Tracinski’s “Five Years Into the War on Terrorism: What Have We Le

[KendallJ]

In case you haven't seen my continual comments in various posts, I've had Tracisnki on the brain recently. His break with ARI, and his split on political issues, most notably continuing optimism regarding Republicans have been eating at me. As a result I've been rereading several of his recent writings to try to understand where the differences arise.

I think I am beginning to reach some conclusions about what is going on, and I have to say that while I think I understand his viewpoints better, that ultimately his basic ideas are flawed.

Let me say right off, I like Tracinski. I think he is an excellent writer. He has done a lot to get Objectivist ideas into the mainstream and even into more mainstream Republican discussions. I subscribe to TIA and probably will continue to do so. However, if he does have disagreements with Objectivist thinking, and those disagreements are fundamental, then ultimately, it will have been the proper thing for ARI to sever ties with him.

I believe the fundamental driving differences are summed up in the disagreements over the Objectivist thoughts of the mechanism by which philosophy influences history. Tracinski’s ideas are summarized in his “What Went Right?” series (only 4 of 6 are currently published). I would suggest for anyone who is interested in the debate that this article should be read in detail. I have read it, and am formulating some thoughts on it, but this is not my purpose today. I hope to follow up at some point with a higher level analysis of his issues based on “What Went Right?”.

I am interested in critiquing another article, namely his “Five Years Into the War on Terrorism: What Have We Learned” from TIA October 2006. 3 of 4 parts of this article are publicly available as separate articles written for Real Clear Politics (The fourth section is entitled “The Lessons Not Yet Learned” and I have not been able to locate a publicly available copy, but will attempt to summarize it if there are questions regarding it.). They are:

The Immediate Lessons of September11

What We Have Learned From Iraq

What We Have Learned in 2006

Tracinski is skillful at taking concrete details and detecting basic issues within them. To that end his observations or “lessons learned” are many times spot on. However his basic observations do not integrate to bolster his continued support of current foreign policy, and key issues are left out of the analysis. Because this is a “retrospective” analysis, his direct intent is not to summarize and draw up the proper path forward; however, he implicitly does so within the piece, and explicitly does so with all his other writings. (Ultimately, I believe that his failure to deal with these issues properly is ultimately based upon the ideas he holds about historical progress evident in the “What Went Right” series, but as I’ve said, I will deal with that separately.)

In “Lessons of Iraq”, Tracinski lays out basic observations that would lead one to continued support of U.S. foreign policy to prosecute the War on Terror. (all emphases in all excerpts are mine.)

The first lesson is that this war will not be won just in swift campaigns but through long persistence. Persistence is required, not because we lack the military means for swift victories, nor even because we have failed to use our full military means in any one particular campaign. Though we have occasionally limited our firepower and held back our strength, we have still proved far more powerful than the enemy in every engagement. The real reason persistence is required is because it is precisely this virtue that our enemies doubt we possess.

There is a crucial respect in which the War on Terrorism could not have been won in one year, or in five years, even if we had fought it more swiftly, more decisively, and with greater ferocity than we have. We could be much farther ahead in destroying the enemy, but we could not yet have fundamentally demoralized him, because no American action over a limited time could do so.

I find this argument spurious, and only relevant given the previous assumption to fight a protracted war of attrition that does nothing to sap the enemy’s capability for waging war. The idea that the enemy can be demoralized by “outlasting” them in such a war is fraught with difficulty, and in fact, Tracinski himself identifies the concretes that raise that doubt later on. He just never ties the two together. Neither this “outlast to demoralize” nor its converse psychological ploy, “winning the hearts and minds” are how wars are won.

In an article I referred to earlier this week, Col Tom Snodgrass, a military strategist also works through an analysis, arriving at the conclusion that between motivation and capability to wage war, trying to eliminate the enemy’s motivation (i.e. to demoralize them) is the losing tactic. But it seems Tracinski thinks this is exactly the axis upon which we need to gauge our success, and no other. Allowing us to believe that no strategy up until now would have succeeded ignores the fact that insurgencies are fought they way they are because insurgents are long on will, and short on capabilities to wage war. This argument too serves as a blanket apology for any of the choices in strategy up to this point.

