In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, writer Shelby Steele wrote an op-ed that is breathlessly, spectacularly stupid even by rightie standards. Truly, the thing should be preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum.
Steele has noticed that we don’t fight wars like we used to.
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
So far, so good. But if you haven’t already read Steele’s piece you will never, ever, guess why he thinks we don’t fight wars like we used to. It is, he says, because of white guilt.
No, really. I am not making this up.
White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems–even the tyrannies they live under–were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must “understand” and pity our enemy even as we fight him. …
…Today words like “power” and “victory” are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, “might” can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today’s atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
Whites need to feel better about themselves so that they can resume blasting third world peoples into smithereens for their own good, says Steele, who is an African American writer seriously in need of therapy.
You’ll have to read the piece yourself to experience and appreciate the full-frontal absurdity of it. I’m not going to repeat the entire argument here.
As Glenn Greenwald wrote, righties clasped this piece to their virtual bosoms.
… many pro-war Bush defenders are drooling with reverence and praise, and for some reason, are viewing Steele’s piece as some sort of license to unleash some of the truly ugly impulses which they usually have the decency, or at least political sense, to hide.
This rightie, for example, is going on about “identity narratives” and calls for the defeat of “institutionalized linguistic assumptions,” which, I take it, are what is holding us back from our proper role as world conquerors. It’s way more academic ontological theory than I want to handle before breakfast. Or after breakfast, for that matter.
David Neiwert argues that what the righties are really celebrating is the excuse for racists to enjoy and honor their racism. Digby summarizes:
The argument here is that racism is dead so we needn’t worry about killing, deporting, marginalizing or demonizing “the other.” How convenient for the party that has been exploiting the southern strategy for forty years and finds itself nearly as unpopular as the disgraced president who first embraced it.
Billmon touches on what I want to write about today:
[Steele’s op ed] is, to say the least, a unique argument — one in which standard counterinsurgency warfare tactics (not to mention our president’s liberator fixation) are redefined and then dismissed as the geopolitical equivalent of the VISTA program. It’s the neoconservative take on street crime displaced about 8,000 miles, with Iraqi insurgents filling in for black inner city youth.
I would suggest this is simply Steele’s way of putting the war in a familiar context — that of his pseudo-scientific social theories — rather than any kind of coherent argument about U.S. policy in Iraq. As the saying goes: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I suppose it was too much to expect Steele to restrict himself to jabbing his thumb in America’s own racial sores, while leaving the quack theories about Iraq to his ideological comrades-not-in-arms at the American Enterprise Institute.
But as Glenn notes, there is a method to Steele’s madness. His little dissertation isn’t just a Hoover Institute seminar on criminal justice run amok. It’s an ingenious, if muddled, attempt to push the old law-and-order buttons in order to justify a more directly genocidal approach to warfighting. Just as filling prisons with bad guys (or, if your Charles Bronson, gunning them down in the street) is still the conservative answer to crime, massive firepower is still the conservative way to win a guerrilla war. The only problem is that our own bleeding hearts won’t let us do it.
Awhile back I posted an argument that the reason we Americans haven’t had an all-out, whoop-it-up total victory since World War II is that the nature of war itself has changed. And to this post, Mahablog commenter aloysha added:
The nature of war has gradually changed over time. … War between nation-states evolved from mainly being waged between armies, to being Total, involving entire populations. … As military technology evolves over time, it empowers different social organizations. For example, about 500 years ago the invention of the cannon favored a concentration of power, which enabled the rise of the modern nation state. Only a King could afford cannons, thus subduing the armies of smaller competitors, ie warlords. This balance has held pretty much until recently, finding expression in ever more expensive items such as battleships, ICBMs and stealth fighters, which only a large nation state could afford.
In recent times, technology has shifted, to empower decentralized, smaller organizations, ie sects and terrorists, which is the main reason why they have appeared and grown strong. The hatreds and rivalries were always there, it’s just that formerly, technology enabled a strong central state to keep the lid on the rabble.
War used to involve nations fighting over territory. Now our real enemies, the terrorists, are not attached to territory. We used to pound a state until the head of state surrendered. Now, among our decentralized cells of enemies, there’s no one with the authority to surrender. We might be armed with the most powerful, high-tech weapons ever devised by man, but our enemies can effectively strike us with anthrax or a “dirty” nuke in a suitcase or, as on 9/11, a few guys with box cutters. How does a nation-state use conventional warfare to strike at such an enemy? It seems anachronistic and out-of-place, like sending a 19th-century horse cavalry to execute a mounted saber charge against inner-city street gangs.
