Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Michael F. Duggan

Why should petty convicts have all the fun? 

It became a preoccupation with me a few years before COVID hit: whenever walking—from my car to a store, through the neighborhood, on longer hikes—I would (within reason) pick up any plastic I came across.  During my morning and evening commutes, I even began picking up plastic between Washington’s Union Station and my office the better part of a mile away.  It soon became a mostly plastics-free route.

Years ago I read about how scientists using a drag net in the Pacific Ocean had turned up seven pounds of dissolved plastics for every pound of plankton.  Some commonly-used plastics break down to the molecule fairly quickly, but no further for something like 1,100 years.  Whether or not we can see it, it is out there and working its way up the food chain.  Some of it has arrived and who knows what the health effects will be as we increasingly ingest foods with plastics in them (autism and some cancers have been linked to chemicals found in plastics).  After issues of human overpopulation, carbon generation, and loss of biodiversity/habitat, it is likely the most serious prong of the unfolding environmental crises.

If I am on a routine errand, I will pick up any small plastic I see: bottles and other containers, paper cup tops and straws, plastic six pack rings (always cut the rings before recycling), plastic ropes and cords, and all manner of other molded plastics.  Sometimes, when going on longer hikes, I will bring garbage bags with me. A number of years ago, a single 200-yard stretch of the flood plain woods between the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Potomac River yielded two large garbage bags of recent and weathered plastic; I had grown tired of seeing discarded bottles and containers among the profusion of blue cowslip that grows there in the spring and decided to do something about it (an even shorter stretch along the border of a local shopping center yielded a similar haul).  Thus began my obsession. 

Picking up plastic quickly becomes a matter of pride and you soon come regret not being able to stop your car in traffic on seeing a particularly egregious piece of polymer-based refuse along the roadside.  At the height of COVID, I was forced by circumstances to drive to work two or three days per week for ten months. During this period, I stopped a number of times along highways and a parkway to pick up pieces of plastic wreckage after accidents were not sufficiently cleaned up by whatever regulatory authorities are responsible for doing so (these pieces of bumpers and car panels I cut up and put out with my recycling; the guys who picked it up every week probably thought I was running some kind of illegal chop shop in my basement).  Stopping on a highway is dangerous, and I probably should not have done this. I urge the proper departments to keep our highways clean (railroad properties alongside the tracks appear to be among the worst-policed places for discarded plastics, so are shopping centers).

If you choose to pick up plastic, please remember that the point is to never be conspicuous, much less righteous about it.  Act naturally and as if nobody else was around (unless of course someone thanks you or gives an approving gesture).  And make no mistake about it, people will notice you.  Along a roadside—and assuming that you are not wearing a fluorescent orange or yellow Department of Corrections vest—you might get an occasional approving honk or a passing thumbs-up out the window.  If you are on a trail carrying out a garbage bag full of plastic, people you meet will stop and thank you (people are friendlier on trails and boats).  Hopefully your actions will inspire others, but the important part is getting the plastic out of the environment even—and especially—when no one sees you do it.  It is an intrinsically good thing to do and its own reward.  Just remember that even good things have their risks, and you should always where heavy-duty work gloves when picking up plastic (a pickup stick also comes in handy).

To date, no one has ever made a negative comment to me while I was picking up plastic. But if anybody ever asks why I do it, I will likely say “Because others do not” or “If you and I don’t, who will?” Of course, the short answer is “self-respect.” On a darker note, if good people ask this question, then what hope is there for the planet?  

I have no illusions that the few pounds of refuse that I pick up will ever make a dent in the local surfeit of discarded plastics, much less the billions of tons now in the world environment (almost all of the plastic ever made is still in existence).  But I believe in the Butterfly Effect, that hurricanes may begin as ripples in a pond.  If you like this idea, please start picking up plastics at your convenience; the area of your everyday activity is your world, police it.  I also hope that the few people who read this article will share it with others.

Even more disheartening than the small scale of a personal effort is that fact that “recycled” plastics are often sent to other nations who sometimes just dump it. Plastic garbage has turned up in the Marianas Trench, literally the most remote place on the planet.  Because of this, we can only hope that the plastic we pull out of the environment does not just end up in a different place.

The United States should implement a world class national and international effort for addressing plastics in the environment.  If I was suddenly transformed into the chief executive of this country, I would appoint a “Plastics Czar” whose department would be to approach this problem on a scale similar to the industrial mobilization of the Second World War, and to organize—mobilize—an army of citizens into local chapters who would engage in competitive plastic pickups and related activities. 

