Reason #414 Why I Couldn't Do Electoral Politics

So General Wesley Clark, a decorated veteran, was on TV the other day talking about John McCain's qualifications for the Presidency. Namely, that in Clark's opinion, he doesn't have any.

"I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility," said Clark, a former NATO commander who campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.

"He hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn't seen what it's like when diplomats come in and say, I don't know whether we're going to be able to get this point through or not," Clark said.

So far, so good -- although I'm not sure that "qualifications" is the right frame for this. Generally, we hold being a US Senator to be a solid qualification for the Presidency. Clark's prior explanation for what he means -- that McCain is hinging his campaign on his unique background as a leader who's "been there" is better, and I guess qualifcations is a pithy way of talking about that. This is also is how he avoids that "Obama doesn't have it either" charge: Obama, Clark notes, isn't basing his campaign on his long background as a Washington leader. Obama's running a campaign based on his judgment and ideas.

But I digress.

[CBS' Bob] Schieffer noted that Obama did not have any of those experiences, nor had he "ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down."

"Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president," Clark said.

In a statement released by the McCain campaign Sunday afternoon, retired Admiral Leighton "Snuffy" Smith criticized Clark's comment.

"If Barack Obama wants to question John McCain's service to his country, he should have the guts to do it himself and not hide behind his campaign surrogates," Smith said.

"If he expects the American people to believe his pledges about a new kind of politics, Barack Obama has a responsibility to condemn these attacks."

Argh!

Look. 1) Clark is totally right here. McCain's service was absolutely, 100% honorable. He showed bravery and courage in an unimaginably difficult and harrowing situation. That is not the same thing as a presidential qualification -- particularly, again, under the lens Clark is talking about: the question of having executive responsibility. 2) This was self-evidently not a "questioning", much less an "attack", on "John McCain's service to his country." That's just a bullshit rendition of Clark's claim. Getting shotdown in Vietnam shows many things about a man, but it does not automatically qualify one for the Presidency. If that's now anti-veteran, there's no way to avoid it.

And I can't do electoral politics, because I can't handle the sort of mealy-mouthedness that might turn this into an actual story framed around "Obama surrogate attacks McCain."

Signal Strength

Dave Meyer has a fantastic post up on the historical practice of America using wars as a form "public relations" or "marketing" -- specifically, marketing that we as a nation are "strong" or have the "will" to impress our desires upon the rest of the world. He begins with Hannah Arendt's retrospective on the Vietnam War, and continues to show how image was always the central element of selling the Iraq War:

In the last year of her life, Hannah Arendt offered a retrospective on Vietnam; Home to Roost is printed in the Responsibility and Judgment collection published back in 2003. Her prescient insight was that the entire "not very honorable and not very rational enterprise was exclusively guided by the needs of a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed 'the mightiest power on earth.'" Eventually, the war was maintained solely "to avoid admitting defeat and to keep the image...intact."

The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era. With Iraq, it was central from the beginning. Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful "Suck. On. This." Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our "strength."

Meyer notes that, insofar as war is used as a signal for will, it requires tremendous message discipline. But as Matt Yglesias points out, such uniformity is effectively impossible in a modern, pluralist democracy -- which is probably why Republican war supporters who are so concerned with the "message" we're sending (to al-Qaeda or Iran or France or whomever) about our "will" have so often resorted to the rhetoric of treason to describe war dissenters, or have engaged in domestic propaganda efforts of questionable veracity (not to mention ethics or legality) to try and keep the American psyche all moving in one public direction.

These are all good points, but Robert Farley, an expert on military affairs, adds that even outside the limitations imposed by American democracy, "signaling" things like "will" relies on several shaky assumptions, which often don't bear themselves out:

1. Signals are unambiguous: The meaning of our signaling is not subject to interpretation, such that different people could, based on different priors, carry away different meanings.

2. Signals always indicate what we want them to indicate: This is related to the first; if we are trying to send a signal of strength, then we send a signal of strength, not a signal of mean, stupid, crazy, etc.

3. We never develop a bad reputation, except for weakness: This is related to the first two; our effort at signaling strength doesn't have reputational costs. If we invade his country, the Other will understand us as strong, rather than as brutal, imperialistic, crusading, evil, etc.