In Vietnam, the biggest reasons we didn’t apply total war was not “white guilt,” but the Soviet Union and China. Johnson and then Nixon tried to fight a “middle way” war that would be tough enough to subdue North Vietnam but not so tough as to draw other superpowers into the conflict against us.
And then there was the simple contradiction summed up in the phrase “We had to destroy the village to save it.†We could have won a military victory in Vietnam, yes, just like we could win a military victory in Iraq if we pull out all the stops. But we would have to destroy cities, villages, populations, pretty much the whole country, to do so. Few would be left alive to appreciate the peace and freedom purchased by war on their behalf. Such a victory would not defeat Islamic extremism, as Steele argues; it would inflame it.
We’re trying to apply war in a surgical way — cutting out only our enemies — and we don’t seem to have figured out how to do that without killing the patient we say we want to save.
It might be argued that we’ve been weakened by our own military strength; we’re an armored knight prepared to slay dragons but besieged by stinging ants.
Donald Rumsfeld, I suspect, recognized this historical shift in the nature of war. In 2001 he took on his role as Secretary of Defense with the notion to transform the military to prepare it for “irregular” or “asymmetric” warfare, meaning wars against enemies that are not nation-states. Rummy was thinking smaller, lighter, faster; he was thinking special ops and high tech. And that made some sense. But Rummy botched the job, in part because his own vision hadn’t evolved enough.
David Von Drehle argued that Rummy’s plans were defeated by the “old ‘iron triangle’ of contractors, Congress and the brass.” Williams Lind argued recently,
While Rumsfeldian “Transformation†represents change, it represents change in the wrong direction. Instead of attempting to move from the Second Generation to the Third (much less the Fourth), Transformation retains the Second Generation’s conception of war as putting firepower on targets while trying to replace people with technology. Its summa is the Death Star, where men and women in spiffy uniforms sit in air-conditioned comfort zapping enemies like bugs. It is a vision of future war that appeals to technocrats and lines industry pockets, but has no connection to reality. The combination of this vision of war with an equally unrealistic vision of strategic objectives has given us the defeat in Iraq.
Go here for more on “Fourth Generation” war. Essentially Lind is calling on rethinking war at all levels; “not merely how war is fought, but who fights and what they fight for.” I cannot say if Lind knows what he’s talking about or not, but it’s evident to me that such rethinking is necessary. And for a lot of reasons we don’t seem to be able to do that. The President claims that everything changed after 9/11, yet he keeps trying to compare our current conflict, whatever it is, to World War II. He’s still sinking money into the bleeping “star wars” missile defense shield, for pity’s sake, while leaving ports and chemical plants unguarded. The contractors and lobbyists and generals still want their big boats and guns and planes.
And the war hawks are not only incapable of grasping that our military tactics and goals need serious updating; they want to retreat to the glory days of General Funston in the Philippines.
Colonel Frederick Funston boasted he would ‘rawhide these bullet-headed Asians until they yell for mercy’ so they would not ‘get in the way of the bandwagon of Anglo-Saxon progress and decency.’ The United States did in the Philippines precisely what it had condemned Spain for doing in Cuba. Soon stories of concentration camps and ‘water-cures’ began to trickle back to the United States …Mark Twain … suggested that Old Glory should now have ‘the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross bones.’ [S.E. Morison, H.S. Commager, W.E. Leuchtenburg, A Concise History of the American Republic. Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 490]
Shelby Steele may be eager to take up the White Man’s Burden, but I think we’d be better advised to let it go.
My name is Sgt. Gehlen with the U.S. Central Command public affairs office. For news, photos, video and more on what is happening in Iraq and other countries in the CENTCOM area of responsibility, check out our website at http://www.centcom.mil.
Sgt. Gehlen,
How do you feel about the above post? Did you read it? Would you be free to comment on it or like the centcom.mil site would your comments be sanitized to fit the good war perspective?
Our tax dollar at work.
The DoD discovers spam. Maybe they’re updating after all.
I would like Mr. Steele to explain why “[o]nly American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism.”
I would like Mr. Steele to explain why “[o]nly American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism.â€
Well, obviously, if we kill everyone with a brain capable of harboring the idea of Islamic extremism, we will have defeated it, right?
This looks like an argument whereby the tail wags the dog. Before you can make the conclusions offered by Steele, it seems you need to analyze each war.
If one does an analysis of the wars (take Vietnam and Iraq as examples) the problem doesn’t originate in white guilt…it originates in the lack of any consensus measure of the legitimacy for conducting said wars.