By Michael F. Duggan

The First World War was the most seminal event of modern history.  To this day it pays dividends.

The Russian Revolution and Civil War (and thus the rise of Marxist-Leninism), the rise of fascism—and thus the Spanish Civil War and Italian adventures in Africa in the 1930s, and a far more destructive Second World War (and Holocaust) ending with the use of atomic weapons—the Cold War with all of its brushfire wars, and the Islamic Revolution are all the spawn of the Great War.  To understand the far-reaching influence of the war, one need only consider that the borders of modern Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were drawn at Versailles—drawn with little or no sensitivity to ethnic or religious distinctions in the region.  There was also a delegation from French Indochina that petitioned for the rights of the Vietnamese people at Versailles.  The young man who presented the petition would later call himself Hồ Chí Minh.  He was roundly snubbed by Wilson and by the other leaders of the great Western powers. 

Before the onset of the pandemic, I bought a used copy Witness to a Century, the memoir of George Seldes, a remarkable American journalists whose life spanned the 20^th century.  Born in Pennsylvania in 1890, he lived to be 104. He covered Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to Pittsburgh in 1910. He published his memoir in 1987.

Seldes was thrown out of the Soviet Union by Lenin, thrown out of Italy by Mussolini, and thrown out of a hotel room by William Jennings Bryan, who he had caught wearing long underwear (complete with a flap in the back) while trying to get an interview as a cub reporter.  He knew or met virtually everybody and the index of his book is like a Who’s Who of the 20^th century.  Like a good reporter, he seemed to be everywhere at the right time. He was with Lincoln Steffens in a bar during the Genoa Conference of April 1922 (a follow-up to Versailles), where they taught a young Ernest Hemingway an abbreviated style of writing for the wire services called “cablese.”¹  Even if his name is unfamiliar to you, you might have caught a fleeting glimpse of him as one of the witnesses in the movie Reds. One of his few lines is near the beginning of the film: “Jack [Reed]… Well, I wouldn’t call him a playboy, but some people did.”

Recently I picked up his book again and found him to be a lively, amusing, and insightful writer.  I would like to think that he never reported to the Kremlin—he sometimes spoke out against the American Communist Party. But who knows what a progressive journalist might have done as a young man.

Seldes tells an amazing story about how he crossed the lines on the Western Front at the end of WWI, went to Kassel and conducted an exclusive interview the German Chief of Staff, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg.  During the interview, Hindenburg is supposed to have said that, militarily speaking, it was the American infantry in the Argonne that had been the decisive factor in Germany’s defeat. After that the general broke down in tears.

When Seldes crossed back to the Allied side, Pershing and his censors detained him and would not let him send the story or even write about the incident.  Of this he writes:

“If the Hindenburg confession had been passed by Pershing’s (stupid) censors at that time, it would have been headlined in every country civilized enough to have newspapers, and undoubtedly would have made a lasting impression on millions of people and become an important page in history; and I believe it would have destroyed the main planks of the platform on which Hitler rose to power, it would have prevented World War II, the greatest and worst war in all history, and it would have changed the future of all mankind.”²

Would Hindenburg’s admission of the defeat of the Imperial German Army in the field have stopped the “stab in the back” narrative in its tracks? Hard to say.  To his eternal dishonor, Hindenburg never publicly repeated his admission, and in fact was a progenitor of the stab in the back myth.

Seldes might have been naïve in thinking that a single news story, even an important one, would have detailed a major current of history and prevented the rise of the Third Reich.  Hitler and his thugs would have still issued their false narrative and would have called his story a lie (Seldes was Jewish, so a denial of the story would have fit in with Hitler’s phobic view of the world and would have found a ready audience in those who followed him).

We will never know if Seldes’s Story of the Century would have guided that century in a more peaceful direction.  At the very least, we can say that the world would have probably been a better place if it had know that the German Chief of Staff knew that his armies had been defeated militarily and not stabbed in the back on the home front. And it might have prevented the largest war in history.

Notes

1. George Seldes, Witness to a Century, Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs (New York: Ballantine Books 1987) 311-313.  Denis Brian, The True Gen, an Intimate Portrait of Hemingway by Those Who knew Him (New York: Grove Press 1988) 37.
2. Seldes, Witness to a Century, 100.

By Michael F. Duggan

A great man of science is gone.

A gentle man of large ambition and focus and a world-historical intellect, Wilson was one of the great minds of the late 20th-early 21st century and likely the greatest biologist of his time. He wrote about 50 books (many over the age of 80) and contributed parts to about 100 more. He was a wonderful stylist and for the past 25 years, he was one of my favorite writers and his Pulitzer Prize-winning On Human Nature is one of my favorite books. Widely considered to be the father of modern sociobiology, he was “Darwin’s natural heir” for our time. He died on December 26.

