Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday September 18, 2010
|
WASHINGTON RULES: America's Path to Permanent War
WASHINGTON RULES: America's Path to Permanent War Andrew J
Bacevich
ISBN 978-0-8050-9141-0
286 pages
$25
CULTURES OF WAR: Pearl Harbor/ Hiroshima/ 9-11/ IraqJohn W
Dower
ISBN 978-0393061505
596 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Gerard De Groot
"We need some great failures," the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote in his autobiography. "Especially we ever-successful Americans -- conscious, intelligent, illuminating failures." What Steffens meant was that a people confident in righteousness need occasionally to be reminded of their fallibility. The past 50 years have produced failures aplenty -- the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and Iraq among them. Unfortunately, as Andrew Bacevich and John Dower demonstrate, the light of failure has not penetrated the darkness of delusion. As a result, wars provide a repeating rhythm of folly.
"Washington Rules" and "Cultures of War" are two excellent books made better by the coincidence of their publication. In complementary fashion, they provide a convincing critique of America's conduct of war since 1941. Steffens would have liked these books, specifically for the way they use past failures to explain the provenance of our current predicament.
Read "Cultures of War" first. It's not an easy book, but it is consistently perceptive. Dower examines Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Sept. 11 and the second Iraq War, drawing disconcerting linkages. Pearl Harbor and Iraq, he feels, demonstrate how otherwise intelligent leaders are drawn toward strategic imbecility. Both attacks were brilliantly executed in the short term, but neither paid sufficient attention to the long-term problem of winning a war. More controversially, Dower pairs Hiroshima with Sept. 11, both acts of terror born of moral certitude. Osama bin Laden and Harry Truman justified wanton killing with essentially the same Manichean rhetoric. Motives, context and scale might have been different; methods were not. For both leaders, the ability to separate good from evil made killing easy.
In 1941, Americans drew comfort from the stereotype of the irrational Oriental. They assumed that the Japanese would be easily defeated because they were illogical -- as their attack upon Pearl Harbor proved. That attack was indeed illogical (given the impossibility of defeating the United States in a protracted war), but it was not peculiarly Japanese. As Dower reveals, the wishful thinking, delusion and herd behavior within the court of Emperor Hirohito was a symptom of war, not ethnicity. The same deficiencies, in 2003, convinced those in the Oval Office that invading Iraq was a good idea.
Since the culture of war encourages patterned behavior, folly proliferates. This is the essence of the Washington rules that Bacevich elucidates. The rules dictate that protection of the American way of life necessitates a global military presence and a willingness to intervene anywhere. Power and violence are cleansed by virtue: Because America is "good," her actions are always benign. These rules have pushed the United States to a state of perpetual war. With enemies supposedly everywhere, the pursuit of security has become open-ended.
The alternative, according to Bacevich, is not isolationism or appeasement, two politically loaded words frequently used to pummel those who object to Washington's behavior. He advocates, instead, a more level-headed assessment of danger, advice all the more cogent since it comes from a former soldier. Iraq and Afghanistan did not threaten America; in fact, those countries and the world have become more dangerous because of heavy-handed American intervention. Nor does North Korea pose a threat. Nor did Vietnam.
One is reminded of John Winthrop, who, in 1630, told the future residents of Massachusetts Bay Colony: "We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." Over subsequent decades, Winthrop's sermon became the American mission, fired by self-righteousness and fueled by self-confidence. From that mission emerged the idea of Manifest Destiny -- American ideals should spread across the continent and around the globe. Along the way, Americans lost sight of what Winthrop actually meant. His words were both inspiration and warning: Aspire to greatness, but remain honorable. Power lies in virtue. Winthrop envisaged a shining beacon, worthy of emulation. He saw no need to come down from the hill and ram ideals down the throats of the recalcitrant.
The power of virtue is Bacevich's most profound message. Instead of trying to fix Afghanistan's Helmand Province, he insists, Americans should fix Detroit and Cleveland. Instead of attempting to export notions of freedom and democracy to nations that lack experience of either, America should demonstrate, by her actions, that she is still a free, democratic and humane nation. Her real strength lies in her liberal tradition, not in her ability to kill.
Back in 1963, the Kennedy administration was faced with a steadily disintegrating situation in Vietnam. At a turbulent cabinet meeting, Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked: If the situation is so dire, why not withdraw? Arthur Schlesinger, present at the meeting, noted how "the question hovered for a moment, then died away." It was "a hopelessly alien thought in a field of unexplored assumptions and entrenched convictions." The Washington rules kept the United States on a steady course toward disaster.
Those unexplored assumptions and entrenched convictions have now pushed the United States into a new quagmire. Despite that predicament, both Dower and Bacevich try to end positively. "If change is to come, it must come from the people," argues Bacevich. Dower agrees. But these feeble attempts at optimism are the least convincing parts of two otherwise brilliant books. Barack Obama once promised that change was coming, but then quickly adhered to the old rules by escalating an unwinnable and certainly unaffordable war in Afghanistan. Failures, as Steffens hoped, have been illuminating, but after each flash of light, darkness has prevailed.
