Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight & Win a Nuclear War
In a recent interview with the New Republic, Paul Warnke, the newly appointed head of the Arms Control and Disarmament…
Richard Pipes 1977-07-01In a recent interview with the New Republic, Paul Warnke, the newly appointed head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, responded as follows to the question of how the United States ought to react to indications that the Soviet leadership thinks it possible to fight and win a nuclear war. “In my view,” he replied, “this kind of thinking is on a level of abstraction which is unrealistic. It seems to me that instead of talking in those terms, which would indulge what I regard as the primitive aspects of Soviet nuclear doctrine, we ought to be trying to educate them into the real world of strategic nuclear weapons, which is that nobody could possibly win.”1
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Even after allowance has been made for Mr. Warnke’s notoriously careless syntax, puzzling questions remain. On what grounds does he, a Washington lawyer, presume to “educate” the Soviet general staff composed of professional soldiers who thirty years ago defeated the Wehrmacht—and, of all things, about the “real world of strategic nuclear weapons” of which they happen to possess a considerably larger arsenal than we? Why does he consider them children who ought not to be “indulged”? And why does he chastise for what he regards as a “primitive” and unrealistic strategic doctrine not those who hold it, namely the Soviet military, but Americans who worry about their holding it?
Be all that as it may, even if Mr. Warnke refuses to take Soviet strategic doctrine seriously, it behooves us to take Mr. Warnke’s views of Soviet doctrine seriously. He not only will head our SALT II team; his thinking as articulated in the above statement and on other occasions reflects all the conventional wisdom of the school of strategic theory dominant in the United States, one of whose leading characteristics is scorn for Soviet views on nuclear warfare.
American and Soviet nuclear doctrines, it needs stating at the outset, are starkly at odds. The prevalent U.S. doctrine holds that an all-out war between countries in possession of sizable nuclear arsenals would be so destructive as to leave no winner; thus resort to arms has ceased to represent a rational policy option for the leaders of such countries vis-à-vis one another. The classic dictum of Clausewitz, that war is politics pursued by other means, is widely believed in the United States to have lost its validity after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soviet doctrine, by contrast, emphatically asserts that while an all-out nuclear war would indeed prove extremely destructive to both parties, its outcome would not be mutual suicide: the country better prepared for it and in possession of a superior strategy could win and emerge a viable society. “There is profound erroneousness and harm in the disorienting claims of bourgeois ideologies that there will be no victor in a thermonuclear world war,” thunders an authoritative Soviet publication.2 The theme is mandatory in the current Soviet military literature. Clausewitz, buried in the United States, seems to be alive and prospering in the Soviet Union.
The predisposition of the American strategic community is to shrug off this fundamental doctrinal discrepancy. American doctrine has been and continues to be formulated and implemented by and large without reference to its Soviet counterpart. It is assumed here that there exists one and only one “rational” strategy appropriate to the age of thermonuclear weapons, and that this strategy rests on the principle of “mutual deterrence” developed in the United States some two decades ago. Evidence that the Russians do not share this doctrine which, as its name indicates, postulates reciprocal attitudes, is usually dismissed with the explanation that they are clearly lagging behind us: given time and patient “education,” they will surely come around.
It is my contention that this attitude rests on a combination of arrogance and ignorance; that it is dangerous; and that it is high time to start paying heed to Soviet strategic doctrine, lest we end up deterring no one but ourselves. There is ample evidence that the Soviet military say what they mean, and usually mean what they say. When the recently deceased Soviet Minister of Defense, Marshal Grechko, assures us: “We have never concealed, and do not conceal, the fundamental, principal tenets of our military doctrine,”3 he deserves a hearing. This is especially true in view of the fact that Soviet military deployments over the past twenty years make far better sense in the light of Soviet doctrine, “primitive” and “unrealistic” as the latter may appear, than when reflected in the mirror of our own doctrinal assumptions.
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Mistrust of the military professional, combined with a pervasive conviction, typical of commercial societies, that human conflicts are at bottom caused by misunderstanding and ought to be resolved by negotiations rather than force, has worked against serious attention to military strategy by the United States. We have no general staff; we grant no higher degrees in “military science”; and, except for Admiral Mahan, we have produced no strategist of international repute. America has tended to rely on its insularity to protect it from aggressors, and on its unique industrial capacity to help crush its enemies once war was under way. The United States is accustomed to waging wars of its own choosing and on its own terms. It lacks an ingrained strategic tradition. In the words of one historian, Americans tend to view both military strategy and the armed forces as something to be “employed intermittently to destroy occasional and intermittent threats posed by hostile powers.”4
This approach to warfare has had a number of consequences. The United States wants to win its wars quickly and with the smallest losses in American lives. It is disinclined, therefore, to act on protracted and indirect strategies, or to engage in limited wars and wars of attrition. Once it resorts to arms, it prefers to mobilize the great might of its industrial plant to produce vast quantities of the means of destruction with which in the shortest possible time to undermine the enemy’s will and ability to continue the struggle. Extreme reliance on technological superiority, characteristic of U.S. warfare, is the obverse side of America’s extreme sensitivity to its own casualties; so is indifference to the casualties inflicted on the enemy. The strategic bombing campaigns waged by the U.S. Air Force and the RAF against Germany and Japan in World War II excellently implemented this general attitude. Paradoxically, America’s dread of war and casualties pushes it to adopt some of the most brutal forms of warfare, involving the indiscriminate destruction of the enemy’s homeland with massive civilian deaths.
These facts must be borne in mind to understand the way the United States reacted to the advent of the nuclear bomb. The traditional military services—the army and the navy—whose future seemed threatened by the invention of a weapon widely believed to have revolutionized warfare and rendered conventional forces obsolete, resisted extreme claims made on behalf of the bomb. But they were unable to hold out for very long. An alliance of politicians and scientists, backed by the Air Force, soon overwhelmed them. “Victory through Air Power,” a slogan eminently suited to the American way of war, carried all before it once bombs could be devised whose explosive power was measured in kilotons and megatons.
The U.S. Army tried to argue after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the new weapons represented no fundamental breakthrough. No revolution in warfare had occurred, its spokesman claimed: atomic bombs were merely a more efficient species of the aerial bombs used in World War II, and in themselves no more able to ensure victory than the earlier bombs had been. As evidence, they could point to the comprehensive U.S. Strategic Bombing Surveys carried out after the war to assess the effects of the bombing campaigns. These had demonstrated that saturation raids against German and Japanese cities had neither broken the enemy’s morale nor paralyzed his armaments industry; indeed, German productivity kept on rising in the face of intensified Allied bombing, attaining its peak in the fall of 1944, on the eve of capitulation.
And when it came to horror, atomic bombs had nothing over conventional ones: as against the 72,000 casualties caused by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, conventional raids carried out against Tokyo and Dresden in 1945 had caused 84,000 and 135,000 fatalities, respectively. Furthermore, those who sought to minimize the impact of the new weapon argued, atomic weapons in no sense obviated the need for sizable land and sea forces. For example, General Ridgway, as Chief of Staff in the early 1950’s, maintained that war waged with tactical nuclear weapons would demand larger rather than smaller field armies since these weapons were more complicated, since they would produce greater casualties, and since the dispersal of troops required by nuclear tactics called for increasing the depth of the combat zone.5
As we shall note below, similar arguments disputing the revolutionary character of the nuclear weapon surfaced in the Soviet Union, and there promptly came to dominate strategic theory. In the United States, they were just as promptly silenced by a coalition of groups each of which it suited, for its own reasons, to depict the atomic bomb as the “absolute weapon” that had, in large measure, rendered traditional military establishments redundant and traditional strategic thinking obsolete.
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Once World War II was over, the United States was most eager to demobilize its armed forces. Between June 1945 and June 1946, the U.S. Army reduced its strength from 8.3 to 1.9 million men; comparable manpower cuts were achieved in the navy and air force. Little more than a year after Germany’s surrender, the military forces of the United States, which at their peak had stood at 12.3 million men, were cut down to 3 million; two years later they declined below 2 million. The demobilization proceeded at a pace (if not in a manner) reminiscent of the dissolution of the Russian army in the revolutionary year of 1917. Nothing could have stopped this mass of humanity streaming homeward. To most Americans peacetime conditions meant reversion to a skeletal armed force.
Yet, at the same time, growing strains in the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, and mounting evidence that Stalin was determined to exploit the chaotic conditions brought about by the collapse of the Axis powers to expand his domain, called for an effective military force able to deter the Soviets. The United States could not fulfill its role as leader of the Western coalition without an ability to project its military power globally.
In this situation, the nuclear weapon seemed to offer an ideal solution: the atomic bomb could hardly have come at a better time from the point of view of U.S. international commitments. Here was a device so frighteningly destructive, it was believed, that the mere threat of its employment would serve to dissuade would-be aggressors from carrying out their designs. Once the Air Force received the B-36, the world’s first intercontinental bomber, the United States acquired the ability to threaten the Soviet Union with devastating punishment without, at the same time, being compelled to maintain a large and costly standing army.
Reliance on the nuclear deterrent became more imperative than ever after the conclusion of the Korean war, in the course of which U.S. defense expenditures had been sharply driven up. President Eisenhower had committed himself to a policy of fiscal restraint. He wanted to cut the defense budget appreciably, and yet he had to do so without jeopardizing either America’s territorial security or its worldwide commitments. In an effort to reconcile these contradictory desires, the President and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, enunciated in the winter of 1953-54 a strategic doctrine which to an unprecedented degree based the country’s security on a single weapon, the nuclear deterrent. In an address to the United Nations in December 1953, Eisenhower argued that since there was no defense against nuclear weapons (i.e., thermonuclear or hydrogen bombs, which both countries were then beginning to produce), war between the two “atomic colossi” would leave no victors and probably cause the demise of civilization. A month later, Dulles enunciated what came to be known as the doctrine of “massive retaliation.” The United States, he declared, had decided “to depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing.” Throughout his address, Dulles emphasized the fiscal benefits of such a strategy, “more basic security at less cost.”
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The Eisenhower-Dulles formula represented a neat compromise between America’s desires to reduce the defense budget and simultaneously to retain the capacity to respond to Soviet threats. The driving force was not, however, military but budgetary: behind “massive retaliation” (as well as its offspring, “mutual deterrence”) lay fiscal imperatives. In the nuclear deterrent, the United States found a perfect resolution of the conflicting demands of domestic and foreign responsibilities. For this reason alone its adoption was a foregone conclusion: the alternatives were either a vast standing army or forfeiture of status as a leading world power. The Air Force enthusiastically backed the doctrine of massive retaliation. As custodian of the atomic bomb, it had a vested interest in a defense posture of which that weapon was the linchpin. And since in the first postwar decade the intercontinental bomber was the only available vehicle for delivering the bomb against an enemy like the Soviet Union, the Air Force could claim a goodly share of the defense budget built around the retaliation idea.
Although the Soviet Union exploded a fission bomb in 1949 and announced the acquisition of a fusion (or hydrogen) bomb four years later, the United States still continued for a while longer to enjoy an effective monopoly on nuclear retaliation, since the Soviet Union lacked the means of delivering quantities of such bombs against U.S. territory. That situation changed dramatically in 1957 when the Soviets launched the Sputnik. This event, which their propaganda hailed as a great contribution to the advancement of science (and ours as proof of the failures of the American educational system!), represented in fact a significant military demonstration, namely, the ability of the Russians to deliver nuclear warheads against the United States homeland, until then immune from direct enemy threats. At this point massive retaliation ceased to make much sense and before long yielded to the doctrine of “mutual deterrence.” The new doctrine postulated that inasmuch as both the Soviet Union and the United States possessed (or would soon possess) the means of destroying each other, neither country could rationally contemplate resort to war. The nuclear stockpiles of each were an effective deterrent which ensured that they would not be tempted to launch an attack.
This doctrine was worked out in great and sophisticated detail by a bevy of civilian experts employed by various government and private organizations. These physicists, chemists, mathematicians, economists, and political scientists came to the support of the government’s fiscally-driven imperatives with scientific demonstrations in favor of the nuclear deterrent. Current U.S. strategic theory was thus born of a marriage between the scientist and the accountant. The professional soldier was jilted.
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A large part of the U.S. scientific community had been convinced as soon as the first atomic bomb was exploded that the nuclear weapon, which that community had conceived and helped to develop, had accomplished a complete revolution in warfare. This conclusion was reached without much reference to the analysis of the effects of atomic weapons carried out by the military, and indeed without consideration of the traditional principles of warfare. It represented, rather, an act of faith on the part of an intellectual community which held strong pacifist convictions and felt deep guilt at having participated in the creation of a weapon of such destructive power. As early as 1946, in an influential book sponsored by the Yale Institute of International Affairs, under the title The Absolute Weapon, a group of civilian strategic theorists enunciated the principles of the mutual-deterrence theory which subsequently became the official U.S. strategic doctrine. The principal points made in this work may be summarized as follows:
- Nuclear weapons are “absolute weapons” in the sense that they can cause unacceptable destruction, but also and above all because there exists against them no possible defense. When the aggressor is certain to suffer the same punishment as his victim, aggression ceases to make sense. Hence war is no longer a rational policy option, as it had been throughout human history. In the words of Bernard Brodie, the book’s editor: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment had been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose” (p. 76).
- Given the fact that the adjective “absolute” means, by definition, incapable of being exceeded or surpassed, in the nuclear age military superiority has become meaningless. As another contributor to the book, William T.R. Fox, expressed it: “When dealing with the absolute weapon, arguments based on relative advantage lose their point” (p. 181). From which it follows that the objective of modern defense policy should be not superiority in weapons, traditionally sought by the military, but “sufficiency”; just enough nuclear weapons to be able to threaten a potential aggressor with unacceptable retaliation—in other words, an “adequate” deterrent, no more, no less.
- Nuclear deterrence can become effective only if it restrains mutually—i.e., if the United States and the Soviet Union each can deter the other from aggression. An American monopoly on nuclear weapons would be inherently destabilizing, both because it could encourage the United States to launch a nuclear attack, and, at the same time, by making the Russians feel insecure, cause them to act aggressively. “Neither we nor the Russians can expect to feel even reasonably safe unless an atomic attack by one were certain to unleash a devastating atomic counterattack by the other,” Arnold Wolfers maintained (p. 135). In other words, to feel secure the United States actually required the Soviet Union to have the capacity to destroy it.