Wilson was the world authority on ants. Because the behavior of most ants is instinctive—hardwired—Wilson decided to address questions on the sociobiological basis for human behavior. It became the second great prong of his professional career.

Over the next half-century, sociobiology/evolutionary psychology became a counterbalance to a purely social science approach to questions related to nature and nurture in human life. For this he was pilloried and was actually assaulted by social science advocates for merely suggesting that the underlying behavior of human beings was in part the result of hundreds of thousands of years of natural sculpting and trial-and-error. As he wrote in his 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth, “History makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He never said that his view was the final word (for me his 1998 book, Consilience is likely a bridge too far in its universality on the unity of knowledge), and taken together, sociobiology and the social sciences explain a lot more than either does by itself. If you do not know what we are as an animal, then you have little understanding of yourself or your kind.

I met him once at a lecture he gave at the National Academy of Science years ago, and he seriously entertained a question I asked (“does the pheromone communication of ants have an equivalent to the deep grammar of human generative language?” I was being the precocious recently-minted Ph.D.).

There are many evolutionary biologists I have read and admired over the years—Niles Eldridge, Stephen J. Gould, Ernst Mayr, Lynn Margulis, James A. Shapiro—but Wilson was a singular Napoleonic figure who towered above them all. He was also a tireless champion of the environment (a third prong) and wrote wonderfully and with admonishment on biodiversity and even provided a basis—the minimum requirements—for saving the planet (Half-Earth, 2016).

If you are in need of a suggestion for a charitable donation this year, you could do worse than investigate the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. https://eowilsonfoundation.org/

As when Stephen Hawking died in 2018, I feel as if a calm, rational, and wise presence has left an increasingly chaotic world when he and his kind are needed the most. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was 92.

By Michael F. Duggan

T223. Regret to inform you that Lieut. R.A. Leighton 7th Worcesters died of wounds December 23rd. Lord Kitchener sends his sympathy.
Colonel of Territorial Forces, Records, Warwick.

One hundred six years ago today (December 26, 1915), Lt. Roland Leighton, age 20, of the 7th Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, was buried at the British military cemetery in Louvencourt, France. He had been shot while leaving a trench to inspect barbed wire in need of repair in front of the British positions on the moonlit night of December 22. Hit in the lower abdomen, Leighton died late the following day. He had been scheduled to go home for Christmas leave on December 24.

His fiance, Vera Brittain, would live until 1970 and would write Testament of Youth (along with 28 other books), one of the most important memoirs of the First World War. She would also lose her only sibling, Edward, and friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow—essentially all of her male circle of friends (Edward, Roland, and Victor were her “Three Musketeers”)—in the war. Edward, Roland, and Vera had all been accepted at Oxford, but she would go alone (she left Oxford to serve as a VAD nurse in France and Malta, but would return after the war).

In 2014 Testament of Youth was made into a feature film with Alicia Vikander (Laura Croft: Tomb Raider) and Kit Harington (Game of Thrones). Even with historical inaccuracies and omissions, it is a hard-hitting movie about human promise squandered in war. Brittain’s wartime diaries were published as Chronicle of Youth in 1981. Her correspondences were issued in 1998 as Letters from a Lost Generation.

Roland also had literary ambitions. On April 25, 1915, he wrote the poem Violets, which he showed to Vera while on leave that August. On the day he wrote the poem, he had enclosed violets in a letter to her. Nascent, but showing real potential, it rings of the Georgian Poets like Rupert Brooke, but gently anticipates Graves, Owen, and Sassoon.

Violets from Plug Street wood, Sweet, I send you oversea. (It is strange they should be blue, Blue, when his soaked blood was red, For they grew around his head: It is strange they should be blue.) Violets from Plug Street Wood, Think what they have meant to me— Life and hope and love and you. (And you did not see them grow, where his mangled body lay, Hiding horror from the day; Sweetest it was better so) Violets from oversea, To your dear, far, forgetting land, These I send in memory, Knowing you will understand

By Michael F. Duggan

In his World War II memoir, Doing Battle: the Making of a Skeptic, Paul Fussell observes:

“Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all American males?  Killed off in their tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers had the effect, welcomed or not, of improving the breed.  Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust.”  