Steele’s analysis is an insult to the American public, offered to bolster the misguided decisions of a select few…all the while undressed and exposed by the majority of the citizenry for what it actually is…a mistake. Therefore, the analysis is quite simple…Americans aren’t inclined to support mistakes.
more observations here:
http://www.thoughttheater.com
Uhh…This here “Sergeant Gehlen”….
His first name wouldn’t be Reinhard, would it?
Just askin’…
Someone should send Steele a copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel. His argument seems to be that white men always conquer if they just work hard enough, which is totally not the case historically. (By which I mean, white societies didn’t conquer “colored victims” because they were white.)
History repeats itself.
Put the technological arguments aside: An enemy, if smart enough to apply the fundamental basics of warefare, will not permit itself to play to the strong arm of its opponent. Terrorists, “Islamic extremists”, “rogue states”, et al, will not ask the US to engage it on some remote, uninhabited, desert island to fight it out until a victor is declared.
I wish they would, but reality has a well known liberal bias.
Where Iraq is concerned, the enemy blends with the local population (because it can) and strikes where it’s advantageous to do so because it is trying to avoid a scenario like the one I described above. The kind of strong arm tactics that Mr. Steele implies will kill innocents, and that will inflame the local population. Need examples? Look to history. There are too many examples to shake a stick at. Personally, I would choose the Soviet “intervention” in Afghanistan. How did that fare?
Why this idealism isn’t extinct like the Dodo is baffling to me.
Equally baffling is the post by Sgt. Gehlen. I suppose that counters Mr. Steele’s position… I think.
The White Man’s Burden is now the White Man’s Burden–at least when it comes to fighting wars against non-Whites.
Yet another sorry-ass, Right Wing victimology.
“It’s way more academic ontological theory than I want to handle before breakfast. Or after breakfast, for that matter.”
It’s more than I can handle without losing my breakfast. I wonder if this jackass is any relation to Michael Steele, the black Maryland Republican who claimed he was pelted with Oreo cookies by Democrats during a debate – a story afterwards shown to be false.
How on earth did Steele’s commentary make print? My god.
“[M]ilitary victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another.”
Righto. Some examples: “We’re entitled to that land!” versus “Nuh uh, we are!” “Your religion sucks!” versus “Yours sucks more!” And the ever popular: “Give us your oil!” versus “No!”
Jack in comment #5 also saw the same glaring insanity I did: “Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism.” And liddle lambsy divey! Does this Steele person know anything about Saddam, for instance that he ran Iraq as a secular society with a relatively Westernized culture, and that Al Qaeda viewed him as an enemy of Islamic fundamentalism and marked him for death?
Just confirms my suspicion that the WSJ isn’t fit for an alley cat to poop on.
Truly frightening stuff. The right is palpably losing patience that reality isn’t conforming to their delusions. I got nervous when Steve Forbes announced a couple weeks ago that the price of oil would drop when we have our confrontation with Iran, and now this enraged writing, not from the fringes of wingnutland, but direct from the hallowed opinion page of the establishment WSJ. The announcement from Forbes should’ve been a warning of what was to follow.
War – a big one – is coming because the right is clamoring louder for it, and there isn’t much to stop them.
I never understood “white guilt” or “liberal guilt”. To this liberal, it’s not about guilt. What these neanderthals don’t understand, is that the world works better, for me included, if there aren’t huge disparities in income, if we didn’t go around trying to dominate everyone. I’d like everyone to have the breaks I did, to improve themselves. There’s enough to go around for all, if we’re willing to make it work. Eventually, after our country is knocked down a few pegs, we might start to learn this once again. If we’re lucky.
This belief in scarcity and survival of the fittest – the belief in fear essentially – is the core rightie assumption, the belief that we have to claw each other to survive. Small, stupid people, who think we’ll be ahead if we terrorize others for their resources. That’ll demonstrate the superiority of our culture. Sounds like something the Nazis used to say.
A little OT, I wrote to someone yesterday about a pair of murals that greeted thousands of students back at my college, years ago. The murals, done in the 50s, faced each other in the entrance of the school’s Education building. They earnestly depicted two societies, one with an educated population, and one without. Essentially they showed the difference between prosperity versus poverty, the point being that education is what makes the difference. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that my country would be heading toward the scene depicted in the poverty mural. That’s what happens when the neanderthals take over.
alyosha, I completely agree with you about the question of “guilt.” The opposite of “white” or “liberal” guilt is shameless criminality. Way too much of that going around these days.