He goes on:

But the lesson of Iraq is that this ideological conflict is the real key to America's long-term survival. Winning the war requires more than military strength. It requires moral and intellectual strength. Only moral strength will give us the confidence to persist against the enemy, and only intellectual strength will allow us to win the internal ideological struggle against Western self-hatred.

I personally don’t think this is a lesson of Iraq. In fact, Tracinski points to Bush’s state of the union speech for other lessons learned, but fails to identify that as early as that speech, Bush addressed the fact that the war would be drawn out and require our resolve. I’m not sure what Iraq has taught us differently except that we will need more resolve than we previously thought.

But Iraq has also been a rebuke to the glib confidence of some on the right who assured us that Arabs and Muslims are just like us, equally prepared to benefit from the blessings of a free society. In fact, the Iraqis have turned out to be far more violent, primitive, and tribalistic.

I think this lesson has been the most demoralizing to the average American. If Americans are "war weary," it is not because we have suffered massive casualties, because we haven't; most people do not even know anyone who has been killed or injured in Iraq. And it is certainly not because we are suffering from economic privation; this is a small and relatively inexpensive war. Americans are "war weary" because they are tired of having to pay attention to the unfamiliar and unattractive culture of the Middle East.

OK, the Iraqi’s are more primitive and brutal than we thought. We are “war weary” from having to pay attention, and it will certainly require moral and intellectual strength to win. But the real question is: “Do we as a nation have the will to continue for as long as it will now certainly take?” I can answer that question of will for the average Objectivist, but that is far different than assessing the nation as a whole, and includes assessing all of its mixed philosophical influences, and various philosophical perspectives. Just as a military strategist must assess what hard assets he has available to fight, in addressing his battle plan, so too must he assess the resolve of his troops and the country that backs him. He may wish for a different assets and more resolve, but ultimately he must make decisions based upon what we have. It does not matter if he is morally justified in fighting, if his people do not have the resolve to do so, he should not begin. He must assess this both in the case that his plan goes as follows and in the cases where he might be forced to fight longer than expected. Not doing the former risks outright defeat. Not doing the latter risks loss of resolve mid-mission which is what we face right now, and the grave error the Bush administration committed in planning.

But the primitivism of the Arab and Islamic world does not mean that we should give up [attempting to establish a decent representative government] in Iraq. It is, in fact, the very reason we have to keep trying, because we can now glimpse the full brutality of the forces that will take over the Middle East if we do not oppose them with a better alternative.

This is the only explicit statement of the direction we should take, and it is wholly unsupported throughout the piece. Whether we should continue must include an assessment of what will be at stake, how much time and effort we must invest to complete the mission, and whether or not we have the moral will to complete the fight. None of these issues are addressed by Tracinski, and in fact, the evidence Tracinski presents later calls into question whether or not he has considered the factors involved. Remember this claim because I’ll bring it up when as we proceed; something which Tracinski should have done but avoids for reasons that should become obvious. (The bracketed phrase appears in the TIA version, but not the Real Clear Politic version.)

Also, I think that this assertion exists because of Tracinski’s faith in the ability of representative government (regardless of philosophical basis) as a natural stabilizing factor for progress. This is a direct implication of “What Went Right?”, and is a mistaken assessment. Representative government without proper philosophical basis is a crapshoot. It may result in a stable government; it may not. If the establishment of such is critical to our success and we cannot explicitly establish the proper government then we have pinned our success on a roll of the dice. Is there evidence that we cannot explicitly establish the proper government? Read on…

In his subsequent piece, “What Have We Learned in 2006” Tracinski brings up subsequent lessons the he feels have been learned. First, bringing up the examples of the Palestinian election, the “Cartoon Jihad” and the Lebanese war he describes the first lesson.

The Palestinian election demonstrated that "democracy," which is supposed to be our political and ideological weapon against totalitarian Islam, can also be used by the terrorists as a weapon against us.