When I first read this stark observation, I didn’t want to believe it.  It seemed cynical, illiberal, a paragraph designed to grab the attention.  Wasn’t the U.S. fighting against an ideology that embraced eugenics (and “improving the breed” sounds like the language of Nazism or at least animal husbandry)?¹ 

I wrote it off as the bitter remembrance of a combat infantry officer who, like Robert Graves before him, disliked the men with whom he trained, “men whose company, in many cases, I would have run miles to avoid.”²  Any “war buffs” taken in by the élan and esprit de corps of Band of Brothers and other books about elite units, should read this book if they want to know what life was like for a 20-year-old officer in an ordinary leg infantry unit in the Vosges Mountains in 1944-45.  It is a wonderful tonic to balance out the uncritical solemnity that infuses myths of the “Good War” (they should also read Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed).  Although I never accepted Greatest Generation heliographies uncritically, Fussell’s point seemed to go too far.   

But leaving aside such promising individuals as George H.W. Bush, John and Joseph Kennedy, Jr., Lewis Nixon, Eugene Sledge, John Paul Stevens, Byron White, and Fussell himself—all of whom were from the educated middle and upper classes—I now think that he has a point: policy may consciously or unconsciously push unspoken trends and attitudes that are reprehensible when said aloud.  After all, the various U.S. wars in the Middle East provided convenient venues to test new weapons under real world conditions, but we would never say so.   

Today, an unspoken justification for some bad behavior and policy—the flouting of vaccines and vaccine mandates—is the view that a large majority of those who die are no longer of much importance to the community, economy, and the gene pool.  If anything, these people are a burden.  Like Fussell’s de facto eugenics of military service, this result may not be intended, but it is real, and some people don’t care enough to use personal responsibility to prevent thousands of deaths in what is now the deadliest single event in U.S. history.

People won’t tell you this, but beloved grandmothers, grandfathers, and the odd special needs child aside, most of those dying of COVID-19 are nameless, faceless numbers of the aged, infirm, and weak.  Don’t let some anti-vaxxer tell you that they are bravely advocating greater “freedom.”  What they are advocating is a vulgar, primitive understanding of natural selection for the purpose of social improvement, that is akin to the obtuse nineteenth-century construction of evolution as “survival of the fittest.”  Clearly they do not understand more nuanced parts of evolution, like group selection. 

About 75% of those dying of COVID-19 in the United States are over 65.  Those with mental disabilities are also at much greater risk of dying from the disease than the general population.  In the eyes of some anti-vaxxers (and in the hearts of those who whip them up), these are people would have died soon anyway or are otherwise costly to society.

Flouting masks and vaccines has nothing to do with courage, Jesus, manhood, patriotism, or “rights.”  It is all about callousness to the point of criminality.  The result has been a mostly preventable holocaust, a “thinning of the herd” by culling the weak from the herd through the sickness of those healthy enough to endure it.  How can this be anything but eugenics?  It certainly isn’t Christian.      

Although the number of their fatalities is not as great, we should remember that natural selection cuts both ways, and hospital wards and cemeteries are also filling up with younger anti-vaxxers as well as the old and infirm, about whom many couldn’t care less. How would they feel if people began writing off their lives as instances of self-inflicted natural selection that improved the gene pool?     

Notes

1. Paul Fussell, Doing Battle (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1996) 171-72.
2. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, quoted by Fussell in Doing Battle, 77.

By Michael F. Duggan

We live in a time when 760,000 American deaths is considered to be an acceptable operating cost in dealing with a mostly preventable disease. That is almost 100,000 more than the total number of all United States combat deaths from all of our wars combined (look it up if you don’t believe me). It is now the deadliest episode of our history. Considering that there are three safe and highly effective free vaccines available on request, this number becomes especially baffling. And now with COVID-19 cases on the rise again in many states, we appear to be on the cusp of the fourth surge. Or is it the fifth? The question is whether the disease will go from pandemic to endemic and if it might have been eradicated.

Except for avoidable mistakes made during 2020, the problem does not appear to be at the Federal level; the vaccines were underwritten by the United States Government, and the current administration got 200 million vaccinations out in its first 100 days. The failure as it persists today is in the fabric of the nation, the uneven patchwork of jurisdictions that make up the United States. Anybody who believes in delegating power to the states ought to write a ground-up history on the COVID-19 crisis.

The United States is also a nation in which flirting with fascism and the use of violent imagery in political speech have become ubiquitous in parts of the electorate (history is watching their leaders and will remember their names). Some of these people embrace empirically disprovable delusions and some believe that they have a right to act violently on the basis of these fevered dreams and other irrational impulses.