Gerard De Groot is a professor of history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and author of "The Bomb: A Life."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
ALMOST CHIMPANZEE: Searching for What Makes Us Human, in Rainforests, Labs, Sanctuaries, and Zoos
Jon Cohen
Times
ISBN 978-0-8050-8307-1
369 pages
$27.50
Reviewed by Deborah Blum
During the early 1920s, the pioneering primatologist Robert Yerkes kept two young chimpanzees -- cleverly named Chim and Panzee -- at his home to observe them in a human environment. He became particularly attached to Chim (later identified as a bonobo), admiring the animal's obvious intelligence and generous nature. When Panzee became ill, Chim actively tried to comfort and care for her. Yerkes described this behavior in a 1925 book he titled "Almost Human," although he admitted that he worried about "idealizing an ape."
It has been years, decades really, since researchers worried about idealizing chimpanzees or emphasizing their similarities to ourselves. The shift is largely credited to the fieldwork and educational activism of another pioneering scientist, Jane Goodall. Indeed, as Jon Cohen points out in his gently provocative new book, "Almost Chimpanzee," the conservation-minded Goodall deliberately dwelled on people-parallels. "She believed that a critical mass of humans would most likely come to her cause if they imagined their own hands reaching for the curl of a chimpanzee's finger."
But today, Cohen suggests, it may be time to dwell again on our differences. Chimpanzees are well established as our closest cousins on Earth; some research sets the genetic difference at a mere one percent. On the other hand, even that slight deviation set us on widely divergent evolutionary paths and, in the end, provided only one species with real power over life on Earth. "Humans will determine the fate of chimpanzees," Cohen notes. "Chimpanzees of course will have no say in the fate of humans."
Cohen's book, then, is a meticulous exploration of how both small quirks and large kinks in biology and culture led to such different destinations. He searches for the best evidence of when human and chimpanzee ancestors first separated -- usually fixed at about five million years ago -- and whether it was a genuinely dramatic break. He mulls over why small genetic variances have such enormous impact, leading him into a wonderfully weird discussion of whether human-chimpanzee hybrids are possible -- a notion dubbed "humanzees" by some researchers.
In a chapter called "Carnal Knowledge," Cohen delves further into human versus chimpanzee reproduction, comparing everything from essential body parts to fertility issues. For instance, while healthy human males produce an average of 66 million sperm per milliliter, chimpanzees apparently clock in closer to an average of 2.5 billion. "Logically enough, higher sperm counts require larger testicles," he writes, citing evidence that the ratio is 3:1 in favor of chimps.
A longtime correspondent for the journal Science, Cohen has a gift for unearthing small and telling details. At the same time, he occasionally falls into a research-publication style of storytelling which undermines his effectiveness. When I read a sentence such as "Surface molecules on chimpanzee erythrocytes, in contrast, have loads of Neu5Gc and a sprinkling of Neu5Ac," I tend to look for my science dictionary rather than marvel over the facts in question.
But "Almost Chimpanzee" is not intended as a literary meditation on our place in the natural world (I had somewhat expected that based on the searching-for-ourselves implication of the subtitle). It is, instead, a briskly told, clearheaded survey of research that looks at the innate differences between two closely linked species, never forgetting that one of those species -- at least for now -- stands as the most successful primate in the planet's history.
There's a terrific section on life expectancy built around the evolutionary biology work of University of Utah anthropologist Kristen Hawkes that neatly connects everything from chimpanzee menopause to the role of elderly females in hunter-gatherer societies. And there's a fascinating look at the importance of cooking food, which allowed early humans to spend less energy sleepily digesting their dinners and more, apparently, devising a route to world domination.
All of this leads to the ever-troubling question of what comes next. Many scientists working with chimpanzees in labs find their studies restricted or too expensive to maintain over the long term. And many conducting field research wonder how much longer the animals will last as a wild species, because of habitat loss, poaching and the notorious African bush meat trade. One scientist whom Cohen interviewed predicted that within 50 years only captive chimpanzees will be left alive, almost entirely due to the activities of their human cousins.
Out of this gathering cloud of dismay comes one of my favorite quotations in the book, a description of a dedicated and cynical conservationist. "He's seen so many disgusting people," explains one of his friends, "and so few disgusting chimps." It's not meant to be a measure of all humans, but it definitely works as a measure of how far we've come from the time of Yerkes, when a scientist might hesitate to idealize apes but never ourselves.
Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and the author of two books about primate research, "The Monkey Wars" and "Love at Goon Park."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
Advertisement Would you be interested in earning $25-50/hour?
Major companies are looking for home webesite testers
right now. All you need is you internet connection and
computer. No experience is needed. In fact, testers are in such need right now that you
can get a $20 SIGNUP bonus right now. You'll get a
free newsletter and you'll have access to hundreds
of job offers at companies like Microsoft™, Google™
or Yahoo™. Get $5-$20 for looking at websites and
giving your opinion. Go Here now for details. |
|
| Recent Stories |
 THREE STATIONS
THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
BURN
MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL: A Memoir
JULIET |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