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Barely one year after Hiroshima and three years before the Soviets were to acquire a nuclear bomb, The Absolute Weapon articulated the philosophical premises underlying the mutual-deterrence doctrine which today dominates U.S. strategic thinking. Modern strategy, in the opinion of its contributors, involved preventing wars rather than winning them, securing sufficiency in decisive weapons rather than superiority, and even ensuring the potential enemy’s ability to strike back. Needless to elaborate, these principles ran contrary to all the tenets of traditional military theory, which had always called for superiority in forces and viewed the objective of war to be victory. But then, if one had decided that the new weapons marked a qualitative break with all the weapons ever used in combat, one could reasonably argue that past military experience, and the theory based on it, had lost relevance. Implicit in these assumptions was the belief that Clausewitz and his celebrated formula proclaiming war an extension of politics were dead. Henry Kissinger, who can always be counted upon to utter commonplaces in the tone of prophetic revelation, announced Clausewitz’s obituary nearly twenty years after The Absolute Weapon had made the point, in these words: “The traditional mode of military analysis which saw in war a continuation of politics but with its own appropriate means is no longer applicable.”6
American civilian strategists holding such views gained the dominant voice in the formulation of U.S. strategic doctrine with the arrival in Washington in 1961 of Robert S. McNamara as President Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense. A prominent business executive specializing in finance and accounting, McNamara applied to the perennial problem of American strategy—how to maintain a credible global military posture without a large and costly military establishment—the methods of cost analysis. These had first been applied by the British during World War II under the name “operations research” and subsequently came to be adopted here as “systems analysis.” Weapons’ procurement was to be tested and decided by the same methods used to evaluate returns on investment in ordinary business enterprises. Mutual deterrence was taken for granted: the question of strategic posture reduced itself to the issue of which weapons systems would provide the United States with effective deterrence at the least expense. Under McNamara the procurement of weapons, decided on the basis of cost effectiveness, came in effect to direct strategy, rather than the other way around, as had been the case through most of military history. It is at this point that applied science in partnership with budgetary accountancy—a partnership which had developed U.S. strategic theory—also took charge of U.S. defense policy.
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As worked out in the 1960’s, and still in effect today, American nuclear theory rests on these propositions: All-out nuclear war is not a rational policy option, since no winner could possibly emerge from such a war. Should the Soviet Union nevertheless launch a surprise attack on the United States, the latter would emerge with enough of a deterrent to devastate the Soviet Union in a second strike. Since’ such a retaliatory attack would cost the Soviet Union millions of casualties and the destruction of all its major cities, a Soviet first strike is most unlikely. Meaningful defenses against a nuclear attack are technically impossible and psychologically counterproductive; nuclear superiority is meaningless.
In accord with these assumptions, the United States in the mid-1960’s unilaterally froze its force of ICBM’s at 1,054 and dismantled nearly all its defenses against enemy bombers. Civil-defense was all but abandoned, as was in time the attempt to create an ABM system which held out the possibility of protecting American missile sites against a surprise enemy attack. The Russians were watched benignly as they moved toward parity with the United States in the number of intercontinental launchers, and then proceeded to attain numerical superiority. The expectation was that as soon as the Russians felt themselves equal to the United States in terms of effective deterrence, they would stop further deployments. The frenetic pace of the Soviet nuclear build-up was explained first on the ground that the Russians had a lot of catching up to do, then that they had to consider the Chinese threat, and finally on the grounds that they are inherently a very insecure people and should be allowed an edge in deterrent capability.
Whether mutual deterrence deserves the name of a strategy at all is a real question. As one student of the subject puts it:
Although commonly called a “strategy,” “assured destruction” was by itself an antithesis of strategy. Unlike any strategy that ever preceded it throughout the history of armed conflict, it ceased to be useful precisely where military strategy is supposed to come into effect: at the edge of war. It posited that the principal mission of the U.S. military under conditions of ongoing nuclear operations against [the continental United States] was to shut its eyes, grit its teeth, and reflexively unleash an indiscriminate and simultaneous reprisal against all Soviet aim points on a preestablished target list. Rather than deal in a considered way with the particular attack on hand so as to minimize further damage to the United States and maximize the possibility of an early settlement on reasonably acceptable terms, it had the simple goal of inflicting punishment for the Soviet transgression. Not only did this reflect an implicit repudiation of political responsibility, it also risked provoking just the sort of counterreprisal against the United States that a rational wartime strategy should attempt to prevent.7
I cite this passage merely to indicate that the basic postulates of U.S. nuclear strategy are not as self-evident and irrefutable as its proponents seem to believe; and that, therefore, their rejection by the Soviet military is not, in and of itself, proof that Soviet thinking is “primitive” and devoid of a sense of realism.
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The principal differences between American and Soviet strategies are traceable to different conceptions of the role of conflict and its inevitable concomitant, violence, in human relations; and secondly, to different functions which the military establishment performs in the two societies.
In the United States, the consensus of the educated and affluent holds all recourse to force to be the result of an inability or an unwillingness to apply rational analysis and patient negotiation to disagreements: the use of force is prima facie evidence of failure. Some segments of this class not only refuse to acknowledge the existence of violence as a fact of life, they have even come to regard fear—the organism’s biological reaction to the threat of violence—as inadmissible. “The notion of being threatened has acquired an almost class connotation,” Daniel P. Moynihan notes in connection with the refusal of America’s “sophisticated” elite to accept the reality of a Soviet threat. “If you’re not very educated, you’re easily frightened. And not being ever frightened can be a formula for self-destruction.”8
Now this entire middle-class, commercial, essentially Protestant ethos is absent from Soviet culture, whose roots feed on another kind of soil, and which has had for centuries to weather rougher political climes. The Communist revolution of 1917, by removing from positions of influence what there was of a Russian bourgeoisie (a class Lenin was prone to define as much by cultural as by socioeconomic criteria), in effect installed in power the muzhik, the Russian peasant. And the muzhik had been taught by long historical experience that cunning and coercion alone ensured survival: one employed cunning when weak, and cunning coupled with coercion when strong. Not to use force when one had it indicated some inner weakness. Marxism, with its stress on class war as a natural condition of mankind so long as the means of production were privately owned, has merely served to reinforce these ingrained convictions. The result is an extreme Social-Darwinist outlook on life which today permeates the Russian elite as well as the Russian masses, and which only the democratic intelligentsia and the religious dissenters oppose to any significant extent.
The Soviet ruling elite regards conflict and violence as natural regulators of all human affairs: wars between nations, in its view, represent only a variant of wars between classes, recourse to the one or the other being dependent on circumstances. A conflictless world will come into being only when the socialist (i.e., Communist) mode of production spreads across the face of the earth.
The Soviet view of armed conflict can be illustrated with another citation from the writings of the late Marshal Grechko, one of the most influential Soviet military figures of the post-World War II era. In his principal treatise, Grechko refers to the classification of wars formulated in 1972 by his U.S. counterpart, Melvin Laird. Laird divided wars according to engineering criteria—in terms of weapons employed and the scope of the theater of operations—to come up with four principal types of wars: strategic-nuclear, theater-nuclear, theater-conventional, and local-conventional. Dismissing this classification as inadequate, Grechko applies quite different standards to come up with his own typology:
Proceeding from the fundamental contradictions of the contemporary era, one can distinguish, according to sociopolitical criteria, the following types of wars: (1) wars between states (coalitions) of two contrary social systems—capitalist and socialist; (2) civil wars between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or between the popular masses and the forces of the extreme reaction supported by the imperialists of other countries; (3) wars between imperialist states and the peoples of colonial and dependent states fighting for their freedom and independence; and (4) wars among capitalist states.9
This passage contains many interesting implications. For instance, it makes no allowance for war between two Communist countries, like the Soviet Union and China, though such a war seems greatly to preoccupy the Soviet leadership. Nor does it provide for war pitting a coalition of capitalist and Communist states against another capitalist state, such as actually occurred during World War II when the United States and the Soviet Union joined forces against Germany. But for our purposes, the most noteworthy aspect of Grechko’s system of classification is the notion that social and national conflicts within the capitalist camp (that is, in all countries not under Communist control) are nothing more than a particular mode of class conflict of which all-out nuclear war between the superpowers is a conceivable variant. In terms of this typology, an industrial strike in the United States, the explosion of a terrorist bomb in Belfast or Jerusalem, the massacre by Rhodesian guerrillas of a black village or a white farmstead, differ from nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States only in degree, not in kind. All such conflicts are calibrations on the extensive scale by which to measure the historic conflict which pits Communism against capitalism and imperialism. Such conflicts are inherent in the stage of human development which precedes the final abolition of classes.
Middle-class American intellectuals simply cannot assimilate this mentality, so alien is it to their experience and view of human nature. Confronted with the evidence that the most influential elements in the Soviet Union do indeed hold such views, they prefer to dismiss the evidence as empty rhetoric, and to regard with deep suspicion the motives of anyone who insists on taking it seriously. Like some ancient Oriental despots, they vent their wrath on the bearers of bad news. How ironic that the very people who have failed so dismally to persuade American television networks to eliminate violence from their programs, nevertheless feel confident that they can talk the Soviet leadership into eliminating violence from its political arsenal!
Solzhenitsyn grasped the issue more profoundly as well as more realistically when he defined the antithesis of war not as the absence of armed conflict between nations—i.e., “peace” in the conventional meaning of the term—but as the absence of all violence, internal as well as external. His comprehensive definition, drawn from his Soviet experience, obversely matches the comprehensive Soviet definition of warfare.
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We know surprisingly little about the individuals and institutions whose responsibility it is to formulate Soviet military doctrine. The matter is handled with the utmost secrecy, which conceals from the eyes of outsiders the controversies that undoubtedly surround it. Two assertions, however, can be made with confidence.
Because of Soviet adherence to the Clausewitzian principle that warfare is always an extension of politics—i.e., subordinate to overall political objectives (about which more below)—Soviet military planning is carried out under the close supervision of the country’s highest political body, the Politburo. Thus military policy is regarded as an intrinsic element of “grand strategy,” whose arsenal also includes a variety of non-military instrumentalities.
Secondly, the Russians regard warfare as a science (nauka, in the German sense of Wissenschaft). Instruction in the subject is offered at a number of university-level institutions, and several hundred specialists, most of them officers on active duty, have been accorded the Soviet equivalent of the Ph.D. in military science. This means that Soviet military doctrine is formulated by full-time specialists: it is as much the exclusive province of the certified military professional as medicine is that of the licensed physician. The civilian strategic theorist who since World War II has played a decisive role in the formulation of U.S. strategic doctrine is not in evidence in the Soviet Union, and probably performs at best a secondary, consultative function.
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Its penchant for secrecy notwithstanding, the Soviet military establishment does release a large quantity of unclassified literature in the form of books, specialist journals, and newspapers. Of the books, the single most authoritative work at present is unquestionably the collective study, Military Strategy, edited by the late Marshal V. D. Sokolovskii, which summarizes Soviet warfare doctrine of the nuclear age.10 Although published fifteen years ago, Sokolovskii’s volume remains the only Soviet strategic manual publicly available—a solitary monument confronting a mountain of Western works on strategy. A series called “The Officer’s Library” brings out important specialized studies.11 The newspaper Krasnaia zvezda (“Red Star”) carries important theoretical articles which, however, vie for the reader’s attention with heroic pictures of Soviet troops storming unidentified beaches and firing rockets at unnamed foes. The flood of military works has as its purpose indoctrination, an objective to which the Soviet high command attaches the utmost importance: indoctrination both in the psychological sense, designed to persuade the Soviet armed forces that they are invincible, as well as of a technical kind, to impress upon the officers and ranks the principles of Soviet tactics and the art of operations.
To a Western reader, most of this printed matter is unadulterated rubbish. It not only lacks the sophistication and intellectual elegance which he takes for granted in works on problems of nuclear strategy; it is also filled with a mixture of pseudo-Marxist jargon and the crudest kind of Russian jingoism. Which is one of the reasons why it is hardly ever read in the West, even by people whose business it is to devise a national strategy against a possible Soviet threat. By and large the material is ignored. Two examples must suffice. Strategy in the Missile Age, an influential work by Bernard Brodie, one of the pioneers of U.S. nuclear doctrine, which originally came out in 1959, and was republished in 1965, makes only a few offhand allusions to Soviet nuclear strategy, and then either to note with approval that it is “developing along lines familiar in the United States” (p. 171), or else, when the Russians prefer to follow their own track, to dismiss it as a “ridiculous and reckless fantasy” (p. 215). Secretary of Defense McNamara perused Sokolovskii and “remained unimpressed,” for nowhere in the book did he find “a sophisticated analysis of nuclear war.”12
The point to bear in mind, however, is that Soviet military literature, like all Soviet literature on politics broadly defined, is written in an elaborate code language. Its purpose is not to dazzle with originality and sophistication but to convey to the initiates messages of grave importance. Soviet policy-makers may speak to one another plainly in private, but when they take pen in hand they invariably resort to an “Aesopian” language, a habit acquired when the forerunner of today’s Communist party had to function in the Czarist underground. Buried in the flood of seemingly meaningless verbiage, nuggets of precious information on Soviet perceptions and intentions can more often than not be unearthed by a trained reader. In 1958-59 two American specialists employed by the Rand Corporation, Raymond L. Garthoff and Herbert S. Dinerstein, by skillfully deciphering Soviet literature on strategic problems and then interpreting this information against the background of the Soviet military tradition, produced a remarkably prescient forecast af actual Soviet military policies of the 1960’s and 1970’s.13 Unfortunately, their findings were largely ignored by U.S. strategists from the scientific community who had convinced themselves that there was only one strategic doctrine appropriate to the age of nuclear weapons, and that therefore evidence indicating that the Soviets were adopting a different strategy could be safely disregarded.
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This predisposition helps explain why U.S. strategists persistently ignored signs indicating that those who had control of Soviet Russia’s nuclear arsenal were not thinking in terms of mutual deterrence. The calculated nonchalance with which Stalin at Potsdam reacted to President Truman’s confidences about the American atomic bomb was a foretaste of things to come. Initial Soviet reactions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were similar in tone: the atomic weapon had not in any significant manner altered the science of warfare or rendered obsolete the principles which had guided the Red Army in its victorious campaigns against the Wehrmacht. These basic laws, known as the five “constant principles” that win wars, had been formulated by Stalin in 1942. They were, in declining order of importance: “stability of the home front,” followed by morale of the armed forces, quantity and quality of the divisions, military equipment, and, finally, ability of the commanders.14 There was no such thing as an “absolute weapon”—weapons altogether occupied a subordinate place in warfare; defense against atomic bombs was entirely possible.15 This was disconcerting, to be sure, but it could be explained away as a case of sour grapes. After all, the Soviet Union had no atomic bomb, and it was not in its interest to seem overly impressed by a weapon on which its rival enjoyed a monopoly.16
In September 1949 the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear device. Disconcertingly, its attitude to nuclear weapons did not change, at any rate not in public. For the remaining four years, until Stalin’s death, the Soviet high command continued to deny that nuclear weapons required fundamental revisions of accepted military doctrine. With a bit of good will, this obduracy could still have been rationalized: for although the Soviet Union now had the weapon, it still lacked adequate means of delivering it across continents insofar as it had few intercontinental bombers (intercontinental rockets were regarded in the West as decades away). The United States, by contrast, possessed not only a fleet of strategic bombers but also numerous air bases in countries adjoining Soviet Russia. So once again one could find a persuasive explanation of why the Russians refused to see the light. It seemed reasonable to expect that as soon as they had acquired both a stockpile of atomic bombs and a fleet of strategic bombers, they would adjust their doctrine to conform with the American.