Recently, hundreds of people attended an event at Dealey Plaza to welcome John F. Kennedy, Jr., back to the political fight (on top of the patent absurdity of such an expectation is the fact that John-John’s political view were nothing remotely like those of today’s conspiracy followers). It is unclear whether this kind of behavior is mass psychosis or, as others have suggested, something more like a propaganda-driven cult (as Justice Holmes reminds us, “[w]hen the ignorant are taught to doubt, they do not know what they might safely believe,” at which point they might fall for anything). Those on the extremity of the other side of the political spectrum are only marginally less extreme in some of their acts and prescriptions (e.g. the taking down of statutes of Grant and Lincoln). Taken together, the country is a pressurized bottle on a high gas flame. Throw in the five looming and mostly unaddressed crises of the environment—human overpopulation, carbon generation/climate change, deforestation/habitat destruction/loss of biodiversity, water issues, and the plastics crisis—and you get a fair idea of the lay of the land.

With many Americans hurting as the predictable result of the economic disruption of the pandemic, government spending is a necessity but also inflationary (the primary cause of inflation are the shortages caused by the back up in supply lines and networks around the world). The American Relief Plan Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the incredible, shrinking Build Back Better Act are all necessary for the general welfare. Even though the Infrastructure Act is a long term in scope, programs that flush the economy with ready cash can keep prices high, at least in the short term. There appears to be no immediate remedy for inflation, which is a global phenomenon.

The administration’s legislative agenda, the mass distribution of vaccines, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the creation of 500,000 new jobs are all notable accomplishments. And yet these achievements are not registering with many Americans. Some commentators have observed that inflation has hit the red states harder, which might explain the discontent among conservative independents. The administration has less than 12 months to get things moving again, to get the word out about its successes, and to tamp down the anger behind the divisions. If it doesn’t, then what? If Biden succeeds, he will be the president who turned things around. If not he will be a tragic figure of history, his agenda a noble effort to save a nation that did not meet him halfway.

I do not know what will be coming after the 2022 midterm elections and especially after 2024, but it might be unrecognizable relative to what we have come to know in this country. What happens if the losers in close political races do not concede defeat? What if voter suppression and other undemocratic measures allow political minorities to dominate? How will the U.S. military react if violence breaks out in parts of the country, or if extremest groups assert themselves with political violence? If you have a plausible claim to citizenship in a more rational, less volatile country, you might want to beat the rush and start the application process now.

By Michael F. Duggan

Shakespeare could have written the script, although parts of the final act are still unclear.  Call it The Tragedy of Colin Powell.

I am an admirer of Colin Powell.  I think of him as one of the most notable American leaders of the past half-century, but I see him as a tragic historical figure for what he might have been and for his legacy.  He was a good and possibly a great man and could have been the George Marshall of the early twenty-first century, if only… 

He certainly had qualities of greatness in him, and the Powell Doctrine (which could just as easily be called the Grant, Eisenhower, or MacArthur Doctrine), which combined with the latest technology, produced magnificent operational results in the Gulf War of 1990-91.¹  At the time, many of us saw Desert Storm as a masterstroke of measured realism, a police action to expel an invader and restore the territorial sovereignty of Kuwait.  More recently it has been called into question as a significant expansion of U.S. involvement in the Middle East.²  It was also a motivation for those who launched the September 11 attacks.

Powell embodied the American Dream and is our patron saint of success by merit. The son of Jamaican parents in the South Bronx, he rode an ROTC scholarship all the way to the Halls of Power. My father, a West Pointer, went through the Army Infantry School with him at Fort Benning. He once observed that even then “everybody knew the sky was the limit for that guy.”

My view of Powell is not set in stone, but I would like to see him as a sensible, moderate realist, soldier-statesman, the “Reluctant Warrior” with two purple hearts whose legacy was forever tarnished by lesser men.  Was his failure in the run up to the Iraq a casualty of the zeal and manipulation of others, the collateral damage of an undeclared war?  Was it an honest mistake?  In my opinion, Powell’s “Pottery Barn” warning of “you break it, you own it” is a better indication of his realism and gives a fairer idea of his doubts surrounding the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I see Powell as a tragic figure for two closely-related reasons, but my overall opinion of him is still in flux.  I would hate to think that he was just an attractive, if slick, political operator, like Obama, whose modus operandi was often to split the difference with the stronger voices in the room.  I think he had more integrity and insight than that, but again, I don’t know. Something gnaws at me—something doesn’t seem quiet right about his performance at the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003.   

