Bad historical analogies

The discussions over the Iraq War, from the buildup to war to the current disastrous mess and how to get out of it, have been plagued by a bevvy of bad historical analogies.

One of the latest, and one of the silliest, is from Max Boot: History Can Offer Bush Hope ... Los Angeles Times 09/23/04. Somehow, I'm not quite sure why, I've seen a liberal writer or two lately give Boot some credit for being not quite as out of touch with reality as some of the other leading lights among the "neoconservatives." But like I say, I'm not sure how.

There's no actual content to that column. It basically just says that George W. Bush is a lot like Abraham Lincoln. He also complains about various events in the management of the Second World War by Franklin Roosevelt and considers that Bush's experience in the Iraq War compares to that, too. But he means that as a compliment. It's a heavy-handed attempt to cast the glow of those fabled mystic chords of memory from the Civil War and the Second World War onto this nasty colonial-style war in Iraq. One that will convince only those still eager to be fooled.

Unfortunately, this kind of historical analogy that it would often be flattering to call superficial has been common to the neoconservative case for preventive wars of liberation. Here's a current one from Robert Kagan, another big name in the neoconservative world: Iraq and Averages, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Orginally Published in the Washington Post 10/04/04 . This one is largely devoted to comparing the Iraq War to the very recent history of ... baseball.

There seems to be no end of the vacuous analogies offered up by these neoconservative intellectuals, who present themselves as serious thinkers dedicated to promoting the spreading of the blessings of liberty and democracy to the benighted Arab lands by bombs and bullets. Here's the sort of Deep Thinking we get from Kagan:

Now, the United States could conceivably lose in Iraq, just as Jeter could some day hit under.200 for a whole season. But the odds are against it, and it is certainly far too early to make that judgment. And as for the effect of such a loss, the strategic and moral disaster would be enormous, and America would pay a huge price. But the fundamental course of American foreign policy would not change. Over the past two decades, the United States has launched nine significant military interventions abroad, about once every two years. That's a more significant predictor of the future than the events of the past four months. And the United States will remain involved in the Middle East for decades to come, trying to protect its security by promoting democracy. The history of U.S. foreign policy, our "lifetime average," suggests it is a mistake to write off key elements of the "Bush doctrine," especially those that Bush only inherited from his predecessors.

Anyone who casually tosses out comments like, oh, we have wars every couple of years and that's as American as apple pie so there's no point whining about it, is not someone whose ideas should be assumed to be in the interest of the American people. Or of any other segment of humanity, except possibly for major shareholders in Halliburton or other firms directly profiting from unnecessary wars.

You might expect somebody like Kagan to even ridicule wounded American casualties and fatalities and their families. Someone like that might say things like, "And indeed, if you watch in any conflict in our history, there have always been people who said, 'Why? Why should we do that? Another loss of life. Another person wounded. Another limb off.'"

Kagan, of course, is the author of the essay Power and Weakness, a favorite defense of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and unilateralism, and one that was widely read among European policymakers and understood to be a statement of the Bush administration's attitude. First published in Policy Review (June 2002), and since published in book form as Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, it is a classic example of a thin ideological polemic trying to dress itself up as serious thought. It is brimming with bad historical references used as little more than window-dressing for current arguments. As well as fuzzy thinking, such as in its much-quoted introductory paragraph:

It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power - the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power - American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory - the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.

Here's a good example of historical analogy tossed out in a way that actually says nothing beyond adding a veneer of grandeur to an argument for force and the threat of force as the basis for American policy. This comes in the middle of sneering (in a sophisticated way, of course!) at the wimpy powers of Old Europe for their girlie-man attachment to diplomacy and international law and tenderfoot stuff like that:

This is no reproach. It is what weaker powers have wanted from time immemorial. It was what Americans wanted in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the brutality of a European system of power politics run by the global giants of France, Britain, and Russia left Americans constantly vulnerableto imperial thrashing. It waswhat the other smallpowers of Europe wanted in those years, too, only to be sneered at by Bourbon kings and other powerful monarchs, who spoke instead of raison d’état. The great proponent of international law on the high seas in the eighteenth century was the United States; the great opponent was Britain’s navy, the “Mistress of the Seas.” In an anarchic world, small powers always fear they will be victims. Great powers, on the other hand, often fear rules that may constrain them more than they fear the anarchy in which their power brings security and prosperity.

Yes, if we see passages like that, we must be in the presence of Grand Historical Theory. Why, in the majestic sweep of the centuries and the weighty obligations of Historical Destiny, only gutless Europeans would whine, "Another loss of life. Another person wounded. Another limb off." What's a few thousands soldiers' lives, a few dozen prisoners tortured, some civilians killed here and there (and over there and also back there) when we're dealing with such Important Trends?

But, of course, us virtuous Americans don't share the sinful faults of Old Europe: "The United States is a behemoth with a conscience. It is not Louis XIV’s France or George III’s England." No, we invade countries like and shoot them up and leave them in ruins and civil war for their own good, not for any base motives.