Events which ensued immediately after Stalin’s death seemed to lend credence to these expectations. Between 1953 and 1957 a debate took place in the pages of Soviet publications which, for all its textural obscurity, indicated that a new school of Soviet strategic thinkers had arisen to challenge the conventional wisdom. The most articulate spokesman of this new school, General N. Talenskii, argued that the advent of nuclear weapons, especially the hydrogen bomb which had just appeared on the scene, did fundamentally alter the nature of warfare. The sheer destructiveness of these weapons was such that one could no longer talk of a socialist strategy automatically overcoming the strategy of capitalist countries: the same rules of warfare now applied to both social systems. For the first time doubt was cast on the immutability of Stalin’s “five constant principles.” In the oblique manner in which Soviet debates on matters of such import are invariably conducted, Talenskii was saying that perhaps, after all, war had ceased to represent a viable policy option. More important yet, speeches delivered by leading Soviet politicians in the winter of 1953-54 seemed to support the thesis advanced by President Eisenhower in his United Nations address of December 1953 that nuclear war could spell the demise of civilization. In an address delivered on March 12, 1954, and reported the following day in Pravda, Stalin’s immediate successor, Georgii Malenkov, echoed Eisenhower’s sentiments: a new world war would unleash a holocaust which “with the present means of warfare, means the destruction of world civilization.”17
This assault on its traditional thinking—and, obliquely, on its traditional role—engendered a furious reaction from the Soviet military establishment. The Red Army was not about to let itself be relegated to the status of a militia whose principal task was averting war rather than winning it. Malenkov’s unorthodox views on war almost certainly contributed to his downfall; at any rate, his dismissal in February 1955 as party leader was accompanied by a barrage of press denunciations of the notion that war had become unfeasible. There are strong indications that Malenkov’s chief rival, Khrushchev, capitalized on the discontent of the military to form with it an alliance with whose help he eventually rode to power. The successful military counterattack seems to have been led by the World War II hero, Marshal Georgii Zhukov, whom Khrushchev made his Minister of Defense and brought into the Presidium. The guidelines of Soviet nuclear strategy, still in force today, were formulated during the first two years of Khrushchev’s tenure (1955-57), under the leadership of Zhukov himself. They resulted in the unequivocal rejection of the notion of the “absolute weapon” and all the theories that U.S. strategists had deduced from it. Stalin’s view of the military “constants” was implicitly reaffirmed. Thus the re-Stalinization of Soviet life, so noticeable in recent years, manifested itself first in military doctrine.
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To understand this unexpected turn of events—so unexpected that most U.S. military theorists thus far have not been able to come to terms with it—one must take into account the function performed by the military in the Soviet system.
Unlike the United States, the Soviet government needs and wants a large military force. It has many uses for it, at home and abroad. As a regime which rests neither on tradition nor on a popular mandate, it sees in its military the most effective manifestation of government omnipotence, the very presence of which discourages any serious opposition from raising its head in the country as well as in its dependencies. It is, after all, the Red Army that keeps Eastern Europe within the Soviet camp. Furthermore, since the regime is driven by ideology, internal politics, and economic exigencies steadily to expand, it requires an up-to-date military force capable of seizing opportunities which may present themselves along the Soviet Union’s immensely long frontier or even beyond. The armed forces of the Soviet Union thus have much more to do than merely protect the country from potential aggressors: they are the mainstay of the regime’s authority and a principal instrumentality of its internal and external policies. Given the shaky status of the Communist regime internally, the declining appeal of its ideology, and the non-competitiveness of its goods on world markets, a persuasive case can even be made that, ruble for ruble, expenditures on the military represent for the Soviet leadership an excellent and entirely “rational” capital investment.
For this reason alone (and there were other compelling reasons too, as we shall see), the Soviet leadership could not accept the theory of mutual deterrence.18 After all, this theory, pushed to its logical conclusion, means that a country can rely for its security on a finite number of nuclear warheads and on an appropriate quantity of delivery vehicles; so that, apart perhaps from some small mobile forces needed for local actions, the large and costly traditional military establishments can be disbanded. Whatever the intrinsic military merits of this doctrine may be, its broader implications are entirely unacceptable to a regime like the Soviet one for whom military power serves not only (or even primarily) to deter external aggressors, but also and above all to ensure internal stability and permit external expansion. Thus, ultimately, it is political rather than strictly strategic or fiscal considerations that may be said to have determined Soviet reactions to nuclear weapons and shaped the content of Soviet nuclear strategy. As a result, Soviet advocates of mutual deterrence like Talenskii were gradually silenced. By the mid-1960’s the country adopted what in military jargon is referred to as a “war-fighting” and “war-winning” doctrine.
Given this fundamental consideration, the rest followed with a certain inexorable logic. The formulation of Soviet strategy in the nuclear age was turned over to the military who are in complete control of the Ministry of Defense. (Two American observers describe this institution as a “uniformed empire.”19 ) The Soviet General Staff had only recently emerged from winning one of the greatest wars in history. Immensely confident of their own abilities, scornful of what they perceived as the minor contribution of the United States to the Nazi defeat, inured to casualties running into tens of millions, the Soviet generals tackled the task with relish. Like their counterparts in the U.S. Army, they were professionally inclined to denigrate the exorbitant claims made on behalf of the new weapon by strategists drawn from the scientific community; unlike the Americans, however, they did not have to pay much heed to the civilians. In its essentials, Soviet nuclear doctrine as it finally emerged is not all that different from what American doctrine might have been had military and geopolitical rather than fiscal considerations played the decisive role here as they did there.
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Soviet military theorists reject the notion that technology (i.e., weapons) decides strategy. They perceive the relationship to be the reverse: strategic objectives determine the procurement and application of weapons. They agree that the introduction of nuclear weapons has profoundly affected warfare, but deny that nuclear weapons have altered its essential quality. The novelty of nuclear weapons consists not in their destructiveness—that is, after all, a matter of degree, and a country like the Soviet Union which, as Soviet generals proudly boast, suffered in World War II the loss of over 20 million casualties, as well as the destruction of 1,710 towns, over 70,1300 villages, and some 32,000 industrial establishments to win the war and emerge as a global power, is not to be intimidated by the prospect of destruction.20 Rather, the innovation consists of the fact that nuclear weapons, coupled with intercontinental missiles, can by themselves carry out strategic missions which previously were accomplished only by means of prolonged tactical operations:
Nuclear missiles have altered the relationship of tactical, operational, and strategic acts of the armed conflict. If in the past the strategic end-result was secured by a succession of sequential, most often long-term, efforts [and] comprised the sum of tactical and operational successes, strategy being able to realize its intentions only with the assistance of the art of operations and tactics, then today, by means of powerful nuclear strikes, strategy can attain its objectives directly.21
In other words, military strategy, rather than a casualty of technology, has, thanks to technology, become more central than ever. By adopting this view, Soviet theorists believe themselves to have adapted modern technological innovations in weaponry to the traditions of military science.
Implicit in all this is the idea that nuclear war is feasible and that the basic function of warfare, as defined by Clausewitz, remains permanently valid, whatever breakthroughs may occur in technology. “It is well known that the essential nature of war as a continuation of politics does not change with changing technology and armament.”22 This code phrase from Sokolovskii’s authoritative manual was certainly hammered out with all the care that in the United States is lavished on an amendment to the Constitution. It spells the rejection of the whole basis on which U.S. strategy has come to rest: thermonuclear war is not suicidal, it can be fought and won, and thus resort to war must not be ruled out.
In addition (though we have no solid evidence to this effect) it seems likely that Soviet strategists reject the mutual-deterrence theory on several technical grounds of a kind that have been advanced by American critics of this theory like Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, and Paul Nitze.
- Mutual deterrence postulates a certain finality about weapons technology: it does not allow for further scientific breakthroughs that could result in the deterrent’s becoming neutralized. On the offensive side, for example, there is the possibility of significant improvements in the accuracy of ICBM’s or striking innovations in anti-submarine warfare; on the defensive, satellites which are essential for early warning of an impending attack could be blinded and lasers could be put to use to destroy incoming missiles.
- Mutual deterrence constitutes “passive defense” which usually leads to defeat. It threatens punishment to the aggressor after he has struck, which may or may not deter him from striking; it cannot prevent him from carrying out his designs. The latter objective requires the application of “active defense”—i.e., nuclear preemption.
- The threat of a second strike, which underpins the mutual-deterrence doctrine, may prove ineffectual. The side that has suffered the destruction of the bulk of its nuclear forces in a surprise first strike may find that it has so little of a deterrent left and the enemy so much, that the cost of striking back in retaliation would be exposing its own cities to total destruction by the enemy’s third strike. The result could be a paralysis of will, and capitulation instead of a second strike.
Soviet strategists make no secret of the fact that they regard the U.S. doctrine (with which, judging by the references in their literature, they are thoroughly familiar) as second-rate. In their view, U.S. strategic doctrine is obsessed with a single weapon which it “absolutizes” at the expense of everything else that military experience teaches soldiers to take into account. Its philosophical foundations are “idealism” and “metaphysics”—i.e., currents which engage in speculative discussions of objects (in this case, weapons) and of their “intrinsic” qualities, rather than relying on pragmatic considerations drawn from experience.23
Since the mid-1960’s, the proposition that thermonuclear war would be suicidal for both parties has been used by the Russians largely as a commodity for export. Its chief proponents include staff members of the Moscow Institute of the USA and Canada, and Soviet participants at Pugwash, Dartmouth, and similar international conferences, who are assigned the task of strengthening the hand of anti-military intellectual circles in the West. Inside the Soviet Union, such talk is generally denounced as “bourgeois pacifism.”24
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In the Soviet view, a nuclear war would be total and go beyond formal defeat of one side by the other: “War must not simply [be] the defeat of the enemy, it must be his destruction. This condition has become the basis of Soviet military strategy,” according to the Military-Historical Journal.25 Limited nuclear war, flexible response, escalation, damage limiting, and all the other numerous refinements of U.S. strategic doctrine find no place in its Soviet counterpart (although, of course, they are taken into consideration in Soviet operational planning).
For Soviet generals the decisive influence in the formulation of nuclear doctrine were the lessons of World War II with which, for understandable reasons, they are virtually obsessed. This experience they seem to have supplemented with knowledge gained from professional scrutiny of the record of Nazi and Japanese offensive operations, as well as the balance sheet of British and American strategic-bombing campaigns. More recently, the lessons of the Israeli-Arab wars of 1967 and 1973 in which they indirectly participated seem also to have impressed Soviet strategists, reinforcing previously held convictions. They also follow the Western literature, tending to side with the critics of mutual deterrence. The result of all these diverse influences is a nuclear doctrine which assimilates into the main body of the Soviet military tradition the technical implications of nuclear warfare without surrendering any of the fundamentals of this tradition.
The strategic doctrine adopted by the USSR over the past two decades calls for a policy diametrically opposite to that adopted in the United States by the predominant community of civilian strategists: not deterrence but victory, not sufficiency in weapons but superiority, not retaliation but offensive action. The doctrine has five related elements: (1) preemption (first strike), (2) quantitative superiority in arms, (3) counterforce targeting, (4) combined-arms operations, and (5) defense. We shall take up each of these elements in turn.
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Preemption. The costliest lesson which the Soviet military learned in World War II was the importance of surprise. Because Stalin thought he had an understanding with Hitler, and because he was afraid to provoke his Nazi ally, he forbade the Red Army to mobilize for the German attack of which he had had ample warning. As a result of this strategy of “passive defense,” Soviet forces suffered frightful losses and were nearly defeated. This experience etched itself very deeply on the minds of the Soviet commanders: in their theoretical writings no point is emphasized more consistently than the need never again to allow themselves to be caught in a surprise attack. Nuclear weapons make this requirement especially urgent because, according to Soviet theorists, the decision in a nuclear conflict in all probability will be arrived at in the initial hours. In a nuclear war the Soviet Union, therefore, would not again have at its disposal the time which it enjoyed in 1941-42 to mobilize reserves for a victorious counteroffensive after absorbing devastating setbacks.
Given the rapidity of modern warfare (an ICBM can traverse the distance between the USSR and the United States in thirty minutes), not to be surprised by the enemy means, in effect, to inflict surprise on him. Once the latter’s ICBM’s have left their silos, once his bombers have taken to the air and his submarines to sea, a counterattack is greatly reduced in effectiveness. These considerations call for a preemptive strike. Soviet theorists draw an insistent, though to an outside observer very fuzzy, distinction between “preventive” and “preemptive” attacks. They claim that the Soviet Union will never start a war—i.e., it will never launch a preventive attack—but once it had concluded that an attack upon it was imminent, it would not hesitate to preempt. They argue that historical experience indicates outbreaks of hostilities are generally preceded by prolonged diplomatic crises and military preparations which signal to an alert command an imminent threat and the need to act. Though the analogy is not openly drawn, the action which Soviet strategists seem to have in mind is that taken by the Israelis in 1967, a notably successful example of “active defense” involving a well-timed preemptive strike. (In 1973, by contrast, the Israelis pursued the strategy of “passive defense,” with unhappy consequences.) The Soviet doctrine of nuclear preemption was formulated in the late 1950’s, and described at the time by Garthoff and Dinerstein in the volumes cited above.
A corollary of the preemption strategy holds that a country’s armed forces must always be in a state of high combat readiness so as to be able to go over to active operations with the least delay. Nuclear warfare grants no time for mobilization. Stress on the maintenance of a large ready force is one of the constant themes of Soviet military literature. It helps explain the immense land forces which the USSR maintains at all times and equips with the latest weapons as they roll off the assembly lines.
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Quantitative superiority. There is no indication that the Soviet military share the view prevalent in the U.S. that in the nuclear age numbers of weapons do not matter once a certain quantity had been attained. They do like to pile up all sorts of weapons, new on top of old, throwing away nothing that might come in handy. This propensity to accumulate hardware is usually dismissed by Western observers with contemptuous references to a Russian habit dating back to Czarist days. It is not, however, as mindless as it may appear. For although Soviet strategists believe that the ultimate outcome in a nuclear war will be decided in the initial hours of the conflict, they also believe that a nuclear war will be of long duration: to consummate victory—that is, to destroy the enemy—may take months or even longer. Under these conditions, the possession of a large arsenal of nuclear delivery systems, as well as of other types of weapons, may well prove to be of critical importance. Although prohibited by self-imposed limitations agreed upon in 1972 at SALT I from exceeding a set number of intercontinental ballistic-missile launchers, the Soviet Union is constructing large numbers of so-called Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile launchers (i.e., launchers of less than intercontinental range), not covered by SALT. Some of these could be rapidly converted into regular intercontinental launchers, should the need arise.26
Reliance on quantity has another cause, namely, the peculiarly destructive capability of modern missiles equipped with Multiple Independently-targettable Reentry Vehicles, or MIRV’s. The nose cones of MIRVed missiles, which both super-powers possess, when in mid-course, split like a peapod to launch several warheads, each aimed at a separate target. A single missile equipped with three MIRV’s of sufficient accuracy, yield, and reliability can destroy up to three of the enemy’s missiles—provided, of course, it catches them in their silos, before they have been fired (which adds another inducement to preemption). Theoretically, assuming high accuracy and reliability, should the entire American force of 1,054 ICBM’s be MIRVed (so far only half of them have been MIRVed), it would take only 540 American ICBM’s, each with three MIRV’s, to attack the entire Soviet force of 1,618 ICBM’s. The result would leave the United States with 514 ICBM’s and the USSR with few survivors. Unlikely as the possibility of an American preemptive strike may be, Soviet planners apparently prefer to take no chances; they want to be in a position rapidly to replace ICBM’s lost to a sudden enemy first strike. Conversely, given its doctrine of preemption, the Soviet Union wants to be in a position to destroy the largest number of American missiles with the smallest number of its own, so as to be able to face down the threat of a U.S. second strike. Its most powerful ICBM, the SS-18, is said to have been tested with up to 10 MIRV’s (compared to 3 of the Minuteman-3, America’s only MIRVed ICBM). It has been estimated that 300 of these giant Soviet missiles, authorized under SALT I, could seriously threaten the American arsenal of ICBM’s.