The preponderance of evidence from his long career suggests that he was a realist at heart.  But there is also Colin Powell the charming public speaker who played down differences between himself and former bosses and colleagues.³  When it comes to the Iraq War, being in favor of a diplomatic solution and then being the decisive factor in selling it to the world is a difficult position to explain.  And yet we must reconcile this division between Powell and Realist and Powell the Apologist, the reconciler of irreconcilable positions.  

I was against the invasion and occupation of Iraq from before the start and was not swayed by Powell’s testimony at the United Nations.  I saw it as phony—the antithesis of Adlai Stevenson’s performance at the U.N. that help prevent a war in 1962.  I sided with Kennan and Scowcroft (and Scott Ritter) and saw no evidence that justified an invasion.⁴  Some friends of mine did, if briefly, question their opposition to the invasion because of their faith in Powell.  And Powell’s advocacy gave others in the media and elsewhere the cover to embrace a catastrophic policy.  To me it looked like a cynical stunt exploiting Powell’s nearly universal popularity to sell an unjustified war.  As Powell’s Chief of Staff, Larry Wilkerson, observes:

“That’s how bad I felt about the presentation, which I thought was hokey, circumstantial crap.  And then I realized that, you know, Colin Powell had given it.  He had Mother Teresa poll ratings.  That’s the reason it was so effective, because Colin Powell gave it.  When Colin Powell held up that little thing and said, not in a post-9/11 world… people believed him.  They wouldn’t have believed Dick Cheney.  They wouldn’t have believed George Bush.  They wouldn’t have believed Condi Rice… But they believed Colin Powell.”⁵

Wilkerson believed, not that the evidence presented was necessarily wrong, but that it was circumstantial—inconclusive—and could lead to different interpretations.  It was not a basis for going to war.⁶

Giving Powell the benefit of the doubt, I believe that he is tragic for two reasons:  

1. The fact that he was used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq is disturbing.  My reading, and that of other historians, is that during the Bush II administration, he was knuckled-under and outmaneuvered by two of the most brutal and shrewd bureaucratic infighters in U.S. history, Cheney and Rumsfeld.⁷  He was a former soldier who might have felt that he had to follow the orders of the administration in which he served.  And because he was the first African-American secretary, he likely felt that he could not resign in protest, a la William Jennings Bryan.⁸  Both of these things made his actions inevitable at the time.  It was a no-win situation, and he knew it.  And once done, it was final, it led to a failed policy, it could not be undone, and he would always be remembered for it.  Thus a tragic historical figure.
2. A former infantry combat officer who served in Vietnam, Powell was an innovator of an outlook that specifically sought to avoid the kind of war he was used to legitimize. Thus his role as a cabinet member produced results that were diametrically opposed to what he likely saw as his historical importance and in some ways his life’s mission as a military planner and soldier. 

What about the argument that the circumstantial evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was suggestive and that a majority of people inside government believed that Hussein had such weapons?  Here I don’t know what to believe.  Larry Wilkerson notes that Powell was dubious about the existence of WMD well before the speech at the U.N.⁹  The public line is that Powell preferred a diplomatic solution to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but when one was not forthcoming, and with sufficient reason to believe Hussein could have WMD, he willingly got onboard the military option.  Hmm.  If this is the case, then the performance at the U.N. denotes a colossal failure of judgment by a noteworthy man.  

In literature, the tragic hero is one who is better than most people—one who pushes the limits of human potential—but who is flawed and therefore sympathetic.  Perhaps Powell is a new kind of tragic hero: a person who is better than the prevailing currents of his or her times.  Thus he fails, not because of his own flaws, but those of his milieu and his inability to change them (and a moderate realist in a time of ideologues is bound to be either a nonstarter or else a tragic figure with or without a tragic flaw).  It was not his flaw, but rather a hopelessly flawed administration that failed him.  He was a rational island in a sea of delusion and was inundated by the rising tide of an ill-considered war footing.  At least that it what I would like to think.  

Of course the other possibility also exists: that he made a horrible mistake by making an all-too common assumption about the illusory casus belli of the Iraq War.  Here the great historical observer would have seen through the clutter, noise, and distractions.  At the very least, he would have acted more cautiously given the questionable nature of the evidence.  Failure to do these things would seem to rob him of the title of being a great man, making him even more tragic but also more human, reduced in stature. 

Ultimately, to be considered a great figure, you must get the biggest (and last) things right.  Your career must been seen as ascending.  Churchill had the Dardanelles, and if he had died in 1925 or 1930, he would have been regarded as a failure.  But he also had the Blitz, D-Day, and V-E Day.  Powell had the Gulf War and a speech that sold the Iraq War to the world—a war that resulted in the deaths of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and in essence handed Iraq to Iran (to be fair, the war would have happened with or without Powell’s speech).  I suspect that we may never know whether his error was imposed on him (or if an exaggerated version of the evidence was sold to him), was the result of his own misjudgment, or some combination of the two.