The proper lesson of the Palestinian election is that we need to examine and reject the misleading term "democracy." In today's political discussion, the term "democracy" takes some of the actual procedures of a free society, such as free elections and a free press, and packages them together with the principle of unlimited majority rule, implying that a nation is still "free" so long as its liberty is taken away by majority vote.

But wait. The lesson learned is that our reliance on democracy backfired. The lesson yet to be learned is “why?”. Without the “why” actions cannot change for the better. Tracinski must believe that within the next few years that this answer will be learned, and can be learned by the U.S. and need not have the proper philosophical principles attached to it, else he would not continue to pin his hopes of success in Iraq on “attempting to establish a … representative government in Iraq.” In fact, this is highly questionable.

The second factor for questioning Tracinski’s hope is his already admitted observation of the worse-than-anticipated Iraqi primitiveness.

I hinted yesterday [in "What We Have Learned from Iraq]that the violence and primitivism of the Islamic world is deeply rooted in its oldest traditions. This is the ultimate root. The Muslim religious ideal is the believer's total submission to the religious strictures of Islam, as interpreted by the religious authorities. Mohammed himself became a religious dictator in his own lifetime, and the religion he founded has never fundamentally rejected religious dictatorship as an ideal.

If the U.S. has yet to be able to explicitly articulate the basis of stable representative government, and the Islamic culture is deeply rooted its antithesis, then what are the chances for successful establishment of representative government any time soon? Here Tracinski is silent, if not already implicitly hopeful. If the strategy was to quickly vanquish the enemy and then fight a protracted, low-intensity war for years, while we establish the proper philosophical base within both the U.S. and Iraq, all the while resisting the infiltration of the antithetical philosophical ideas from all sides, one must ask, “Where there not less costly, and quicker ways to secure the American people from danger?” If the answer is yes, and I believe that it is, then the choice of the more costly route is sacrificial, whether implicitly or explicitly chosen. If there are quicker ways to end this conflict, and Tracinski chooses to advocate for longer ways, albeit hopefully, then he continues to advocate the altruistic path. But “What Went Right?” demonstrates his belief in the inherent ability of representative government, regardless of philosophical underpinnings, to be a natural force for good. He believes that not even the most aggressive prosecution of the war up until now could have resulted in anything more. We, as Objectivists, know what the proper principles upon which to prosecute this war are, but we must take an honest look at what the U.S.’s philosophical assets truly are, and decide whether advocating for continued half-measures will ever get us to the proper conclusions in a reasonable amount of time.

Tracinski in his follow-up piece, “The Democratic Party AddsNothing to the National Debate” tells us that we should all vote Republican so as to “crush the left” because the left adds nothing to the debate. I would respectfully suggest that to put a party in power, within which the “debate” is still raging, will lead to only one thing in policy actions: the wreckage of the consensus. And it is that compromise that I do not want guiding our foreign policy actions today. For me, the re-reading of Ayn Rand’s “The Roots of War” and “The Wreckage of the Consensus” was instructive in helping me understand how the ARI position can simultaneously advocate the proper principles of total war with Islam, while its principals advocate a Democratic vote.

Whenever our leaders attempt to explain it [the Vietnam War] to us, they make the mystery greater. They tell us simultaneously that we are fighting for the interests of the United States – and that the United States has no “selfish” interest in that war. They tell us that communism is the enemy—and they attack denounce and smear anti-communists in this country. They tell us that the spread of communism must be contained in Asia – but not in Africa… must be resisted in Vietnam – but not in Europe… They tell us that we must defend South Vietnam’s right to hold a “democratic” election, and to vote itself into communism, if it wishes, provided it does so by vote – which means that we are not fighting for any political ideal or any principle of justice, but only for unlimited majority rule, and that the goal for which American soldiers are dying is to be determined by somebody else’s vote. They tell us also that we must force South Vietnam to accept communists into a coalition government—a process by which we delivered China to the communists, which fact we must not mention. -- Rand in "Wreckage of the Consensus"

Read that again, and replace Vietnam with Iraq, communist with Islamic fascist, anti-communist with secularist and democratic election with representative government and it is easy to see which side of the divide Tracinski has placed himself upon. It is not for the fact that Tracinski advocates the proper ultimate course to follow in the Middle East (war with Iran), which he does, that we should be cautious about him. Rather it is because he believes that that proper course is possible from within the wreckage of the Republican consensus.