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Counterforce. Two terms commonly used in the jargon of modern strategy are “counterforce” and “countervalue.” Both terms refer to the nature of the target of a strategic nuclear weapon. Counterforce means that the principal objective of one’s nuclear missiles are the enemy’s forces—i.e., his launchers as well as the related command and communication facilities. Countervalue means that one’s principal targets are objects of national “value,” namely the enemy’s population and industrial centers.
Given the predominantly defensive (retaliatory) character of current U.S. strategy, it is naturally predisposed to a countervalue targeting policy. The central idea of the U.S. strategy of deterrence holds that should the Soviet Union dare to launch a surprise first strike at the United States, the latter would use its surviving missiles to lay waste Soviet cities. It is taken virtually for granted in this country that no nation would consciously expose itself to the risk of having its urban centers destroyed—an assumption which derives from British military theory of the 1920’s and 1930’s, and which influenced the RAF to concentrate on strategic bombing raids on German cities in World War II.
The Soviet high command has never been much impressed with the whole philosophy of counter-value strategic bombing, and during World War II resisted the temptation to attack German cities. This negative attitude to bombing of civilians is conditioned not by humanitarian considerations but by cold, professional assessments of the effects of that kind of strategic bombing as revealed by the Allied Strategic Bombing Surveys. The findings of these surveys were largely ignored in the United States, but they seem to have made a strong impression in the USSR. Not being privy to the internal discussions of the Soviet military, we can do no better than consult the writings of an eminent British scientist, P.M.S. Blackett, noted for his pro-Soviet sympathies, whose remarkable book Fear, War and the Bomb, published in 1948-49, indicated with great prescience the lines which Soviet strategic thinking were subsequently to take.
Blackett, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1948, had worked during the war in British Operations Research. He concluded that strategic bombing was ineffective, and wrote his book as an impassioned critique of the idea of using atomic weapons as a strategic deterrent. Translating the devastation wrought upon Germany into nuclear terms, he calculated that it represented the equivalent of the destruction that would have been caused by 400 “improved” Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. Yet despite such punishment, Nazi Germany did not collapse. Given the much greater territory of the Soviet Union and a much lower population density, he argued, it would require “thousands” of atomic bombs to produce decisive results in a war between America and Russia.27 Blackett minimized the military effects of the atomic bombing on Japan. He recalled that in Hiroshima trains were operating forty-eight hours after the blast; that industries were left almost undamaged and could have been back in full production within a month; and that if the most elementary civil-defense precautions had been observed, civilian casualties would have been substantially reduced. Blackett’s book ran so contrary to prevailing opinion and was furthermore so intemperately anti-American in tone that its conclusions were rejected out of hand in the West.
Too hastily, it appears in retrospect. For while it is true that the advent of hydrogen bombs a few years later largely invalidated the estimates on which he had relied, Blackett correctly anticipated Soviet reactions. Analyzing the results of Allied saturation bombing of Germany, Soviet generals concluded that it was largely a wasted effort. Sokolovskii cites in his manual the well-known figures showing that German military productivity rose throughout the war until the fall of 1944, and concludes: “It was not so much the economic struggle and economic exhaustion [i.e., countervalue bombing] that were the causes for the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, but rather the armed conflict and the defeat of its armed forces [i.e., the counterforce strategy pursued by the Red Army.]”28
Soviet nuclear strategy is counterforce oriented. It targets for destruction—at any rate, in the initial strike—not the enemy’s cities but his military forces and their command and communication facilities. Its primary aim is to destroy not civilians but soldiers and their leaders, and to undermine not so much the will to resist as the capability to do so. In the words of Grechko:
The Strategic Rocket Forces, which constitute the basis of the military might of our armed forces, are designed to annihilate the means of the enemy’s nuclear attack, large groupings of his armies, and his military bases; to destroy his military industries; [and] to disorganize the political and military administration of the aggressor as well as his rear and transport.29
Any evidence that the United States may contemplate switching to a counterforce strategy, such as occasionally crops up, throws Soviet generals into a tizzy of excitement. It clearly frightens them far more than the threat to Soviet cities posed by the countervalue strategic doctrine.
____________
Combined-arms operations. Soviet theorists regard strategic nuclear forces (organized since 1960 into a separate arm, the Strategic Rocket Forces) to be the decisive branch of the armed services, in the sense that the ultimate outcome of modern war would be settled by nuclear exchanges. But since nuclear war, in their view, must lead not only to the enemy’s defeat but also to his destruction (i.e., his incapacity to offer further resistance), they consider it necessary to make preparations for the follow-up phase, which may entail a prolonged war of attrition. At this stage of the conflict, armies will be needed to occupy the enemy’s territory, and navies to interdict his lanes of communications. “In the course of operations [battles], armies will basically complete the final destruction of the enemy brought about by strikes of nuclear rocket weapons.”30 Soviet theoretical writings unequivocally reject reliance on any one strategy (such as the Blitzkrieg) or on any one weapon, to win wars. They believe that a nuclear war will require the employment of all arms to attain final victory.
The large troop concentrations of Warsaw Pact forces in Eastern Europe—well in excess of reasonable defense requirements—make sense if viewed in the light of Soviet combined-arms doctrine. They are there not only to have the capacity to launch a surprise land attack against NATO, but also to attack and seize Western Europe with a minimum of damage to its cities and industries after the initial strategic nuclear exchanges have taken place, partly to keep Europe hostage, partly to exploit European productivity as a replacement for that of which the Soviet Union would have been deprived by an American second strike.
As for the ocean-going navy which the Soviet Union has now acquired, it consists primarily of submarines and ground-based naval air forces, and apparently would have the task of cleaning the seas of U.S. ships of all types and cutting the sea lanes connecting the United States with allied powers and sources of raw materials.
The notion of an extended nuclear war is deeply embedded in Soviet thinking, despite its being dismissed by Western strategists who think of war as a one-two exchange. As Blackett noted sarcastically already in 1948-49: “Some armchair strategists (including some atomic scientists) tend to ignore the inevitable counter-moves of the enemy. More chess playing and less nuclear physics might have instilled a greater sense of the realities.”31 He predicted that a World War III waged with the atomic bombs then available would last longer than either of its predecessors, and require combined-arms operations—which seems to be the current Soviet view of the matter.
____________
Defense. As noted, the U.S. theory of mutual deterrence postulates that no effective defense can be devised against an all-out nuclear attack: it is this postulate that makes such a war appear totally irrational. In order to make this premise valid, American civilian strategists have argued against a civil-defense program, against the ABM, and against air defenses.
Nothing illustrates better the fundamental differences between the two strategic doctrines than their attitudes to defense against a nuclear attack. The Russians agreed to certain imprecisely defined limitations on ABM after they had initiated a program in this direction, apparently because they were unable to solve the technical problems involved and feared the United States would forge ahead in this field. However, they then proceeded to build a tight ring of anti-aircraft defenses around the country while also developing a serious program of civil defense.
Before dismissing Soviet civil-defense efforts as wishful thinking, as is customary in Western circles, two facts must be emphasized.
One is that the Soviet Union does not regard civil defense to be exclusively for the protection of ordinary civilians. Its chief function seems to be to protect what in Russia are known as the “cadres,” that is, the political and military leaders as well as industrial managers and skilled workers—those who could reestablish the political and economic system once the war was over. Judging by Soviet definitions, civil defense has as much to do with the proper functioning of the country during and immediately after the war as with holding down casualties. Its organization, presently under Deputy Minister of Defense, Colonel-General A. Altunin, seems to be a kind of shadow government charged with responsibility for administering the country under the extreme stresses of nuclear war and its immediate aftermath.32
Secondly, the Soviet Union is inherently less vulnerable than the United States to a counter-value attack. According to the most recent Soviet census (1970), the USSR had only nine cities with a population of one million or more; the aggregate population of these cities was 20.5 million, or 8.5 per cent of the country’s total. The United States 1970 census showed thirty-five metropolitan centers with over one million inhabitants, totaling 84.5 million people, or 41.5 per cent of the country’s aggregate. It takes no professional strategist to visualize what these figures mean. In World War II, the Soviet Union lost 20 million inhabitants out of a population of 170 million—i.e., 12 per cent; yet the country not only survived but emerged stronger politically and militarily than it had ever been. Allowing for the population growth which has occurred since then, this experience suggests that as of today the USSR could absorb the loss of 30 million of its people and be no worse off, in terms of human casualties, than it had been at the conclusion of World War II. In other words, all of the USSR’s multimillion cities could be destroyed without trace or survivors, and, provided that its essential cadres had been saved, it would emerge less hurt in terms of casualties than it was in 1945.
Such figures are beyond the comprehension of most Americans. But clearly a country that since 1914 has lost, as a result of two world wars, a civil war, famine, and various “purges,” perhaps up to 60 million citizens, must define “unacceptable damage” differently from the United States which has known no famines or purges, and whose deaths from all the wars waged since 1775 are estimated at 650,000—fewer casualties than Russia suffered in the 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II alone. Such a country tends also to assess the rewards of defense in much more realistic terms.
____________
How significant are these recondite doctrinal differences? It has been my invariable experience when lecturing on these matters that during the question period someone in the audience will get up and ask: “But is it not true that we and the Russians already possess enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other ten times over” (or fifty, or a hundred—the figures vary)? My temptation is to reply: “Certainly. But we also have enough bullets to shoot every man, woman, and child, and enough matches to set the whole world on fire. The point lies not in our ability to wreak total destruction: it lies in intent.” And insofar as military doctrine is indicative of intent, what the Russians think to do with their nuclear arsenal is a matter of utmost importance that calls for close scrutiny.
Enough has already been said to indicate the disparities between American and Soviet strategic doctrines of the nuclear age. These differences may be most pithily summarized by stating that whereas we view nuclear weapons as a deterrent, the Russians see them as a “compellant”—with all the consequences that follow. Now it must be granted that the actual, operative differences between the two doctrines may not be quite as sharp as they appear in the public literature: it is true that our deterrence doctrine leaves room for some limited offensive action, just as the Russians include elements of deterrence in their “war-fighting” and “war-winning” doctrine. Admittedly, too, a country’s military doctrine never fully reveals how it would behave under actual combat conditions. And yet the differences here are sharp and fundamental enough, and the relationship of Soviet doctrine to Soviet deployments sufficiently close, to suggest that ignoring or not taking seriously Soviet military doctrine may have very detrimental effects on U.S. security. There is something innately destabilizing in the very fact that we consider nuclear war unfeasible and suicidal for both, and our chief adversary views it as feasible and winnable for himself.
SALT misses the point at issue so long as it addresses itself mainly to the question of numbers of strategic weapons: equally important are qualitative improvements within the existing quotas, and the size of regular land and sea forces. Above all, however, looms the question of intent: as long as the Soviets persist in adhering to the Clausewitzian maxim on the function of war, mutual deterrence does not really exist. And unilateral deterrence is feasible only if we understand the Soviet war-winning strategy and make it impossible for them to succeed.
1 “The Real Paul Warnke,” the New Republic, March 26, 1977, p. 23.
2 N.V. Karabanov in N.V. Karabanov, et al., Filosofskoe nasledie V. I. Lenina i problemy sovremennoi voiny (“The Philosophical Heritage of V.I. Lenin and the Problems of Contemporary War”) (Moscow, 1972), pp. 18-19, cited in Leon Gouré, Foy D. Kohler, and Mose L. Harvey, eds., The Role of Nuclear Forces in Current Soviet Strategy (1974), p. 60.
3 A.A. Grechko, Vooruzhonnye sily sovetskogo gosudarstva (“The Armed Forces of the Soviet State”) (Moscow, 1975), p. 345.
4 Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War (1973), p. 368.
5 Matthew B. Ridgway, Soldier (1956), pp. 296-97.
6 In Michael Howard, ed., The Theory and Practice of War (London, 1965), p. 291.
7 Benjamin S. Lambeth, Selective Nuclear Options in American and Soviet Strategic Policy (Rand Corporation, R-2034-DDRE, December 1976), p. 14. This study analyzes and approves of the refinement introduced into the U.S. doctrine by James R. Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense in the form of “limited-response options.”
8 Interview with Playboy, March 1977, p. 72.
9 Grechko, Voorozhunnye sily sovetskogo gosudarstva, pp. 347-48, emphasis added.
10 Voennaia strategiia (Moscow, 1962). Since 1962 there have been two revised editions (1963 and 1968). The 1962 edition was immediately translated into English; but currently the best version is that edited by Harriet Fast Scott (Crane-Russak, 1975) which renders the third edition but collates its text with the preceding two.
11 To date, twelve volumes in this series have been translated into English and made publicly available through the U.S. Government Printing Office.
12 William W. Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy (1964), p. 97.
13 Garthoff's principal works are Soviet Military Doctrine (1953), Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age (1958), and The Soviet Image of Future War (1959). Dinerstein wrote War and the Soviet Union (1959).
14 Cited in J.M. Mackintosh, The Strategy and Tactics of Soviet Foreign Policy (London, 1962), pp. 90-91, emphasis added.
15 Articles in the New Times for 1945-46 cited in P.M.S. Blackett, Fear, War and the Bomb (1949), pp. 163-65.
16 We now know that orders to proceed with the development of a Soviet atomic bomb were issued by Stalin in June 1942, probably as a result of information relayed by Klaus Fuchs concerning the Manhattan Project, on which he was working at Los Alamos, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, XXIII, No. 10, December 1967, p. 15.
17 Dinerstein, War and the Soviet Union, p. 71.
18 I would like to stress the word “theory,” for the Russians certainly accept the fact of deterrence. The difference is that whereas American theorists of mutual deterrence regard this condition as mutually desirable and permanent, Soviet strategists regard it as undesirable and transient: they are entirely disinclined to allow us the capability of deterring them.
19 Matthew P. Gallagher and Karl F. Spielmann, Jr., Soviet Decision-Making for Defense (1972), p. 39.
20 The figures are from Grechko, Vooruzhonnye sily, p. 97.
21 Metodologicheskie problemy voennoi teorii i praktiki (“Methodological Problems of Military Theory and Practice”) (Moscow, Ministry of Defense of the USSR, 1969), p. 288.