The question then is the degree to which the contributions of an otherwise impressive career will counterbalance his failure as Secretary of State in peddling the invasion of Iraq.  It is difficult to assess this at this early point.  But from what I know of him, I hope that historians and our people will be kind to the memory of a noteworthy public servant and will remember him more for his Doctrine than a one-off dog-and-pony show at the U.N.

Notes

1. The Powell doctrine may be seen as a military analog to the realism of Kennan and Scowcroft.  Its eight point checklist: 1). Is a vital national security interest threatened? 2). Do we have a clear attainable objective? 3). Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? 4). Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted? 5). Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?  6).  Have the consequences of our action been fully considered? 7). Is the action supported by the American people? 8). Do we have genuine broad international support. See https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-powell-doctrines-wisdom-must-live-on/
2. See Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East (New York: Random House, 2016), 133-134.  
3. See Juan Williams’, The History Makers interview “An Evening with Colin Powell,” April 2006.
4. See Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t Attack Saddam,” The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2002 and Albert Eisele’s interview “George Kennan Speaks Out,” The Hill, September 26, 2002.
5. Larry Wilkerson, War is not about Truth, Justice, and the American Way (New York: Real News Books, 2015), 107.
6. Larry Wilkerson, War is not about Truth, Justice, and the American Way, 111.
7. See Bartholomew Sparrow, The Strategist, Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security (New York: Public Affairs, 2015), 531-532.
8. Larry Wilkerson sees Powell’s decision not to resign in more personal terms observing “[i]t’s not his character t quit.  It’s his character to keep going, and to keep trying to change things.  It’s is character to keep cleaning the dog poop off the carpet in the Oval Office.” Wilkerson continues, saying that, although he wrote a letter of resignation immediately after the speech, he stayed with Powell out of loyalty and because he saw his boss as the only plausible counterbalance to Cheney and Rumsfeld in the Bush II White House. Larry Wilkerson, 109-110.
9. Larry Wilkerson, War is not about Truth, Justice, and the American Way, 109.

Michael F. Duggan

This week we have all seen or heard the tributes to those lost in the September 11 attacks. Many of them deal with questions of how the attacks changed us or how we feel about them. This is entirely appropriate, especially in light of United States policies since the attacks. Still, I wish more of them dealt with questions about why we were attacked.

There are also questions of proportionality. Do we focus on the September 11 attacks because they were inflicted by a human foe? Was it their dramatic nature or the fact that two of the world’s tallest buildings were completely obliterated? Why are these lives more notable than those lost to COVID-19?

In terms lives lost, the September 11 attacks were roughly on the scale of the Pearl Harbor attack with 2,977 and 2,403 deaths. COVID-19, on the other hand, has exacted a considerably higher number of American lives than all of World War II (to date there have been about 660,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States compared to 291,577 U.S. combat deaths and 405,399 deaths from all causes during the Second World War). On January 12 of this year, the United States lost 4,327 of its citizens to COVID-19 in a single day—1,350 more than the losses of September 11, 2001—and during the week of the Capitol riot, we lost an average of about 3,300 people per day. Now, with the Delta variant, we are still experiencing about 1,500 deaths every day, or a little more than a September 11-scale attack every two days.

By Michael F. Duggan

A dark thought: what if we have it all backward? What if the Earth’s is the fevered patient struggling to breathe and we are the pathogen, and COVID-19 is the immune response? This view does not sit well with our humanitarian impulses, but that does not mean that it is not true.

By Michael F. Duggan

“What set the Afghanistan war apart was not that it was the longest war in U.S. History but that it was more quickly forgotten than any other conflict in which the United States had ever participated.  As if by agreement, the American people and their government erased the Afghanistan experience from memory even before the bloodletting had ended.”

-Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, 2016

The metaphors for it are clichés: blood in the water, a feeding frenzy.  Those participating in it are variously sharks and vultures or else armchair generals and Monday morning quarterbacks.  When politicians of both parties and reporters of all stripes pile on en masse, it is because they sense vulnerability in a president and his policy.  And there is nothing more insufferable than the sanctimony and superiority of people, many of whom could not have cared less about Afghanistan for the past twenty years, suddenly becoming exasperated over an inevitable ending.

