Hoisted from Others' Archives: People Forget Just How Awful the Old New Republic Was How Much of the Time
I confess that I am still annoyed at the strange persistence of the narrative of decline around the Gabriel Snyder New Republic. People forget just how awful the Old New Republic was how much of the time. Here, to remind us, is Heather Hurlburt from 2012:
: Leon Wieseltier Thinks You Can Never Have Enough War : "I haven’t read Rachel Maddow’s new book, Drift...
...Unlike The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, I am not a book critic. I am a national security professional. This means that--also unlike Wieseltier--I spend my days immersed in the thinking and writing of defense experts and policymakers--in the U.S. government, in the military, in other nations, in the non-governmental sector.
Wieseltier has written a review of Drift in which he takes issue with, well, a lot of things--the fact that Maddow has a TV show among them. But his core problem seems to be her suggestion that we might have a societal problem with ‘the artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities.’ He really ought to spend more time with defense intellectuals. Since they tend to be men, many of them with chests of medals, and few of them given to open mockery, he might prefer them to Maddow, whose style he objects to as ‘perky’ and ‘absurdist.’ (Irrelevant question: there is a great literary and indeed political tradition of absurdism--has any of it ever before been described as ‘perky?’)... Wieseltier would be rather surprised to hear some of the things these serious folk have to say....
Start with Andrew Bacevich. Bacevich is a conservative cultural Catholic... a retired Army colonel and history professor who lost a son in Iraq.
At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The skepticism about arms and armies that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamored with military might… Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles. Indeed, one striking aspect of America's drift toward militarism has been the absence of dissent offered by any political figure of genuine stature. [Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 2005.]
Then I would introduce him to Major General Charlie Dunlap, now a professor of law at the University of North Carolina. Twenty years ago now, Dunlap wrote an article called ‘The Origins of the Coup of 2012’ in which a General Brutus and allies take over the reins from an ineffective civilian administration--and are handed them permanently in a national referendum.... During the feckless debt ceiling debate last year, for part of which I found myself in the United Arab Emirates, explaining red-facedly why democracy really was a better system than ‘enlightened’ autocracy, I thought of Duncan often....
Surely General Colin Powell needs no introduction. Wieseltier may be familiar with his work on education as the foundation for all aspects of a healthy society, including its defense. In addition, Powell has been pretty firm about the need to consider defense cuts as part of deficit reduction:
When the Cold War ended 20 years ago, when I was chairman and [Dick] Cheney was Secretary of Defense, we cut the defense budget by 25 percent. And we reduced the force by 500,000 active duty soldiers, so it can be done. Now, how fast you can do it and what you have to cut out remains to be seen, but I don't think the defense budget can be made sacrosanct and it can't be touched,' he said....
Senior military thinkers who are not, as individuals, national cultural figures (nor are they perky) have been worrying about the trend Maddow identifies for a while now. Whether Maddow’s book captures their concerns I don’t know. Thanks to Wieseltier, I promise to pay full price for a hard-cover copy and find out. But it would be a shame to miss this opportunity to merge the things book reviewers talk about with the ones military strategists worry about. Which is, after all, what Wieseltier says he wants.
That, and a war with Syria.