22 V.D. Sokolovskii, Soviet Military Strategy (Rand Corporation, 1963), p. 99, emphasis added.
23 See, e.g., Metodologicheskie problemy, pp. 289-90.
24 Gouré et al., The Role of Nuclear Forces, p. 9.
25 Cited ibid., p. 106.
26 I have in mind the SS-20, a recently developed Soviet rocket. This is a two-stage version of the intercontinental SS-16 which can be turned into an SS-16 with the addition of a third booster and fired from the same launcher. Its production is not restricted by SALT I and not covered by the Vladivostok Accord.
27 Blackett, Fear, p. 88. As a matter of fact, recent unofficial Soviet calculations stress that the United States dropped on Vietnam the TNT equivalent of 650 Hiroshima-type bombs—also without winning the war: Kommunist Vooruzhonnykh Sil (“The Communist of the Armed Forces”), No. 24, December 1973, p. 27, cited in Gouré et al., The Role of Nuclear Forces, p. 104.
28 Sokolovskii, Soviet Military Strategy (3rd edition), p. 21.
29 A.A. Grechko, Na strazhe mira i stroitel'stva Kommunizma, (“Guarding Peace and the Construction of Communism”) (Moscow, 1971), p. 41.
30 Metodologicheskie problemy, p. 288.
31 Blackett, Fear, p. 79.
32 On the subject of civil defense, see Leon Gouré, War Survival in Soviet Strategy (1976).
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Hillary Clinton’s Bad Old Days
The Democratic front-runner is still intimately involved with conspiracy-theorist leftists
Joshua Muravchik 2016-03-17
aving tacked to the left in her contest with the self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton will almost certainly tack back toward the center in the general-election campaign. She has executed this zigzag before. By this point, her true beliefs may be undiscoverable, perhaps even by her. But her apparent weakness for the counsel of unrepentant veterans of the 1960s New Left gives cause for wonder about the voices she would listen to and the direction she would steer once she reached the White House.
Clinton’s own ideological roots lie in that movement. When the president of Wellesley College yielded to the demand of protesting students that one of their number be added to the graduation program in 1969 to counterbalance the establishmentarian commencement speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, Hillary Rodham was their choice. She delivered an address in which the core idea was this: “Our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.”
She was chosen because she had already made a name as an activist, a trajectory that continued beyond Wellesley. Its highlights were recalled in 2008 by none other than Tom Hayden, who as one of the organizers of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Michigan was perhaps the preeminent founder of the New Left. Hayden, whose purpose was to retaliate against the Clinton campaign for circulating accounts of Barack Obama’s far-left associations, wrote:
She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations [at the Democratic National Convention]. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike against an “unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” She was involved in the New Haven defense of [Black Panther] Bobby Seal during his murder trial in 1970….[A]fter Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others “tolerated communists.”
It was widely reported that Clinton-family retainer Sidney Blumenthal had furnished the material on Obama’s past, making this a piquant clash. These two men—Hayden and Blumenthal—were New Leftists who had gone on to big careers more by obscuring than revising their youthful radical views. Now each was seeking to damage the other’s favored candidate by dishing on their radical pasts.
Of course, everything in Hayden’s Hillary history happened long ago, and her views, like those of most of us who were 1960s radicals of one stripe or another, have doubtless evolved. Yet in thousands of pages of writings and in countless spoken words since, she has failed to explain in what way they have changed. Instead, she has deliberately blurred the picture.
In Living History, an autobiography issued in anticipation of running for the presidency in 2004, she contrives to make herself seem to have been nothing but a spectator. She claims she went to the 1968 Chicago demonstration merely “to witness history.” She writes that she “moderated the mass meeting” where Yale students voted to join the strike and observed “how seriously my fellow students took” the issues—as if she herself had not been an advocate. She reports that “demonstrations broke out in and around campus” supporting the Black Panthers while she was at Yale, without offering a hint that she took part in any way. As for her summer at the Bay Area’s premier hard-left law firm, she acknowledges only working on a “child custody” case.
The First Lady’s leftish image was really defined by her curious dalliance with Michael Lerner, a fellow 1960s radical who had founded the Seattle Liberation Front. A demonstration the Front organized devolved into rioting, leading to Lerner’s prosecution in 1970 as one of the ‘Seattle Seven.’This evasiveness extended to her descriptions of the events themselves. No mention is made, for example, that the Panthers in the dock in New Haven were on trial for the torture and murder of one of their own (whom they suspected of being an informer), as if it all may have been a matter of government persecution. Regarding Vietnam, she portrays Yale’s chaplain William Sloane Coffin glowingly as having become a “national leader of the anti-war movement through his articulate moral critique” of America’s actions, but she omits mentioning that he traveled to Hanoi in solidarity with America’s enemy, a pitiless totalitarian regime. All this whitewashing and airbrushing prompts one to wonder whether she ever rethought her youthful radicalism or just left it behind because it was impractical or impolitic.
In 1992, when the Bill Clinton campaign sought and won my support as it wooed “Reagan Democrats” back to the fold, I asked Al Frum, then the head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, about Hillary’s leftward tug on her husband. He responded that to his surprise she was proving to be a “big help” in keeping the campaign in the middle of the road. So she may have been, but once ensconced in the White House, she emerged at once as being “solidly on the left of [the] administration’s ideological spectrum,” as the Nation noted enthusiastically. Her activities, especially her leading role in the unsuccessful effort to dramatically overall the health-care system, were widely seen as one source of the backlash that brought the Republicans control of both houses of Congress in 1994.
The First Lady’s leftish image was really defined by her curious dalliance with Michael Lerner, a fellow 1960s radical who had founded the Seattle Liberation Front. A demonstration the Front organized devolved into rioting, leading to Lerner’s prosecution in 1970 as one of the “Seattle Seven.” A decade later, he reinvented himself as a “psychotherapist,” creating the Institute for Labor and Mental Health. A decade or so after that, he announced that he had been ordained a rabbi, albeit without having attended any seminary. Rabbinic garb added bite to Lerner’s criticisms of Israel, which were constant and invariably extreme. It also enabled him to formulate a new patter about spirituality that grabbed Hillary’s attention.
Lerner’s spirituality did not signify an interest in man’s relation to the eternal. Instead it consisted of the same leftist causes he had long championed, wrapped in ponderous talk about “mov[ing] from an ethos of selfishness to an ethos of caring and community.” He called this the “politics of meaning.”
Hillary borrowed the phrase when she delivered a major speech in 1993 lamenting a “sleeping sickness of the soul” that she said was “at the root of America’s ills.” This necessitated “redefining who we are as human beings in the post-modern age.” Soon after, in greeting Lerner at a public event, she said, “Am I your mouthpiece or what?” When the speech evinced some ridicule—“what on earth does it mean?” asked the New Republic—Clinton conceded, “As Michael Lerner and I have discussed, we have to first create a language that would better communicate what we are trying to say.” So she had him to the White House for a skull session.
Much as Lerner reveled in press accounts describing him as Hillary’s “guru,” her “politics of meaning” speech echoed themes she had favored before ever encountering Lerner. As the late Michael Kelly pointed out in a stunning New York Times Magazine article, the speech tracked closely her 1969 Wellesley commencement address in which she spoke of “forg[ing] an identity in this particular age” by “coming to terms with our humanness.” Verily, the girl was mother to the woman. The 21-year-old was now 45, but the thoughts were the same.
After the Republican landslide in 1994, Bill Clinton moved sharply back toward the center, Hillary lowered her profile, and Lerner and his politics of meaning were no longer heard from in Washington. The result was a highly successful presidency, whose success is the core reason there may yet be a second Clinton presidency. The only real blemish on the first was the scandal of Bill’s various extramarital moments, which became the focus of an impeachment process. One consequence of this was to cement the role of Sidney Blumenthal as a key adviser to the Clintons, now especially to Hillary.
Blumenthal had been a member of the SDS. He began a career in journalism writing for “alternative” newspapers like the Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix and radical magazines like the Nation and In These Times. He published an anthology that carried an introduction by Philip Agee, the CIA turncoat who declared himself a “communist” and turned his knowledge of America’s secrets over to Cuban intelligence. In the 1980s, Blumenthal began to contribute to mainstream publications and landed a position with the Washington Post, which then leaned more sharply leftward than it does today. Blumenthal’s beat was exposing the wrongdoing—real or invented—of conservatives. His contributions often appeared in its Style section, which suited his method—to besmirch his subject’s reputations rather than critiquing their ideas.
His schoolyard style was vividly displayed in a book he published at the time, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment. I captured his Trump-like approach in a review in these pages:
He reports that Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, read two conservative classics in his freshman year in college, after which “his mind was set in a pattern that would never waver.”…The neoconservatives as a group embraced President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative as “a way to compensate” for their failure to “broker the Jewish vote for Reagan” in 1984. Further, “a desire for vengeance” against the culture of the 1960’s “led some neoconservatives to feel a measure of vindication when John Lennon was killed” (though Blumenthal offers neither names nor specifics). William F. Buckley Jr. was inspired to launch National Review by an obsessional anti-Semite. Arthur Laffer is fat.
The other side of the coin of Blumenthal’s abusiveness toward ideological adversaries was his sycophancy toward liberals in power or with the potential to get there. NPR’s senior Washington editor Ron Elving has reported this history:
Blumenthal had generated controversy at the New Republic in 1984 with his enthusiastic coverage of…Democratic presidential hopeful…Gary Hart.
The Hart flirtation was soon surpassed by Blumenthal’s infatuation with Bill Clinton, whose 1992 campaign he praised for its potential to bring “epochal change.” . . . Even as the Clintons’ health care bill collapsed and the Republicans took over both the House and Senate in the elections of 1994, Blumenthal remained ardently supportive, touting his access and long interviews with the president.
By 1997, the year Bill Clinton’s second term began, Blumenthal dropped the second shoe, going to work as a White House aide. There he toiled, said the New York Times, as “speech-writer, in-house intellectual and press corps whisperer.” The “impeachment trial…solidified Blumenthal’s relationship with the Clintons,” CNN reported. “Blumenthal routinely provided [them] with information about their Republican opponents…and how to message against them.” It was not only politicians whom Sidney went after. His longtime friend and former fellow-leftist Christopher Hitchens wrote of their reunion in 1998 after an interregnum:
Where was my witty if sometimes cynical, clever if sometimes dogmatic, friend? In his place seemed to be someone who had gone to work for John Gotti. He talked coldly and intently of a lethal right-wing conspiracy that was slowly engulfing the capital. And he spoke, as if out of the side of a tough-guy mouth, about the women who were tools of the plot. Kathleen Willey, who had been interviewed on television the preceding weekend, was showing well in the polls, but that would soon be fixed….As for Monica Lewinsky, he painted her as a predatory and unstable stalker.
Blumenthal’s position as Clinton family consiglieri did not end when Bill left office. Instead, he took up his pen again, producing an 800-plus-page book, settling scores with the Clinton’s critics and detractors. Describing himself as the first family’s “good soldier” and “first knight,” he performed “acrobatic feats of protectiveness [that] are endless,” wrote New York Times book critic, Janet Maslin.
When President Obama named Hillary Clinton secretary of state, she wanted Blumenthal on her staff, but presidential aides vetoed the idea because of Blumenthal’s part in spreading derogatory information about Obama during the primaries. Blumenthal continued nonetheless to function as a confidant and adviser. In lieu of a government salary, he became a consultant to the Clinton Foundation and also to Media Matters, a “progressive media watchdog” Hillary Clinton helped found, and to its closely linked PAC, American Bridge.
According to news stories, his earnings from these positions exceeded what he would have drawn at State.
Mrs. Clinton’s recently released emails include hundreds from Blumenthal. As Politico’s Nahal Toosi put it, “Clinton received advice from many…but the quantity and audacity of the missives from Blumenthal…stand out.” Her address on this private server was reserved for top aides, close friends, high government officials, and former secretaries of state, denied even to most diplomatic and administration officials. When Blumenthal’s outsized presence in her inbox prompted questions from reporters, Clinton dismissed it, saying his were “unsolicited” messages, some of which she had “passed on.”
In truth she often replied to them with appreciation, occasionally asked Blumenthal for more on a subject, and at least once wrote that she was waiting for something he had promised. As the New York Times reported: “Mrs. Clinton…took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, often forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials…and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.”
The attention that Blumenthal’s messages attracted has been magnified by the ongoing controversy over the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which revolves in part around questions about whether Secretary Clinton had done everything she might have to prevent or stop it and whether she had subsequently misrepresented the attackers’ motives. As emails were released under judicial order, reporters were quick to notice that prior to the attack, Blumenthal sent her dozens of messages on Libya. By one journalist’s count, one-third of the released material pertaining to Libya came from Blumenthal, who had no known expertise on the subject.
Blumenthal, however, scarcely limited himself to Libya. The messages consisted mostly of articles he was forwarding, often prefaced with a brief comment. They touched on Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, North Korea, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Georgia, and the European Union, as well as various non-geographic topics. No other country received even a fraction of the attention he devoted to Libya, with one glaring exception: Israel. There was, however, a striking difference between Blumenthal’s Libya messages and those about Israel.
The former are long, detailed, and written in the style of intelligence reports. When called to testify to Congress, Blumenthal surprised listeners by saying he had not written them—and their substance and style confirmed this. Blumenthal, it turned out, was advising a business partnership aiming to secure contracts to provide humanitarian aid in Libya’s reconstruction. One of the partners, a retired U.S. intelligence officer, had authored the memos.
Although Blumenthal’s involvement in this venture created a conflict of interest regarding Libya, his emails do not seem designed to influence policy. They and most of those on other topics seem intended primarily to sustain his own value to Clinton by demonstrating his breadth of knowledge and range of contacts. In contrast, his communications about Israel clearly press a point of view about the country and its policies. They are unfailingly critical of Israel, blaming it for the absence of peace.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009 first publicly endorsed a two-state solution with Palestinians, Blumenthal wrote to Clinton that this was a “transparently false and hypocritical ploy” on which she should try to “catch” him. When the U.S. brokered a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in 2012, he wrote: “Hope it holds….Bibi refuses a partner for peace, but has encouraged one for war.” When she prepared to speak before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he urged using the occasion to diminish AIPAC:
While praising AIPAC, remind it in as subtle but also direct a way as you can that it does not have a monopoly over American Jewish opinion….AIPAC itself has become an organ of the Israeli right, specifically Likud. By acknowledging J Street you give them legitimacy, credibility….Just by mentioning J Street in passing, AIPAC becomes a point on the spectrum, not the controller of the spectrum.
J Street is the counter-AIPAC, calling itself “pro-Israel,” but it devotes the lion’s share of its words and energy to harsh criticism of the Jewish state.
