Logic's debauchery

In 1967, as public support for our Southeast Asian adventure in stemming the Yellow Menace began its long and tumultuous descent, President Johnson invited George McGovern and a few of his fellow Senate peaceniks to the White House, for, famously, a touch of "the Treatment." It didn't take. Wrote McGovern shortly afterward, in his diary: "The President is a tortured and confused man -- literally tortured by the mess he has gotten into in Vietnam."

At the time things were bad, really bad, but the worst had yet to come: more unremitting escalations of hope and fury; the putting asunder of the Democratic Party and the nation at large; a deteriorated presidency; an elusive, nearly invisible enemy; endless expense; muddled objectives; remorseless death ...

Well, you remember it, or you've at least read histories of it; and when reading those histories it's always a bit like rewatching a horrifying film scene and thinking within some small and yearning cerebral nook that this time, maybe it'll come out different. Because there's still time. As there was in '67. To stop the madness. The circular illogic.

Of counterinsurgency gospel.

Which, as the fastidious George Will pointed out yesterday with just the right dosage of fastidiousness, for a pleasant change, "teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development." Which is almost Steve Martinesque in its delightful, elliptical simplicity, such as the arrow-through-head comedian's advice on how to become a millionaire without paying taxes: first, get a million dollars.

From there, in Afghanistan, the illogic seeps onward and outward. "The U.S. strategy is 'clear, hold and build,' " observed Will, who further observed that merely the "clearing" part is impossibly quixotic, since "Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains." Pacification, meet Afghanistanization.

Or, asked Will, how about the "Creation of an effective central government?" When pondering those last three incompatible words one inexorably thinks of Voltaire's geopolitical quip: that the Holy Roman Empire of his day was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. In Afghanistan there's been virtually no government to centralize, let alone make effective; although, suggested Will through the Economist, we can always look forward to assorted refinements of that government's "inept, corrupt and predatory" nature.

Furthermore, as the NY Times mentioned this week -- "mentioned" may seem like a rather light verbal application here, but its object is that bloody obvious -- "Multiplying allegations of fraud in the Aug. 20 presidential election have left Washington with little hope for a credible partner in the war once the results are final."

All that is grim enough. Yet there was one passage in Will's exhortatory column that invalidated the need for any collateral arguments: "[B]efore launching New Deal 2.0 in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should ask itself: If U.S. forces are there to prevent reestablishment of al-Qaeda bases -- evidently there are none now -- must there be nation-building invasions of Somalia, Yemen and other sovereignty vacuums?"

Vacuums, indeed, and stark and easily envisioned vortexes of American military futility. Yet where should it end? Does not the circular illogic again apply? If these -- Somalia and friends -- are territorial safe houses for al Qaeda, should we not then invade, and then stay to "prevent reestablishment"? How about Indonesia? Hell, how about Great Britain and its radical-Islamist population? There's always that One-Percent Doctrine thing, you know, so one never does know.

'Round and 'round and 'round we could go; and, so goes the scuttlebutt, if General Stanley McChrystal has his way, in Afghanistan we very well might. Which leads to yet another (one would think) unnecessary but invalidating argument, this one foreshadowed by the good general himself. Reports the Times: "The revised strategy articulated by General McChrystal in recent public comments would invest the United States more extensively in Afghanistan" -- and here it comes -- by "taking a page from the 2007 strategy shift in Iraq."

In other words, the Myth of the Successful Surge. We came, we saw, we re-escalated, we trained, we retreated; and now they're blowing themselves up, all over again. This is the page from which Gen. McChrystal is reading. To which President Obama should say: "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Which is precisely what President Johnson should have asked Gen. William Westmoreland, in 1967, before it was way too fucking late.