it now or wait until Iran has a nuclear weapon, do it ourselves or let the Israelis do it, and so forth.

  The Unserious summary we used to coin: these are people who only know how to fish with dynamite.

  —quickstrategy Read quickstrategy's other letters
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