Among the articles Blumenthal transmitted was one by the UK’s Jeremy Greenstock arguing that Hamas sought peace and quoting approvingly a UN official who called Israel’s control of imports into Gaza “illegal, inhuman . . . insane . . . a medieval siege.” He sometimes sent articles by left-wing Israelis on various topics. One, by Gershon Baskin, condemned Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders. Another, by Yuri Avnery, claimed that “the cult of Masada is becoming dominant” in Israel. A third, by Avner Cohen, argued that Israel should join the Non-Proliferation Treaty and abandon its policy of “nuclear ambiguity.” Blumenthal added the comment that Israel’s policy “is itself the model for Iran.”
Blumenthal offered counsel on U.S. policy by paraphrasing a post by Pat Lang, a blogger whom he called a “friend.” Blumenthal wrote, “The U.S. must be insistent, especially with Israel, playing very firm and tough, or else the talks will collapse, which is likely the Israeli objective.” Another Lang blog that Blumenthal forwarded suggested that U.S. officials had fallen for Israeli “disinformation” in reporting that Syria had transferred Scud missiles to Hezbollah. When Clinton responded tersely, “skepticism not in order,” Blumenthal replied, implying that Israel was nonetheless the real villain. “Of course, if Bibi were to have engaged Syria in negotiations taking its previous gestures seriously,” this might not have happened, he said.
In a piece on Europe’s anti-immigrant parties, Max wrote: ‘The extreme right is also attracted to Israel because the country represents its highest ideas…a racist apartheid state.’ Clinton replied, ‘A very smart piece—as usual.’The author whose writing Blumenthal transmitted most often was his son, Max. Max Blumenthal first garnered public attention with Republican Gomorrah, a 2009 book that describes itself as “a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal and sordidness from the dark heart of the forces that now have a leash on the party.” Building on this, Max secured a post as senior writer for the “alternative” website AlterNet. When Sidney sent Clinton an advance copy of the epilogue of the paperback edition, she raved: “I loved the epilogue….He’s so good.”
In recent years, Max’s focus has been Israel, the subject of a half dozen of his articles forwarded by his father. Max is a mainstay of the fervently anti-Israel website, Mondoweiss, and the even more fervent Electronic Intifada, edited by Ali Abunimah, creator of the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) campaign. One gets a taste of Electronic Intifada from tweets by Abunimah and Rana Baker, listed on the masthead along with Max as members of the site’s “team.” When three Israeli teenagers disappeared in June 2014 (later to turn up murdered), Baker tweeted: “Wonderful wonderful news three settlers have been kidnapped.”
Max’s specialty is granular detail that gives his work a patina of authority even as the facts he conveys are often wrong. For example, Mondoweiss ran 2,000 words by Max and Philip Weiss debunking the accusation that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah voiced anti-Semitism. They detailed the sources scoured by Max. But Nasrallah’s own website carried an audio recording of him declaiming the most chilling of the words in question: “If [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
In 2013 Nation Books published Max’s, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. The Nation’s own columnist, Eric Alterman, a harsh critic of Israel’s, called it “shameful” and “awful,” saying “like a child’s fairy tale, each story he tells has the same repetitive narrative, with Israel, without exception, cast as the Big Bad Wolf.” In sum, he said, “this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.”
Of course Sidney cannot be held accountable for Max’s writings, but of the articles Sidney forwarded to Clinton on the subject of Israel, he sent more by Max than by any other author. She never, as far as I can see, commented on Max’s articles that focused exclusively on Israel, but to ones devoted only partly to Israel she sometimes reacted with enthusiasm. In a piece on Europe’s anti-immigrant parties, Max wrote: “The extreme right is also attracted to Israel because the country represents its highest ideas…a racist apartheid state.” Clinton replied, “A very smart piece—as usual.” To another that referred to “the extensive history of Israeli and ultra-Zionist funding and promotion of Islamophobic propaganda in the United States,” she commented, “Your Max is a mitzvah.” To yet another that called the late Zionist blogger Rachel Abrams “an unabashed genocide enthusiast,” she blurted, “Max strikes again!”
The tone of goofy cheer indicates the level of solidarity and intimacy between Hillary Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal. In making a highly successful career near power, Blumenthal has never, to my knowledge, confronted his youthful radicalism to explain which, if any, of the ideas held then seem mistaken today and why. Far more consequentially, the same is true of Hillary Clinton, which is disquieting now that the presidency seems so readily within her grasp. The danger is not that she will reveal herself to be some kind of Manchurian Candidate once in office. Rather it is that, having forsaken radicalism merely out of concern for electability, she will continue to be credulous toward the counsel of the Michael Lerners and Sidney Blumenthals of the world.
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Seattle Protest Roasters
Review of "Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist" By Sunil Yapa
Fernanda Moore 2016-03-16
our Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, Sunil Yapa’s debut novel, takes place on the first day of the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. Fifty thousand demonstrators, some of them strange bedfellows indeed, surrounded the convention center where the WTO was scheduled to meet: “Teamsters and turtles” marched in solidarity with farmers, labor unionists, NGO workers, consumer-protection groups, and anarchists, among others. When an anarchist “black bloc” began smashing windows, the understaffed and underprepared Seattle police panicked. Within hours, the march turned from a mildly surreal spectacle into a violent showdown between protestors and police, who fired tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets into the crowds in a vain effort to disperse them. Hundreds of protestors were arrested; several WTO meetings were canceled or postponed. Property damage was tallied in the millions of dollars. The cops ran out of tear gas. The following day, Seattle’s mayor called in the National Guard.
Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
By Sunil Yapa view book
Yapa’s novel opens, fittingly, with a struck match. Victor, a homeless 19-year-old, “with his dark eyes and his thin shoulders and his cafecito con leche skin, wearing a pair of classic Air Jordans, the leather so white it glowed,” is getting high beside the tent he’s pitched below a freeway. Soon he’ll join the marching crowds—not to demonstrate (Victor claims he’s “absolutely allergic to belief”), but to sell weed to the protestors. Victor’s a messed-up kid—lonely, angry, tired, “his heart of hearts poisoned by a bitter, wounded hatred, a sickness of the soul.” Through his jaded eyes, we get our first glimpse of the WTO protestors.
They’re a motley bunch, chanting and singing and “popping out from every hole and door, waves of protestors sloshing in the streets, bright-eyed thousands appearing as if summoned.” At first, all Victor can do is gawk. Topless girls with duct tape across their nipples cry “Death to the police state.” There are “dreadlocked djinns dangling from the lampposts, cameras around their necks” and civil-rights lawyers in combat boots. Yuppies are “stomping into the dawn from their suburban warrens, from their gorgeous mansions that glittered fat on the Sound.” It’s a parade, Victor decides, a bizarre and trippy pageant, all these “sweet, round, high-fructose faces” glowing in solidarity. “Hey, man,” Victor says, sidling up to a hefty guy in a blue jacket—a union man, it turns out, marching right next to all the hippies and freaks. “You need any weed?”
But poor Victor has badly, and hilariously, misjudged the scene. Everyone he approaches—from the union guy to a geezer banging a goatskin drum—recoils, then tells him to get lost. “You guys are some pretty cool heads,” he says, rather desperately, to a pair of groovy-seeming baby boomers.
“Are you trying to sell me marijuana?” the husband snaps, before storming off to tattle to a cop. Even a “sexy undergrad” who plops down next to Victor wants nothing to do with his stash. “Look, you don’t understand. This is a drug-free area,” she tells him. “This is a protest march,” Victor counters, wearily exhaling smoke. “Where’d you hear that?” she says. “This isn’t a protest march. This is a direct action.” And with that, she plucks the joint from Victor’s lips and crushes it beneath her shoe.
It’s a great setup—amusing and revelatory all at once—and it cleverly shines light on both the privileged, fuddy-duddy protestors and the clueless, half-baked kid. Victor’s failed business venture nicely illuminates an interesting paradox: While the rich white folks protest corporate capitalism, the homeless black teenager—a budding entrepreneur!—is desperate for a sale.
In subsequent chapters, Yapa introduces six more narrators. Two are activists, three are cops, and one is the Sri Lankan delegate to the WTO. This should work beautifully—what better way to showcase the protests’ complexities and contradictions than to describe key issues from multiple vantage points across both sides? But hold on.
First we meet John Henry, a holier-than-thou career activist, “a man you could imagine in a dream of the Himalaya, high above the clouds.” (Actually, he’s from Detroit.) Once he was a storefront preacher; now he leads “a congregation in the streets” and spends a lot of time yammering about the beauty of struggle and how much he loves his people. John Henry’s girlfriend—a skinny, dreadlocked white woman named King—is another experienced dissident, “trained in the tactics, techniques, and philosophy of nonviolence.” Deep down, of course, she’s someone entirely different—a woman with a dark (but easy to guess) criminal secret, a violent temper, and a dangerous tendency toward rage.
The novel falls apart. Yapa’s writing turns mushy and sentimental, riddled with rhetorical questions. Everyone waxes moony and philosophical, and all the characters sound exactly the same.On the other side of the barricades, we get Officer Timothy Park—jumpy and hostile, his face disfigured by scars, the very model of a trigger-happy Bad Cop. Right away he gets in trouble for tangling with the protestors; a few pages later, to his partner Julia’s exasperation, he pepper sprays a carload of Quaker activists who give him a little lip. Julia, a tough-talking, gorgeous, Latina cliché (her steely demeanor, naturally, belies her tender and damaged heart) privately considers Park “as radioactive as a blast survivor”—which turns out to be exactly what he is. Park’s mental and physical scars date from the Oklahoma City bombing; Julia was traumatized by the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. They’re like a roll call of late-20th-century catastrophes.
Julia and Park report to Bill Bishop, chief of police, by all accounts a hell of a guy. A 30-year veteran of the force, Bishop favors community policing, opposes departmental racism, and cheerfully marches—though he’s straight—in Seattle’s Gay Pride parade. Naturally, he’s a secret sufferer, too. Ever since his beloved wife died and his troubled teenage stepson ran away, Yapa tells us, Bishop has had “a heart full of loss and a head full of doom.”
Yapa’s policemen and protestors lack Victor’s spark; they’re drab stereotypes with utterly predictable inner conflicts, artlessly deployed at intervals throughout the novel’s increasingly hackneyed plot. First Park, tipped off by the un-groovy boomers, confiscates Victor’s drug stash; then King and John Henry show up to save Victor from the Man. In a trice, formerly apolitical Victor morphs into a burgeoning activist. (He learned about the power of the people, it seems, by reading his beloved dead mother’s books.) When his new best friends need one more body for “lockdown,” Victor eagerly volunteers; after being chained to fellow protestors, he looks up to see a familiar uniformed man. Guess which police chief turns out to be his estranged stepfather?
As these and other coincidences pile up, the novel falls apart. Yapa’s writing turns mushy and sentimental, riddled with rhetorical questions (“Was there not a single word he could say that had not been emptied of value?”) and bogged down in treacly cliché. “Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.” That’s Victor, channeling Chief Bishop, though it’s often hard to sort out whose perspective the narrative is mired in. Everyone waxes moony and philosophical, and all the characters sound exactly the same.
Symbolic details are invariably overdetermined and overdone. Victor’s Air Jordans, for instance, stand for sweatshop labor, late-stage American capitalism, misplaced materialism, greediness, parental indulgence, and, finally, for fatherly love. We hear so much about fear and loss and loneliness and tears that we grow immune to their significance. Which is frustrating, since Yapa writes beautifully when he wants to. An extended digression describing the Sri Lankan civil war is vivid and convincing, and there are plenty of small moments (as when Yapa describes feuding protestors “yelling philosophies in each other’s faces”) that come across as perfectly apt. Taken together, these sections aren’t quite enough to save Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. But they certainly leave the reader curious about Yapa’s next novel.
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William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
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“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
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Dana Perino
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Don’t Forget Harry James
Giving a scorned musician his proper due
Terry Teachout 2016-03-16
ournalists are fond of marking centenaries, but no particular fuss was made over the occasion of Harry James’s birth 100 years ago this past March. To the extent that he is still remembered today, it is only for having set Frank Sinatra on the road to glory by hiring the young singer to perform with his big band in 1939. Yet James had once been famous enough in his own right for his picture to appear on the front page of the New York Times when he died in 1983, a fitting tribute to a trumpet-playing bandleader described in the paper’s obituary as “a major figure of the swing era” whose big band “remained popular for more than 40 years.”
That was, if anything, an understatement. No jazz instrumentalist has ever been more popular than James. Seventy of his records appeared on Billboard’s pop charts between 1939 and 1953. (The Rolling Stones, by contrast, have had 56 chart hits to date.) During that same time, he and his band were heard regularly on network radio and appeared in 10 feature films, including one with Betty Grable, the celebrated World War II pinup girl and the second of James’s three wives. Long after rock ’n’ roll had decisively supplanted golden-age pop as America’s preferred form of popular music, he managed to keep his band working, continuing to perform in public until nine days before his death.
Why, then, is James mostly forgotten? First, his popularity was and is off-putting to certain critics and jazz buffs, and the way in which he won it was even more offensive to them. As John S. Wilson explained in the Times obituary, James’s success “came only when he added to his repertory romantic ballads played with warm emotion and a vibrato so broad that at times it seemed almost comic.” Still, even at the height of his commercial success, he also played plenty of hard-core big-band jazz, and numerous other critics and scholars, including some who had no use for his schmaltzy hit records of “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You” and “You Made Me Love You,” lauded him. Gunther Schuller, for one, called James “the most technically assured and prodigiously talented white trumpet player of the late Swing Era…possibly the most complete trumpet player who ever lived.”
No less troublesome, especially now that race-conscious jazz critics are on the lookout for egregious examples of “cultural appropriation,” was the fact that James was white. But the color of his skin did not prevent such illustrious black trumpeters as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Clark Terry from admiring his technique and artistry. Louis Armstrong, on whom James initially modeled his playing, went so far as to praise him in characteristically pithy terms: “That white boy—he plays like a jig!”
One must dig more deeply to understand why James is so little remembered today, a venture aided by the existence of Peter J. Levinson’s Trumpet Blues (1999), a thoroughly researched biography that deals frankly with his squalid private life. A hard-drinking, philandering loner who abused his wives, ignored his children, and lost a fortune at the craps tables of the casinos that employed him, James died broke and unhappy. But he left behind ample evidence that he was a great jazzman who made self-destructive career choices, at least where his reputation was concerned.
AS THE SAYING goes, James was born in a trunk. His mother was an acrobat, and his father led a circus band that toured throughout the south. James’s father, himself an accomplished trumpeter, drilled the boy unstintingly in the hope that he would become a classical musician, and Harry developed into a budding young virtuoso with an impeccably polished technique and the iron-lipped stamina that comes from playing marches for circus acts.
But James had other plans. He fell in love with jazz after hearing Louis Armstrong’s early records, and when his family settled down in Texas in 1931, he started playing with local dance bands and working his way up the professional ladder. Benny Goodman, the most famous bandleader of the early swing era, heard and hired him six years later, and within a matter of months the 21-year-old James had become, after Goodman himself, the band’s best-known and most admired soloist.