4. No one ever considers that we might be trying to deceive through signaling: This is probably the most important. If signaling is about creating a reputation for strength, and if a reputation for strength is a positive good, then obviously there's an incentive to lie about being strong. The entire premise of signaling depends on no one noticing that we have an incentive to lie about our own strength.

5. We know our own strength: Our effort to communicate the true level of our resolve is dependent on knowing what that level is. However, the resolve of the American people to crush enemies of the American public is a value that is unknown to anyone, including our leadership. At best we're guessing, which basically means that every effort to signal is essentially deception.

This doesn't mean that American actions don't communicate messages that we should be cognizant of. But it does mean that a) we can't pretend like "strength" or "will" are the only signals we'll ever send -- even if that's what we intend to, and b) that it's probably a bad idea to launch entire foreign policy adventures based on the blurry concept of communicating American willpower.

Remembering My Lai

The spectacular blog Lawyers, Guns, & Money has a recurring feature entitled "Worst American Birthdays." It runs on the birthdays of some of the more notorious people ever to disgrace our nation's stage. Normally, I don't pay it much attention, because normally they are either well-known villains (like John C. Calhoun) or more modern corrupt hacks.

But today, the focus was on Lt. William Calley, key player in the gruesome My Lai massacre. Here's how Pvt. Dennis Conti described the events at Calley's trial:

Lieutenant Calley came out and said, "Take care of these people." So we said, okay, so we stood there and watched them. He went away, then he came back and said, "I thought I told you to take care of these people." We said, "We are." He said, "I mean, kill them." I was a little stunned and I didn't know what to do. He said, "Come around this side. We'll get on line and we'll fire into them." I said, "No, I've got a grenade launcher. I'll watch the tree line." I stood behind them and they stood side by side. So they -- Calley and Meadlo -- got on line and fired directly into the people. There were bursts and single shots for two minutes. It was automatic. The people screamed and yelled and fell. I guess they tried to get up, too. They couldn't. That was it. They people were pretty well messed up. Lots of heads was shot off, pieces of heads and pieces of flesh flew off the sides and arms. They were all messed up. Meadlo fired a little bit and broke down. He was crying. He said he couldn't do any more. He couldn't kill anymore people. He couldn't fire into the people any more. He gave me his weapon into my hands. I said I wouldn't. "If they're going to be killed, I'm not going to do it. Let Lieutenant Calley do it," I told him. So I gave Meadlo back his weapon. At that time there was only a few kids still alive Lieutenant Calley killed them one-by-one. Then I saw a group of five women and six kids -- eleven in all -- going to a tree line. "Get 'em! Get 'em! Kill 'em!" Calley told me. I waited until they got to the line and fired off four or five grenades. I don't know what happened....

Sentenced to life in prison, President Richard Nixon quickly moved that his sentence be served as a house arrest, and--a scant three years after he was convicted of premeditated murder leading to the deaths of 504 innocent civilians--he was paroled and released from prison.

While we are on the subject of My Lai, we should also mention the name Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr.. A helicopter pilot, Johnson observed the massacre and intervened, attempting to save wounded Vietnamese and issuing orders to the officers on the scene (who outranked him) to stop the massacre. At one point, he had his gunners train their heavy machine guns on the American soldiers, with orders to shoot if the killing continued. His actions directly saved the lives of untold numbers of My Lai residents. Unfortunately, the survivors were relocated to another hamlet which was subsequently destroyed by South Vietnamese Air and Artillery bombardment.

Calley and Thompson represent the two extremes of America--the former, how low we can sink, the latter, how high we can soar. It is, of course, outrageous that a bona fide war criminal got away with serving three years of house arrest--a blot that almost (not quite) is as great a stain on America as the massacre itself. Lest we think that "we would never do such a thing," remember William Calley. Lest we think that we would be quick to punish the perpetrators, let us remember that the army covered up and attempted to white-wash the massacre for years, and remember that Calley, the only man convicted for this crime, served less than 5 months in prison for it.

And lest we despair that there are no men and women in our armed forces who would stand up to such brutal conduct, let us remember Hugh Thompson.