While he is at it, Shelby Steele should write about why we don’t have marriages like we used to. You know, all that power the physically bigger guy used to exercise against his smaller wife in the good old days when he could legally possess her, beat her and claim her property….All that power and victory is, alas, now stigmatized…..what is the world coming to when sheer power is held back? As Steele says, ‘In today’s atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to think that might can be right’.
Steele must long for the good old days before ‘male guilt’ and civilization’s brake on a big guy’s power to handle wives and wars.
It is just rubbish.
The paragraph that started with “White guilt” was so convoluted that it made me want to pull my hair out.
I couldn’t read any further.
He sounds like Jason formely with The New York Times.
One of the right wing talking points that needs to be confronted is that we “lost” in Vietnam. The US was not militarily defeated by any combination of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regular army. The US left South Vietnam because leaving our forces there was a worse option than bringing them home.
Not only was the wingnut “domino theory” poven false, but the long term political objective of stopping the spread of Stalinism was actually achieved.
The other parallel that iss being missed is that both Vietnam and Iraqi wars were fought for US domestic political reasons. Had Nixon and Kissinger both been tried and convicted as war criminals , we probably would not have our current situation. No doubt the right wingnuts would be an underground terrorist front (instead of aboveground), but our leaders would think twice before squandering our futur in pusuit of their re-election.
Now, wait a minute. You mean the only reason we haven’t engaged in “total war” tactics since WW-II is that our enemies weren’t white?
I’m speechless…
You mean the only reason we haven’t engaged in “total war†tactics since WW-II is that our enemies weren’t white?
Amazing, isn’t it? Although that theory doesn’t account for the Serbs in Kosovo.
And we were pretty rough on the Japanese in WWII, as I recall.
The guy is talking out of his ass.He put the gullible reader on the hook when he made the assertion that America is in Iraq because of Islamic extremism…We invaded “preemptively” to avoid a nuclear strike from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.. If I remember the quote..it went…” We don’t want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud”
And speaking of clouds..I once read that you should be leery of writers who incorporate a lot of ism’s and ization’s in their writing..it could be a mechanism to dilute the bullshit.
This message is in response to a column on Shelby Steele:
My husband purchased a copy of White Guilt by Shelby Steele. After finishing it, he suggested that I read it; he thought that Mr. Steele had written a worthwhile book. Having heard Mr. Steele speak on cable TV, I had already formed the opinion that his Black conservative rhetoric just wasn’t my type of reading. Nevertheless, since the book was close at hand, I would give it a try. I read several of the first chapters, most of the middle, decided I couldn’t take it, and skipped to the last few pages. I called My husband and asked if Steele had talked about his wife in the book, since his father-in-law had been mentioned. My husband couldn’t recall. I explained that it had been my experience that mixed-race authors (usually white/black) and black writers married to white women seem to think that their social perspective (being part of a white family) allows them to print all of their musings, criticisms, and conclusions about Blacks without being challenged. Conservative Blacks really don’t deserve a separate label from conservative Whites; there is no distinction. I am disappointed that my spouse spent money on this book which is sure to further encourage Mr. Steele to continue to spew his (hard fought for) White perspective on what is wrong with Black America while excusing Whites (their culpability is generation-specific and needs to be contextualized and forgotten) in what he perceives as Blacks’ flight from responsibility. Obviously, I agree with your column on Mr. Steele and wish to commend you for not following the blame the victim mentality (most people would agree that slavery, segregation, and institutional racism are not victimless occurrences) that conservatives have today (the gimme intellectuals who want all they can get, but scorn those who are not like them who want to do the same). As for Blacks like Steele and Clarence Thomas, it appears that their efforts to breed a better race of Blacks by marrying white women is gaining momentum. I am all for race mixing and interracial marriage but not at the cost of my being degraded as part of a race not willing to take responsibility for itself. And by the way, unlike Mr. Steele, 53 years of exposure to covert and overt racism has damaged my self-esteem. Perhaps, if I had had a White parent like Mr. Steele to soften the sting of racism, I too would have been less affected. Just imagine what even worse exposure did to generations before me. Near the end of his book, Mr. Steele states, “It is the rare black who gets to live without the world expecting him to pretend. So I don’t mind so much that little bit of hot tar the world has poured on my headâ€. I am glad that Mr. Steele found his freedom, due in large part to certain advantages (whether he admits it or not, to his whiteness), I just don’t want his ilk to dump on what freedom my family has been able to achieve (despite American racist tendencies) without the same advantages he so freely exploits.