James recorded extensively with Goodman in 1937 and 1938, and he can also be heard in off-the-air broadcasts of live performances that illustrate even more clearly what Zeke Zarchy, whom he replaced in Goodman’s trumpet section, later said about him: “Fire came out of that trumpet every time he picked up his horn. It was like a guy throwing a spear.” His sound was fat-toned and ferociously intense, and he played with a darting, daring agility worthy of Armstrong in his prime.
James had another spear in his capacious quiver. Like Armstrong, he was also a wholly idiomatic blues player, an accomplishment rare among white jazzmen of the ’30s that added emotional depth to a self-consciously flashy style. As he explained in a 1977 interview with Merv Griffin: “I was brought up in Texas with the blues. When I was 11 or 12 years old, down in what they call Barbecue Row, I used to sit in with the guys that had the broken bottlenecks on their guitars, playing the blues. That’s all we knew.”
James was determined to cover all the musical bases, and he did so with seeming effortlessness. Moreover, he always insisted that he performed sentimental ballads not for commercial reasons but solely because he liked doing so.In addition, he was a talented composer and arranger, a more than competent drummer and dancer, and a physically attractive man whose piercing blue eyes and slender build made him catnip to women—and therefore born to be a bandleader. In 1939 he went out on his own and spent the next two years struggling to find a distinctive ensemble voice. James’s goal was to lead “a band that really swings and that’s easy to dance to.” He also longed to feature himself on ballads, which Goodman had been unwilling to let him play.
Finally, in 1941, he turned the key of commercial success by hiring Helen Forrest, perhaps the most tasteful and expressive female singer of the big-band era, and adding a small string section to his otherwise conventional instrumental lineup. It was with this group that James recorded an unabashedly sentimental arrangement of “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It),” a 1913 ballad that had been revived four years earlier by Judy Garland. His instrumental version promptly became a million-selling hit, and he rode it to fame and fortune by recording a series of equally fulsome ballads featuring Forrest.
The jazz critic Dan Morgenstern has called “You Made Me Love You” “the record that the jazz critics never forgave Harry James for recording.” Their disdain, while excessive, is understandable: James played the song and others like it with a mile-wide vibrato that has been likened to that of an Italian tenor in full cry, cushioned by sugary violins. He also featured himself on light-classic arrangements like “Carnival of Venice” and “Flight of the Bumblebee” that showed off the spectacularly nimble technique he had acquired from countless hours of youthful practice. At the same time, though, he recorded any number of swinging vocal and instrumental sides, including “Crazy Rhythm,” “Jeffrie’s Blues,” “I’ve Heard That Song Before” (with Forrest), Duke Ellington’s “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” and his own “Let Me Up,” all of which demonstrated his prowess as a jazzman.
The major labels stopped recording him in 1968, the same year in which he made his last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and he soon came to be seen not as a still-vital soloist but as the leader of a nostalgia act.James was determined to cover all the musical bases, and he did so with seeming effortlessness. Moreover, he always insisted that he performed sentimental ballads not for commercial reasons but solely because he liked doing so: “I really get bugged about these people talking about commercial tunes…I don’t think we’ve ever recorded or played one tune that I didn’t particularly love to play. Otherwise, I wouldn’t play it.”
James maintained his popularity into the late ’40s, far longer than most of his contemporaries, but changing musical tastes ultimately forced him to disband his wartime orchestra and organize a smaller, stringless group. Nonplussed by the fast-growing popularity of solo singers like Sinatra, he briefly flirted (as did Benny Goodman) with big-band bebop in 1949, but quickly discovered that his fans were uninterested in hearing him perform harmonically complex up-tempo compositions. “It was a big mistake…playing music that was not fundamentally dance music in places where people came to dance,” he ruefully confessed.
After treading stylistic water for several years, James found a new path to popularity. Long a fervent admirer of the no-nonsense swing of Count Basie, he opted to emulate the smooth, streamlined approach of the “New Testament” band that Basie had put together in 1952. Basie’s new group played blues-oriented ensemble jazz with explosively wide dynamic contrasts. It was harmonically advanced but steered clear of the ultra-fast tempos and vertiginous chromaticism of the boppers. His 1957 album Wild About Harry, arranged and performed in this new style, immediately re-established him as a major voice.
James stuck closely to his neo-Basie approach for most of the rest of his life, leading a first-class group of crack instrumentalists (especially in the mid-’60s, when Buddy Rich played drums for him) and programming his hits of the ’40s alongside big-band versions of jazz compositions such as Miles Davis’s “Walkin’” and Horace Silver’s “Doodlin’.” Not only did he continue to solo with verve and authority, but he gradually expanded the parameters of his style, incorporating elements of the playing of such postwar bebop trumpeters as Clifford Brown without compromising his individuality.
Then his luck ran out. The major labels stopped recording him in 1968, the same year in which he made his last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and he soon came to be seen not as a still-vital soloist but as the leader of a nostalgia act, playing a steadily narrowing repertoire of pop hits for senior citizens who longed to relive their youth. By the time he died in 1983, he had become a back number.
HOW COULD SO superlative a soloist and bandleader have fallen off the map of jazz? In retrospect, it seems clear that James’s key mistake with those writers who maintain and burnish the reputations of musicians was to present himself as a celebrity bandleader first and a jazz musician second.
Throughout his two-year tenure as a member of Benny Goodman’s troupe, he had recorded to unfailingly powerful effect as a small-group sideman with such distinguished swing-era contemporaries as Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Pete Johnson, and Red Norvo. But after he started his own band in 1939, James never again worked as anything other than a leader, nor did he perform in small groups save on rare occasions with studio-only combos whose members were drawn from the ranks of his own band. As a result, baby-boom jazz fans were largely unaware of his gifts as an improviser.
At the same time, James mostly limited his public appearances to ballrooms and casino lounges. It would not be until 1958 that his band would play a jazz club. Basie and Ellington performed both in nightclubs and in concert halls, and they made a point of recording frequently with small groups of various kinds as well as with their big bands. Because of this, they were seen as jazzmen first and foremost. And even after the center of gravity in jazz shifted from big bands to combos in the ’50s, no one was in doubt as to their continuing musical significance. Not so James, who clung stubbornly to his superannuated matinee-idol status until it was too late for him to remake his image along more modern lines.
James’s refusal to come to terms with his diminished place in the world of American pop culture likely had much to do with the emotional immaturity on which everyone who knew him remarked. Incapable of personal intimacy and embarrassed by his lack of formal education, he spent his free time chasing women, drinking to excess, and gambling away his hard-earned fortune. Such compulsive behavior is usually the mark of a deeply troubled person, and Helen Forrest, with whom James had a romantic relationship in the ’40s, believed that he was happy only when playing for an adoring crowd: “He was at peace, and he knew he was loved when he was playing the trumpet….He knew nobody could hurt him.”
It stands to reason that such a man would have found it inordinately difficult to settle for the limited amount of fame available to the postwar jazzman. But James’s unwillingness to face reality should not be allowed to obscure his musical stature. He was one of the foremost jazz trumpeters of the 20th century, and the groups that he led from 1957 to the end of the ’60s ranked among the very best in postwar big-band jazz. One can—and should—forgive a great many saccharine ballads in return for such consistent excellence.
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Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
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“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
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“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
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Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
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Where Have All the Critics Gone?
Long time passing
Joseph Epstein 2016-03-16
ritics, like belly buttons, come in two kinds: innies and outies. The innies—critics, not navels— are appreciative, inclusive, always hoping for the best and, some might say, too often finding it. Those most likely to say so are the outies, who view themselves as guardians of culture, exclusive, permanently posted to make certain no second-rate goods get past the gate and into the citadel of superior art. The innies are hopeful, sympathetic to experiment, more than a touch nervous about the avant-garde marching past and leaving them behind. The outies are skeptical, culturally conservative, and tend to believe, with Paul Valéry, that everything changes but the avant-garde.
A critic is putatively an expert, responsible for knowing his subject thoroughly and deeply, whether it is music, literature, visual art, film, theatre, or any other art. This would include knowledge of its history, traditions, techniques, the conditions under which it has been made, and all else that is pertinent to rendering sound and useful judgment on discrete works of art in his field. Along with knowledge, which is available to all who search it out, the critic must also have authority, the power to convince—a power that has been available only to a few. Whence does such authority derive? Edmund Wilson, a dominant literary critic from the 1920s through the 1960s, places its source, one might say, authoritatively. “The implied position of people who know about literature (as is also the case with every other art),” Wilson wrote, “is simply that they know what they know, and that they are determined to impose their opinions by main force of eloquence or assertion on the people who do not know.”
“Those who cannot do, teach,” George Bernard Shaw famously said, but he would never have said that those who cannot create art, criticize—for he himself, the leading playwright of his day, wrote strong theater and music criticism. One of the many accusations against critics is that they are frustrated artists. Not, as it turns out, true, or certainly not always. The best critics of poetry have been poets: in the modern age, these have included T. S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, W. H. Auden, and Randall Jarrell. Many other important critics have devoted themselves exclusively to criticism without, so far as one knows, ever attempting art: F. R. Leavis in literature, B. H. Haggin in music, Clement Greenberg in visual art, Robert Warshow in film.
The chief purpose of criticism, as T. S. Eliot formulated it, is “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” The able critic does this through comparison (with other works) and analysis (of the work at hand). When it comes to older works, the result usually leads to deflation or enhanced appreciation. If he is good at his task, the critic will have done an aesthetic service by instructing the rest of us, the incognescenti, in the intricacies and ultimate quality of the art we ourselves have already experienced or soon will.
The reviewer advises you on what to see, read, hear, or not to see, read, hear. The critic accounts for the aesthetic principles underlying his judgments and sets out the significance, or insignificance, of the work at hand.Then there is the more complicated matter of critics instructing artists. (Highly conscious artists, of course, are their own most stringent and best critics.) As men and women who have presumably trained themselves to see trees and forest both, critics can be helpful to artists in informing them where and how they have gone askew or cheering them on when they are doing important work? Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg not only wrote about the contemporary visual art of their day but also coached, for better or worse, many of the artists who produced it. In the best of all worlds, the relation between artists and critics is symbiotic, each helping the other. Most artists would of course prefer to have critics on their side, especially in those situations where criticism weighs in heavily on the commercial fate of the art in question. Without interesting art, of course, critics are out of business.
The one ticket to heaven critics may possess is acquired through their discovery of new art or promotion of neglected art. H. L. Mencken earns a ticket here for helping to establish and find a wider readership for the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather. Edmund Wilson was invaluable in his day for introducing readers, in his book Axel’s Castle, to the great modernist writers and through his reviews in the New Republic and later in the New Yorker to a wide range of works, foreign and domestic, they might never have discovered on their own. Wilson prided himself on what he called his efforts at international literary cross-pollination.
Critics can be immensely disputatious among themselves, and have over the years formed schools from which schisms and thereby further schools have resulted. “Criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity from which impostors can be readily ejected,” Eliot wrote, “is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences.” Nor, usually, do they, ever.
A. O. Scott, one of the current movie reviewers of the New York Times, uses this Eliot quotation in the survey of the schools and fields of criticism that appears in his book Better Living Through Criticism.1 Note that I have called Scott a “reviewer” and not a “critic.” The reviewer advises you on what to see, read, hear, or not to see, read, hear. The critic accounts for the aesthetic principles underlying his judgments and sets out the significance, or insignificance, of the work at hand.
The distinction is a useful one, and it is noteworthy that Scott fails to explain the difference anywhere in his book. This is a mark of the work’s thinness, and how it inadvertently reveals the true condition of criticism in our time. Better Living Through Criticism is intended as an argument in favor of the enduring power of a great and noble form, but it is in some ways more akin to an obituary.
Not yet fifty, the son of academics, a Harvard magna cum laude, a former assistant to Robert Silvers, the founding editor of the New York Review of Books, A.O. Scott has the perfect resumé of the contemporary bien pensant. Scott is a writer in the glib school of New York Times critics begun by John Leonard and continued by Frank Rich. He is a man who refers to “late capitalism,” always a giveaway phrase for those who wish to make plain their progressivist credentials. (What, one wonders, is to follow late capitalism? Early Utopianism, perhaps; or, possibly, middle Gulag?) Contemporary glibness leaves its greasy prints nearly everywhere on his pages. He avails himself of the words “bullshit,” “sucked,” “punked.” In discussing Kant, he writes: “Having nothing better to do in the Prussian city of Königsberg, [Kant] set about investigating the nature of taste.” He refers to “the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin riffing on an aphorism of the pre-Socratic philosopher Antilochus.” At other times he can become grandiloquent. Apropos of John Ford’s movie The Searchers, he writes: “The mythology of The Searchers has grown more troubling and volatile over time, as it reveals the racial animus and patriarchal ideology, the violence and paranoia, woven into the nation’s deepest well-springs of identity.” Beware, I advise, white men calling other white men racist.
Scott also enjoys taking a refreshing dip in the bathwater of political correctness. He scores off Robert Warshow for his “unreflecting sexism” for using the word “man” instead of the more, as they now say, inclusive “persons,” though Warshow did so more than 60 years ago. He defends jazz, which he feels was insufficiently appreciated because it was the art of a minority group, when it needs no defense, and has always been an art with a small but devoted following, black and white. Elsewhere, siding with the young, he writes: “To look at the record of contempt for jazz, hip hop, disco, rock ‘n’ roll, video games, comic books, and even television and film is to witness learned and refined people making asses of themselves by embracing their own ignorance.”
Scott grew up reading, in the Village Voice and in Rolling Stone, “a great many reviews of things long before I saw them, and in a lot of cases reading the reviews of something I would never experience firsthand was a perfectly adequate substitute for the experience.” He read “Stanley Crouch on jazz, Robert Christigau and Ellen Willis on rock, J. Hoberman and Andrew Sarris on film, Peter Schjeldahl on art.” He was especially taken by a critic named C(ynthia). Carr, who wrote on avant-garde and underground theatre and performance art; what won him over to her was less her ideas than “the charisma of her voice.”
In Scott’s writing, one senses a man much worried about being thought out of it. This fear of not being au courant is a key element in his view of the role of the reviewer. Toward the end of his book he notes that “there is a moral danger—a danger to morale, and to decency—that many of us [reviewers] face as we age.” The danger turns out to be a lapse into nostalgia, a loss of youthful ideals, with a corresponding loss of critical energy. But, then, the kind of reviewer-critic Scott admires is one willing to make mistakes, and for whom one of the gravest mistakes is moderation. One has to imagine, say, Harold Bloom, but a Harold Bloom dragging in Emerson and Freud to write about comic books.
Like the A student he is, Scott brings in the usual suspects from the past on the subject of criticism: Johnson, Shelley, Wordsworth, Arnold, Pater, Wilde, Mencken, Orwell, Trilling, and the obligatory Walter Benjamin. No mention is made, however, of Randall Jarrell, who, as long ago as 1952, fourteen years before Scott was born, adumbrated Scott’s career in an essay called “This Age of Criticism.” Jarrell wrote: “These days, when an ambitious young intellectual finishes college, he buys himself a new typewriter [make that laptop], rents himself a room, and settles down to write…book reviews, long critical articles, explications.” Jarrell, a poet who was the best critic of poetry of his generation, adds: “No wonder poor poets became poor critics, and count themselves blest in the bargain; no wonder young intellectuals become critics before, and not after, they have failed as artists. And sometimes—who knows?—they might not have failed; besides, to have failed as an artist may be a more respectable and valuable thing.”
