Particularly when it is governed by people who possess an inflated sense of their own shrewdness: "50 Years Ago Israel Was Nearly Destroyed - and it happened because Israeli leaders waited for permission from D.C. to go to war."
Had Israel struck first, it might have been able to neutralize the enemy and not only save thousands of slain soldiers, but the millions that would have been killed had Israel lost.
But Israel would not act without the approval of the Nixon administration. Golda assured Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that they would not strike first, and Kissinger assured the Russians that the Israelis wouldn’t strike first, and the Russians assured the Egyptians and the Syrians, who were preparing to strike first, that they had nothing to worry about.
I never trusted Kissinger: he always struck me as being too clever by half, and he drank far too generously from the well of realpolitic - an approach to foreign policy which often had the disadvantage of being not only immoral, but not even very practical. For me, his crowning act of weasel politics came during the Ford administration, when he convinced Gerald Ford to snub Solzhenitsyn.
Lots of damage has been done by people who were the smartest people in the room.
ReplyDeleteOr rather, has been enabled as the smartest people in the room unfolded exceptionally clever multilayered plans while thuggish brutes took the shortest path between two points. Look at the many Very Smart People prior to 1914 who solemnly assured everyone that a world war was impossible because the economies of Europe were so closely linked that it would be devastating to all?
How about the Very Smart People in early 1930's Germany who persuaded President Hindenberg that making Hitler chancellor would co-opt him and force him to be more reasonable? Of the Very Smart People in the rest of Europe prior to 1939 who thought they had Hitler so boxed in that he was helpless?
Remember the Very Smart People in the West who assured us that the USSR was not going anywhere and that we had to make accommodations to them? Or the other Very Smart People who prattled on about The End of History after the USSR fell and smugly made plans to spend the Peace Dividend since war was now impossible? Because nations with McDonald's never go to war with each other?
What Stephen said. Right now, the Very Smart People are watching China prepare to go to war and assuring everybody that nothing will come of it.
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