As the crowning example of this gross mistake, I would like to refer to a key argument from the last unpublished section of the piece, “The Lessons Not Yet Learned”. It deals specifically with the lesson regarding religion, in general.

The irony is that the War on Terrorism is itself a warning of the philosophical evils of religion. Those evils are obscured by the vast differences between contemporary Christianity… as opposed to the unreformed fanaticism of Islam.

The lesson of the dangers of religion will be the hardest for Americans to learn, because the alternatives to religion seem ever worse, given that no one – except Ayn Rand—has ever offered a secular foundation for morality. But our culture is grappling with the issue of the role of religion, and it is open to hearing a better alternative.

The Taliban and Iran are, to any would-be American theocrat, what he Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union were to the 20^th century American left. They are the warning that will undercut any attempt to break down the separation of church and state in America.

Now, I don’t necessarily think that the religious right will bring about an imminent theocracy next week, but I think it is clear that the religious element of the right is what creates, perpetuates and locks-in the wreckage of the consensus within the debate on the right, and it is the one place where the left adds something to the debate.

Look to the previous points raised by Tracinski and ask yourself, “Can George Bush ever advocate the all out war on Iran that Tracinski wants, without first admitting that the philosophical cause of the cesspool that is the Middle East is religion itself?” The only way this can happen is if Iran provokes the U.S. directly, making the threat concrete. But this is exactly what they will not do. Bush's "compassionate", religious philosophical base will prevent him from seeing the clear course.

I wholly disagree with the last Tracinski paragraph. Christians do not view Islamic totalitarians as a warning sign against imposing Christian morality legally within the U.S. In fact, the religious right views this conflict as none other than a holy war of “Christian ideals” vs. corrupt Islamic morality. The one thing that Christian conservatives refuse to acknowledge is the secular, Aristotelean heritage of the United States.

Tracinski is right that the lessons about religion will be hardest for Americans to learn, but he says nothing of the necessity of learning such a lesson to our eventual victory in Iraq, and he says nothing of the expected time it will take our leaders to learn such a lesson. In fact, I believe that it cannot be learned any time in the near future, and that it must be learned in order to garner victory. As such, one must consider continued advocacy of improper policy in the hopes that proper policy will replace it as altruistic.

This is where I fundamentally disagree with Tracinski’s assessment of the role of philosophy in history. Philosophy is directly and explicitly needed at the leadership level of any specialized field in order to continue to perpetuate the proper course in that field. Without it, course of action is a fitful mix of proper and improper actions, and cannot be rectified from within the field – certainly not in the short term. Our military strategists can induce the proper course of action, given a self interested objective, but our leaders do not have the explicit philosophical ideas to reliably take up such a course. If they do, it will have been through luck. Is that what we want our soldiers in the field to depend on for their success? What we have and continue to have is Rand’s exact characterization of the “wreckage of the consensus.” She was right to dissociate herself from it, and Tracinski should be admonished for not doing the same.

If anything, the Tracinski – ARI split is itself a reflexive refutation of his ideas about how philosophy affects history. It is an explicit, philosophically-grounded view of this high-level idea that must be held in order for Objectivists to continue taking proper action. Tracinski's change of course is a concrete indication of what happens when philosophy does not explicitly interact with high level ideas in any specialized field.

[KendallJ]

hmmm. Many views. No comments. Did I bore everyone?

I'm working on a critique of "What Went Right?".

Is anyone interested or does the matter seem settled to folks?

[gags]

You didn't bore me. I enjoyed reading your perspectives on Tracinski and would like to see what you have to say about "What Went Right?".

[KendallJ]

Well, thanks gags.

Tracinski released Part 5 of "What Went Right?" this week. It is available on TIA website. It contains a very interesting thesis about the role of philosophy in history, and he attempts to integrate that with specifics. It does not however yet draw conclusions about what we should do as a result. I have some problems with what is there so far but we'll see when part 6 comes out. Hopefully soon.