Does popular culture require study in universities? Wasn’t the movie Casablanca somehow more enjoyable before it was recognized, in film courses and else where, as a classic?When Jarrell wrote “This Age of Criticism,” critics were the dominant figures in American intellectual life. The leading intellectual journals of the time—Partisan Review, COMMENTARY, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Encounter in England—were filled with criticism. Of the now well-known New York Intellectuals, only three, Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz and Mary McCarthy, were imaginative writers, and the poems of Schwartz and the novels of McCarthy might never had got the attention they did without their criticism running, so to say, interference for them. The other New York Intellectuals—Warshow, Philip Rahv, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Clement and Martin Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, et alia—were critics; the young Norman Podhoretz started out as a literary critic. The universities harbored such critics as R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Yvor Winters, Ian Watt, and Robert Heilman. Critics in that day were much esteemed; they were heroes of culture. With the blurring of high and popular culture, they could no longer be so. Better Living Through Criticism suggests, if only by omission, why this is so. T
he book is divided between chapters that are disquisitions on various aspects of the traditions of, and changes over the years in, criticism, and chapters that are set up as dialogues in which a Mister Interlocutor, as the old minstrel shows had it, asks the author questions about his own critical career. The book is meant to be a justification for criticism and an apologia pro vita sua of sorts for Scott’s choice of career.
What Better Living Through Criticism leaves out is the old but still essential distinction between highbrow and popular art. Since the time of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) critics of all arts were given their assignment, which was to discover and promulgate the glories of culture, which was itself “a study of perfection.” This same culture, according to Arnold, “seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light.” Under these marching orders, critics were to be simultaneously missionaries and propagandists. Theirs was a search and destroy mission. They were to search out all that qualified under the rubric “best that has been thought and known” and to destroy all that was pretentious, drivel, crap, which included all middlebrow and most popular culture.
Of course not all popular culture is drivel or crap. Lots of it gives pleasure without bringing corruption in its wake. Much of it informs us, in ways that high culture does not, about the way we live now, which was once the task of the novel. Yet does popular culture require study in universities? Does it require a corpus of criticism? Wasn’t the movie Casablanca somehow more enjoyable before it was recognized, in film courses and else where, as a classic? Why do I find it immensely appealing that the late Julius Epstein, who with his brother Philip wrote the screenplay for Casablanca, when complimented on the movie, replied, “Yes, it’s a pretty slick piece of shit.”
In an earlier day some believed that even attacking popular culture, which then often went by the name “kitsch,” wasn’t worth the time and energy put into it. Best to leave it alone altogether. Harold Rosenberg twitted (not, mind, tweeted) Dwight Macdonald for spending so much time writing about the movies. What Rosenberg thought of Robert Warshow’s interest in popular culture is not known. Warshow’s tactic was neither to attack nor exult in popular culture, but to explain its attractions. His two essays on why Americans were attracted to gangster and western movies are among the most brilliant things ever written on the movies and on popular culture generally.
Today the standard of highbrow culture has been worn away, almost to the point of threadbareness. For political reasons, universities no longer feel obligated to spread its gospel. Western culture—dead white males and all that—with its imperialist history has long been increasingly non grata in humanities departments. Everywhere pride of place has been given to the merely interesting—the study of gay and lesbian culture, of graphic novels and comic books, and more—over the deeply significant. Culture, as it is now understood in the university and elsewhere, is largely popular culture. That battle has, at least for now, been lost.
In “This Age of Criticism,” Jarrell was actually bemoaning the spread of criticism, which he felt was choking off the impulse to create stories, plays, and poems. He also felt critics were insufficiently adventurous, content to dwell lengthily on the same small body of classic works. His dream of repressing the field has come to be a reality.
And so we are left with A.O. Scott, whose key thesis is that criticism is “the art of the voice.” His own voice, in his reviews and in Better Living Through Criticism, is that of a man who vastly overestimates his own voice’s significance and charm. The Age of Criticism Randall Jarrell condemned is over and done with—but in a way he would not in the least have approved. Were he alive today, Jarrell might have to seek work reviewing video games.
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“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
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“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
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“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
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“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
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“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
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The School Runners
Review of "The Last Thousand" by Jeffrey Stern
Jonathan Foreman 2016-03-16
2015 exposé on the Buzzfeed website created a stir by savaging the notion that the massive expansion of education in Afghanistan has been one of the triumphs of the international military effort. It was titled “Ghost Students, Ghost Teachers, Ghost Schools.”
The Last Thousand
By Jeffrey E. Stern view book
“As the American mission faltered, U.S. officials repeatedly trumpeted impressive statistics— the number of schools built, girls enrolled, textbooks distributed, teachers trained, and dollars spent —to help justify the 13 years and more than 2,000 Americans killed since the United States invaded,” wrote a Pakistani-American journalist named Azmat Khan. The U.S. government’s claims are, Khan said, “massively exaggerated, riddled with ghost schools, teachers and students that exist only on paper.”
One-tenth of the schools that Buzzfeed’s employees claimed to have visited were not operating or had not been built. Some U.S.-funded schools lacked running water, toilets, or electricity. Others were not built to international construction standards. Teacher salaries, often U.S.-subsidized, were being paid to teachers at nonexistent schools. In some places local warlords had managed to divert U.S. aid into their own pockets.
The tone and presentation of the article leaves little doubt of its author’s conviction that 13 years of effort in Afghanistan, including the expenditure of 2,000 American lives and billions of dollars ($1 billion on education alone) were pointless and the entire intervention a horrendous mistake.
Unfortunately, it is all but certain that some of the gladdening numbers long cited by USAID and others are indeed inaccurate or misleading, especially given that they are based in large part on statistics supplied by various Afghan government ministries. The government of Afghanistan is neither good at, nor especially interested in, collecting accurate data. Here, as in all countries that receive massive amounts of overseas aid, local officials and NGOs have a tendency to tell foreign donors (and foreign reporters) what they think the latter want to hear. They are equally likely to exaggerate the effectiveness of a program or the desperate need for bigger, better intervention.
Moreover it would be remarkable if there weren’t legions of ghost teachers. No-show or nonexistent salaried employees are a problem in every Afghan government department. This is true even in the military: The NATO-led coalition battled for years to stop the practice whereby Afghan generals requested money to pay the salaries of units that existed only on paper. As for abandoned or incomplete school-construction projects, such things are par for the course not only in Afghanistan but everywhere in South Asia. India, Nepal, and Pakistan are littered with them. You don’t read about them much because no development effort has ever been put under the kind of (mostly hostile) scrutiny that has attended America’s attempt to drag Afghanistan into the modern era. Given the general record of all development aid over the past half century and the difficulty of getting anything done in a conflict-wrecked society like Afghanistan, it may well be the case that reconstruction efforts by the U.S. military and U.S. government in Afghanistan were relatively effective and efficient.
Despite all the money that may have been wasted or stolen, there really has been an astonishing education revolution in Afghanistan that is transforming the society. It is an undeniable fact that the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan has enabled the education of millions of children who would never have seen the inside of a school of any kind had it not been for the overthrow of the Taliban. The World Bank and UNICEF both estimate that at least 8 million Afghans are attending school. This means that even if a quarter of the children who are nominally enrolled in school aren’t getting any education at all, there are still 6 million other kids who are; in 2001 there were fewer than 1 million children in formal education, none of them female.
To get a sense of what education can achieve in Afghanistan, even in less than ideal circumstances, you can hardly do better than to read The Last Thousand, by the journalist and teacher Jeffrey E. Stern. It tells the extraordinary story of Marefat, a school on the outskirts of Kabul. Marefat (the Dari word means “knowledge” or “awareness”) was originally founded in a hut in a refugee camp in Pakistan. After the fall of the Taliban regime in November 2001, its founder, Aziz Royesh, brought the school to Afghanistan and set it up on a windblown patch of desert West of Kabul. By 2012, Teacher Aziz, as he is known to all, had enrolled a total of 4,000 pupils and was sending students to elite universities around the world, including Tufts, Brown, and Harvard.
The school primarily caters to the Hazara ethnic minority, of which Aziz (a former mujahideen fighter) is a member. As anyone who read The Kite Runner or saw the movie made from the bestselling novel by Khaled Hosseini knows, the Hazara have long been the victims of oppression by the majority Pashtuns and Tajiks. The Hazara (who account for about 10 percent of the Afghan population) bear a double ethnic burden. They are Shiites—heretics in the eyes of the Sunni majority of the country. And they look Asiatic. Indeed, they are widely but probably wrongly believed to be the descendants of Genghis Khan’s invaders.
The Last Thousand is a powerful and important book, especially in the way Stern conveys the sense of betrayal and the terror that many Afghans feel at the prospect of international abandonment.Hazara were traded as slaves until the early 20th century. As late as the 1970s, they were barred from government schools and jobs and banned from owning property in downtown Kabul. As if certain parallels to another oppressed minority weren’t strong enough, the Hazara are well known for their appetite for education and resented for their business success since the establishment of a democratic constitution, and they have enthusiastically worked with the international military coalition—all of which has made them particular targets of the Taliban.
From the start, Aziz was determined to give his students an education that would inoculate them against the sectarian and ethnic extremism that had destroyed his country. He taught them to question everything and happily educated both boys and girls, separating them only when pressure from conservative politicians put the school’s survival at risk. (When fathers balked at allowing their daughters to go to school, Aziz assured them that a literate girl would be more valuable in the marriage market.) Eventually the school also found itself educating some of the illiterate parents of its students and similarly changing the lives of other adult members of the school community.
The school’s stunning success in the face of enormous obstacles won it and its brave, resourceful founder affection as well as benefactors among the “Internationals”—the foreign civilian and military community in Afghanistan. When John R. Allen, the tough U.S. Marine general in command of all international forces in Afghanistan, finished his tour in February 2013, he personally donated enough money to the school to fund 25 scholarships. Thanks to reports about the school by a British journalist, a “Marefat Dinner” at London’s Connaught Hotel co-sponsored by Moet & Chandon raised $150,000 for the school in 2011. But by early 2013, Teacher Aziz was in despair for Marefat’s future, thanks to terrorist threats against the school and President Obama’s declaration that he would pull out half of America’s forces within a year regardless of the military and political situation in the country.
It’s a fascinating story. Which makes it a shame that much of it is told in a rather self-indulgent and mannered way. Stern’s prose tends to exude a world-weary smugness that can feel unearned, especially given some shallow or ill-informed observations on subjects such as Genghis Khan, Blitzkrieg, and the effect of Vietnam on current U.S. commanders, and his apparent ignorance of the role of sexual honor in Hazara culture.
Most exasperating, Stern patronizingly assumes an unlikely ignorance on the part of the reader. There are few newspaper subscribers who, after 15 years of front-page stories from Afghanistan, have not heard of the grand assemblies known as loya jirgas, or who don’t know that Talib literally means student. Yet Stern refers to the former as “Grand Meetings” and the latter as “Knowledge Seekers.” He also has his characters refer to Internationals as “the Outsiders,” even though any Afghan you are likely to meet knows perfectly well that the foreign presence comes in different and identifiable national and organizational flavors: Americans, NATO, the UN, the Red Cross, Englistanis (British), and so on. The same shtick apparently frees Stern from the obligation to specify an actual date on which an event occurred, or the actual name of a town or province.
Even so, The Last Thousand is a powerful and important book, especially in the way Stern conveys the sense of betrayal and the terror that many Afghans feel at the prospect of international abandonment. The Hazara children and staff at the Marefat school fear a prospective entente with the Taliban enthusiastically promoted by foreign-policy “realists” in the U.S. and UK. They correctly believe it would lead to cultural concessions that could radically diminish their safety and freedom—if not a complete surrender to murderous Pashtun racism and Sunni bigotry.
The book’s main characters are concerned by what seemed to be the imminent, complete departure of all foreign forces as part of the “zero option.” This option was seriously considered by the United States in 2013 and 2014 when then–President Karzai, in the middle of a bizarre descent into (hashish-fueled) paranoia and poisonous anti-Westernism, refused to sign a bilateral security agreement with the Western powers.
Aziz confessed to Stern (who was teaching English at the school) that he himself was in despair but was trying to hide his gloom from his pupils. He began to to urge his students, graduates, and protégés—especially the female ones—to be less vocal in their complaints about discrimination against Hazara, and he himself began controversially to cultivate unexpected allies such as the Pashtun presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani. But Marefat’s staff, students, and their parents had few illusions about the future. As one young girl said to Aziz: “If the Americans leave, we know there is no chance for us to continue our education.”
Although the future of Marefat and its Hazara pupils is uncertain, it is comforting that so much has already been achieved by the education revolution in Afghanistan. Assuming that the Taliban and its Pakistani government sponsors are not allowed to take over or prompt a collapse into civil war, this revolution may well have a tremendous and benign effect on the country’s future. After all, more than 70 percent of the Afghan population is under 25 and the median age is 17. Unlike their parents, these youths have grown up with television and radio (there are more than 90 TV stations and 174 FM radio stations), cellphones (there are at least 20 million mobile users), and even the Internet. Their horizons are wider than anything the leaders of the Taliban regime could even imagine.
As Stern relates in a hurried epilogue, the bilateral security agreement was finally signed in September 2014 after Karzai’s replacement by a new national unity government. There are still U.S. and other foreign troops in Afghanistan, even if not enough.
In Stern’s sympathetic portrayal of the Hazara and their predicament, it’s hard not to hear echoes of other persecuted minorities who put their trust in Western (and especially Anglo-Saxon) liberator-occupiers. The most recent example is the Montagnard hill tribes of Vietnam who fought alongside U.S. Special Forces and were brutally victimized by the victorious Stalinist regime after America pulled out of Indochina. Something similar happened to the Shan and Karen nations of Burma, who fought valiantly alongside the British during World War II but ever since have had to battle for survival against the majority Burmans who sided with the Japanese. In today’s Afghanistan, Gulbedin Hekmatyar, the Pakistan-backed Taliban leader, has overtly threatened the Hazara with something like the fate of the Harkis, the Algerians who fought with French during the war of independence between 1954 and 1962: At least 150,000 of the Harkis were slaughtered with the arrival of “peace.”
The Last Thousand should remind those who are “war-weary” in the U.S. (which really means being weary of reading about the war) that bringing the troops home is far from an unalloyed good. Having met the extraordinary Teacher Aziz and his brave staff and students through the eyes of Jeffrey Stern, and knowing the fate they could face at the hands of their enemies, one finds it hard to think of President Obama’s enthusiasm for withdrawal—an enthusiasm echoed distressingly by several candidates in the presidential race—as anything but thoughtless, heartless, trivial, and unworthy of America.
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