Wed 17 Mar 2004
Professor James Wood is to be congratulated for taking the time and energy to write an op-ed piece, entitled “Good Soldiers, Bad Leaders,” for the Record. Too few professors participate in the intellectual life of the College outside of their classrooms.
That said, Wood’s piece is so flawed that it calls out for a “Fisking” — blogosphere slang for a point-by-point quoting and debunking.
Here are the sections of Wood’s piece that I have issues with along with my complaints. Wood starts with:
Enough time has elapsed since the beginning of Bush’s Iraq Adventure . . .
Do we even need to read anymore? By describing the war in Iraq as an “Adventure” (note the capitalization), Wood has told me all I need to know about what is coming next. A Neocon Manifesto this is unlikely to be. Of course, there is nothing wrong with a little rhetoric, but if your goal is to actually persuade people — or at least honestly engage those who disagree with you — then an insult in the first sentence is not the way to go.
. . . that we can begin to draw some conclusions about where it fits into the history of warfare; what it tells us about American military ability; why we encountered difficulties there; and what it reveals about Bush and the Republican ideologues who, for the moment, hold the reins of power.
National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Ambassador Mitchell Reiss ‘79 — nobody in positions of power in Washington but those nasty “Republican ideologues”. Of course, in Wood’s world, all Republicans are ideologues and (almost) all ideologues are Republican, so his formulation is a little redundant.
This is not, however, to minimize the performance of the American military. Our technically advanced volunteer forces are highly professional, well led, precise and lethal.
These are not the adjectives that someone sympathetic to the US military would use. If you really care about the life and sacrifices of men like Zack Pace, Bungee Cooke and Dan Ornelas, all ‘98, you call them “brave.”
If you think that today’s US military on the same moral plane as, say, the Waffen SS or the USSR Spetsnaz, you call it “precise and lethal.”
Willfully ignorant of Iraqi society and culture, they were surprised by the nature of Iraqi resistance (what there was of it), and incapable of understanding the ingratitude of the people they liberated.
That’s right, nobody but idiots like Mitchell Reiss ‘79 and Drew Erdmann ‘88 (and dozens of other products of places like Williams) running things in Washington. You can disagree with the policies of the current administration without believing that they are stupid. Indeed, a belief in one’s own intellectual superiority is the single most common sin of the professariate.
Saddam was a beast and his years in power horribly degraded Iraqi society.
“Degraded?” Sounds like a College Council president who lets the meeting run too long. Saddam butchered hundreds of thousands of people. Now, it does not follow from this fact that the war in Iraq was a good idea, but why bother with Wood’s substantive points when the words he chooses demonstrate such an obtuseness to the real issues at stake?
I’ll leave a fisking of the actual substance of Wood’s argument, what little there is, to Mike Needham, but on style points alone, this article is an embarassment.
There are cogent and reasoned arguments to make against the war in Iraq. It is a shame that Wood seems unable to make them. I only hope that his predictions for the future of Iraq are no more accurate than Professor Cassandra Cleghorn’s forecasts of millions of post-war refugees.
March 18th, 2004 at 3:09 pm
Mike will not be able to fisk Prof. Wood’s piece today, much as he would really like to, because he has to finish his sociology exam before waking up at 5:30 am tomorrow to drive down to Salem for the basketball tournament. Mike will say that he agrees with Dave’s initial analysis of Prof. Wood’s piece but wants to note that it’s unfair to label Prof. Wood as unsympathetic to the U.S. military. Knowing Prof. Wood pretty well, I can attest that that is not the case. Indeed, on the broad spectrum of faculty politics — except for the issue of post-Cold War American foreign policy where Prof. Wood has gone off the deepend — he is a very reasonable person.
Mike did have a good time running up to Prof. Wood yesterday and telling him to look out for the neoconservative cabal that was hiding under his desk in Stetson.
Mike is now done using the third-person.
March 18th, 2004 at 3:15 pm
One small question: If President “Bush’s Iraq Adventure has now been revealed as a series of lies, wrapped in half-truths and packaged in far right politics” then how did he get Ken Pollack, highly-respected and certainly no right-wing hack (twice appointed director of Gulf affairs for Clinton’s NSC), on board?
Damn these pesky details getting in the way of crazy conspiracy theories.
March 18th, 2004 at 5:46 pm
Mike Needham claims that:
To be precise, I did not claim that Wood, whom I do not know, was unsympathetic to the U.S. military. I stand by my claim that the words he used are the same as those used by the unsympathetic among us. If Wood believes that men like Pace, Cooke and Ornelas are brave — in addition to being “precise and lethal” — if he appreciates the sacrifices that they make to defend him and his family and his freedoms both in Iraq and around the world, then I am certain that the Record would be happy to publish a letter to that effect. Indeed, he is free to clarify the point here as well.