Where have they been up to now?  I am no expert on Afghanistan—I have never been there and I do not speak Dari or Pashto—and yet it was clear to me that the United States and its allies began losing when the mission shifted from payback for the September 11 attacks to nation building.  In military terms, its fate was sealed when U.S. strategy moved from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency (COIN).  To put it bluntly, it was lost when the U.S. put its commitment and money into the hands of warlords and corrupt middlemen.  To Afghans, Americans are infidels and invaders, occupiers and outsiders, and nothing—no “hearts and minds” campaign—will ever change these perceptions.  A majority of Afghans would never accept the rule of such people or those who cooperate with them.  Why were these rather obvious facts not reported by the same corporate media journalists who are now so conspicuously aghast?  

Sure, we saw David Muir go to Afghanistan a couple of years ago in pompadour and a tight black tee shirt and uncritically report the official line about the looming “endgame” there.  We saw courageous network careerists inserting themselves into stories with impressively dangerous backdrops while reporting conventionalist clichés and showing little actual understanding of the nation or its history.  But where was the coverage of how the Taliban had been increasingly dominating the countryside for years?  Where was the broader context of the Afghanistan war in relation to the India-Pakistan struggle for Kashmir?  Where were the stories of Pakistani support for the Taliban, the sanctuaries in Pakistan and its permeable 1,616-mile long border with Afghanistan?  Where were the stories of Afghan warlords taking American aid?  The American people had long forgotten about Afghanistan because the American media had mostly forgotten it and knew precious little about it from the start.

There is a lot of talk these days about “how this could have been done in a more orderly way,” but what are these controlled and regulated roads not taken?  How do you pull forces out of a nation whose government has already fled and whose army has laid down its arms?  Two of the more vexing narratives making the rounds are those of David Axelrod and Chuck Todd.  Axelrod observes that Biden’s zeal to pull out of Afghanistan got too far ahead of the program that he had already pushed back months beyond the original deadline in May.  Presumably Mr. Alexrod would have preferred a more drawn-out collapse and the protracted fighting that would have gone along with it.  Todd is baffled over why the U.S. withdrew most of its ground forces before its diplomatic staff and civilians.  I suppose that he would have preferred U.S. forces to engage in a fighting retreat once it became obvious that we were leaving , and this with no in-country diplomats to talk to the other side.

David Brooks recently made an ex post facto “light at the end of the the tunnel”/”we were turning a corner” argument worthy of Lyndon Johnson or Walt Rostow. The idea is that because al-Qaeda and the Taliban had a 13% favorable rating among Muslims in eleven nations suveyed by the Pew Research Center eight years ago (and because of related numbers on the decline of Islamist terrorism and the unpopularity of fundamentalist rule), it is possible that a modern, liberalizing Afghanistan was in the offing if “we” had only stuck it out a little while longer.¹ “I thought we”—presumably the 1% of Americans who actually do the fighting these days and which do not include David Brooks—”had achieved some level of stability, and we could manage the problem.” Pretty to think so. Mr. Brooks would do well to ask why the Taliban was winning the war outside of the cities in the years after this 2013 poll was taken. Rebel forces without popular support don’t win insurgencies against powerful occupiers and their domestic allies. A more relevant statistic would be the percentage of rural Afghans who approve of, or are willing to play ball with the Taliban.

To be frank, I had little use for pre-presidential Joe Biden.  I thought he was just another cynical and unprincipled politician—a middle-of-the-pack mediocrity that seemed to embody so much of what was wrong with his party for the past half-century.  As president however, I like his ambitious domestic programs, his focus on the pandemic, and his declarative tone.  As far as I can tell, he is the first president since John Kennedy to constructively buck his military advisors over a major policy decision.  Having the guts to do that by itself should garner kudos and historical notice.  He promised to get the United States out of Afghanistan and he did that.  What the nation needs now is presidential leadership to tell the truth about a war that was lost many years ago and not a mea culpa that would be cynicially exploited by others for political gain.  Being right he needs to tough it out and to be the leader that he appears to be.

The fact that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has been ugly is a responsibility that should fall on the shoulders of those who began this mostly forgotten war, those who enabled it for almost two decades, those who escalated the conflict, and those who lied or kept silent about the failure of policy there.  It is also the responsibility of so many talking heads who had forgotten the war (or never really cared about it) and who are now so indignant.  Perhaps next time the U.S. will opt for a more orderly kind of chaos, whatever that means. Or better yet, perhaps the United States will not get involved in unnecessary wars of choice in the first place.

Note

1. See the PBS News Hour, August 27, 2021. See also David Brooks, “This is how Theocracy Shrivels,” August 27, 2021, The New York Times. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2013/09/10/muslim-publics-share-concerns-about-extremist-groups/