Kagan like Hollywood Western imagery, too:

Americans are “cowboys,” Europeans love to say. And there is truth in this. The United States does act as an international sheriff, self-appointed perhaps but widely welcomed nevertheless, trying to enforce some peace and justice in what Americans see as a lawless world where outlaws need to be deterred or destroyed, and often through the muzzle of a gun. Europe, by this old West analogy, is more like a saloonkeeper. Outlaws shoot sheriffs, not saloonkeepers. In fact, from the saloonkeeper’s point of view, the sheriff trying to impose order by force can sometimes be more threatening than the outlaws who, at least for the time being, may just want a drink.

Why are we in such a miserable mess in Iraq? Because to George Bush's Republican Party, this nonsense isnot just an immature fantasy by adolescent boys. It's taken seriously as the basis of American foreign policy. (At least he didn't come up with the idea that Muslim nations are Injun Country.)

And, what would a good magazine-article-length Grand Theory of History be without a reference to Hitler Germany?

As for the Europeans’ supposed tolerance for insecurity and evil, it can be overstated. For the better part of three centuries, European Catholics and Protestants more often preferred to kill than to tolerate each other; nor have the past two centuries shown all that much mutual tolerance between Frenchmen and Germans.

Some Europeans argue that precisely because Europe has suffered so much, it has a higher tolerance for suffering than America and therefore a higher tolerance for threats. More likely the opposite is true. The memory of their horrendous suffering in World War I made the British and French publics more fearful of Nazi Germany, not more tolerant, and this attitude contributed significantly to the appeasement of the 1930s.

A better explanation of Europe’s greater tolerance for threats is, once again, Europe’s relative weakness. Tolerance is also very much a realistic response in that Europe, precisely because it is weak, actually faces fewer threats than the far more powerful United States.

Ah, yes, the endless Lesson of Munich. (We have a lot of capital-letter events when we're dealing with the Sweep of History.) Hitler became too powerful because Europeans were wimps!!

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has some good observations on the "Munich analogy" in War and the American Presidency (2004):

The Second World War provided a new traumatic experience [for policymakers in democracies]. In the years since, the consciousness of policymakers has been haunted by the Munich and Yalta analogies - the gernalization, drawn from attempts to accomodate Adolf Hitler in 1938 and Joseph Stalin in 1945, that appeasement always assures new aggression. Of these analogies, Munich, as the more lucid in its pattern and the more emphatic in its consequence, has been the morepowerful; Yalta figures rather as a complicated special case. I trust that a graduate studentsome day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentiety century. Perhaps in the end he or she will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of "Munich" may exceed the original error of 1938.

Certainly Munich was a tragic mistake, and its lesson was that the appeasement of a highly wound up and heavily armed totalitarian state in the context of a relatively firm and articulated continental equilibrium of power was likely to upset the balance and make further aggression inevitable. But to conclude from this that all attempts to avert war by negotiation must always be understood as "Munichs" goes beyond the evidence.

And he says, "No one understood this better than the greatest contemporary critic of Munich," Winston Churchill, who the contemporary neoconservatives lionize. There is no reason to assume their analysis of Churchill is any more perceptive than their other views of history, or that they use it any more carefully.

Schlesinger proceeds to cite several examples from real-world situations where policymakers attempted to apply the Munich analogy to understand new situations and/or to provide propaganda for their policies. These two I found particularly interesting:

Sixteen years after [the] Munich [Conference], when President Eisenhower invoked the Munich analogy to persuade the British to join the Americans in backing the French in Indochina, Churchill was unimpressed. He rejected Eisenhower's analogy, which did not, of course, prevent Churchill's successor as prime minister two years later from seeing Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Middle East in terms of 1938 and committing his nation to the Suez adventure. This time it was Eisenhower who rejected the Munich analogy. Such incidents illustrate the depressing persistence of the mentality which makes policy through stereotype, through historical generalization wrenched illegitimately out of the past and imposed mechanically on the future. Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.

Timothy Burke in a blog post earlier this year had some very good observationsabout the difficulty of using historical analogies to judge current policy issues: One of These Things is Just Like the Other, Cliopatra blog, 01/07/04:

Doing without historical analogy would be like trying to do without metaphor - and in some ways, it would also be like doing without the empirical substance of informed policy making. We can only predict what might happen by thinking about what has happened: it is the only data we have. Though one of the things we know about the past is how unreliable conventional wisdom about the applicability of historical analogies to new situations often has been. (I confess that one of my private, shameful pleasures as a historian is reading old newspapers in sequence and feeling a kind of unholy delight about how wrong the pundits of the day are about what’s going to happen next.)

He then proposes some guidelines for using historical analogies that could help those serious about using history to understand current problems.

I don't expect to see Max Boot or Robert Kaplan joining their ranks any time soon.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, max boot, lessons of munich, munich, munich analogy, robert kaplan, timothy burke