March 18th, 2004 at 7:47 pm
Fisking a Fisking
I’m not sure Kane’s post counts as a fisking because he doesn’t address any of Wood’s substantive points. About the only thing that he gets right is that his supposed fisking is “on style points alone”.
Here’s the straight blow-by-blow from Kane as I read it, with my response at the bottom.
1. By calling it an “Iraq Adventure” Wood has already tipped his hand and showed us where he stands on the war.
2. Wood thinks all Republicans and Bush admin members are “idealogues” and his “formulation [i.e, description of them as such] is redundant”.
3. Wood is not sympathetic to the military because he doesn’t say they are “brave”.
4. Wood writes that the administration underestimated the resistance and didn’t understand Iraqi society and culture. Therefore, on Kane’s account, Wood believes in his own “intellectual superiority [over Bush staffers]” … which is the “most common sin of the professoriate”.
5. Wood writes that Saddam “degraded” Iraqi society. By not using a stronger verb here, Wood trivializes the degree to which Saddam terrorized (”butchered”) the Iraqi people.
Kane then passes the burden of fisking the substance of Wood’s argument to Needam, before concluding that the article is an “embarassment”.
To each of these, I say, “who cares?”. So Wood couldn’t resist injecting his own opinions about the debate into a well written, though snarky piece. Beneath all of that lies a well thought out and cleverly presented argument. Kane’s effort is amateurish because doesn’t respond to, let alone even start to “debunk” any of Wood’s points.
Let’s look at what Wood really had to say (it is admittedly, a strongly against the war, but a good reader should be able to look past the biases of the writer right?)
1. Wood opens by clearly setting out his objective: to draw conclusions about the legacy of Bush’s Iraq war in history, as well as what it can inform us about the state of the US’s military ability to plan and execute a war and its aftermath.
2. He conjectures that history will not consider the war particularly important for two reasons. First, the scale of the war did not exhibit the “magnitude, the destructiveness, nor the innovativeness” of most major wars. Second, and more importantly, it is unlikely that we will succeed in installing a functioning, democratic regime (contrary to what Needham and folks the NYT’s Friedman predict… I guess we’ll just have to wait and see).
3. Despite attempts to retroactively develop compelling justifications for the war, the simple and less glamoruous story — that we attacked to remove a dictator we just didn’t like — is the most plausible.
4. Wood next turns to evaluating the state of the military, as indicated by their performance in the war. There is no doubt that they performed impressively and overwhelmed the Iraqi army while inflicting few civilian casualties.
5. Despite their impressive battlefield performance, the military did a shockingly poor job perparing for the immediate aftermath. They underestimated the dispersed but lethal resistance that remains active even today, and they failed to restore basic services such as health care, electricity and running water [Wood doesn't mention this, but we did have a very effecive to get the oil fields/fires under control; it's a shame we couldn't do the same for hospitals and water].
6. Wood speculates that there will be ill-effects on our voluntary military resulting from the extraordinary strain placed on both our active duty troops and the reservists. [As many have pointed out, we haven't had enough troops in Iraq to get the job done, forcing us to return soldiers for multiple tours and to call up many reservists. Though the Bush administration likes to hype the many nations that are involved with the US's operation in Iraq, it's hard to deny that we could do with a few more friends helping us out].
7. Wood places the blame for these failures with the Bush staffers who pressed for a war in Iraq, as many internal documents have now shown, well before 9/11. The true impetus for war lay not with any Al Queda connection or in the search for WMD [ if that were the case, surely North Korea is the most serious current threat, especially after Bush undid all of the progress in North/South relations gained during Clinton's tenure.] but in a preexisting itch — to remove Saddam — that the administration felt compelled to scratch.
8. Wood’s final point underscores what will likely be the real leagacy of the Iraq war: the (we can only hope not) irreperable and deliberate damage that the Bush administration has done to the UN, an institution whose stated purpose is to help its member nations achieve lasting peace.
Anyone care to fisk these points?
March 19th, 2004 at 3:42 pm
I think that Foster’s summary of my piece is fair although not generous. I think that his summary of Wood’s argument is significantly better than Wood’s own article. Indeed, I can hardly fisk it at all since it is so reasonable.
I certainly disagree, quite strongly, with the argument, but reasonable Ephs will always disagree. My problem with Wood’s op-ed is that it is so sloppy from a rhetorical point of view. If I were grading, Wood’s article would get a B- (at best) while Foster’s would be an A. I guess that I expect better work from a Williams professor.
I am also, perhaps overly, sensitive to (perceived) slights against our men and women in uniform, Ephs and non-Ephs alike.
By the way, saying that Saddam “degraded” Iragi society is like saying that the Khmer Rouge “degraded” Cambodian society. It’s true enough, but misses the point.
Also, note Wood’s use of the word “henchmen” to describe both the men who worked for Saddam and the men/women who work for Bush. This is moral equivalence with a vengance.