Gregory:

Great to have you back! Would like to post a paper i delivered last spring on the subject of Ms. Tuchman-- titled "The March of Folly: A Posthumous Chapter?" -- which I think you and your readers might enjoy.

Hope this doesn't take up too much space! Feel free to condense or delete, if it does... k

"The March of Folly": A Posthumous Chapter?
Delivered at the University Club, Memphis, May 18th, 2006

During the 1980s, as many of you are aware, I lived something of a double life. By day I was a journalist; by night and weekends, something of a historian. My side job as a history-textbook author involved synthesis rather than primary-source research, so over that period I became very familiar the writers who were then the “stars,” as it were, of popular history. Among them was Barbara Tuchman, a brilliant historian, and an even more brilliant writer who brought elegance and clarity to her discussions of complex historical issues, writing books like "The Guns of August," her 1962 masterpiece on the outbreak of World War I, that read -- and still reads -- more like a pot-boiler novel than dry-as-dust non-fiction.

A granddaughter of Henry Morgenthau, the famous early twentieth-century financier, btw, a woman who wrote history “on the side” (like me but obviously more lucratively) while raising a family in New York City, Barbara Tuchman was something of the Doris Kearns Goodwin of her age. Her interests ranged far and wide, from early twentieth-century China to medieval Europe. Some of you may have read "A Distant Mirror," perhaps her most unlikely best-seller, concerning as it did an actual but obscure minor French nobleman of the fourteenth century, and every aspect of the medieval world around him. One might imagine that 1300 pages of that stuff would wear most readers out, but Tuchman’s excellence was such that "A Distant Mirror" led the New York Times’ non-fiction best-seller list for much of 1978.

That brings us to the book that is the subject of my paper this evening, Ms. Tuchman’s penultimate work, published in 1984, five years before her death a week after her 77th birthday in 1989. Its full title, "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam," states concisely what in fact is its theme, namely that folly has been a persistent feature of the behavior of governments from mythic to modern times. "Folly" attempts to come to grips with how and why, at critical junctures in the past, governments have relentlessly pursued “policy contrary to their own self-interest.” Ms. Tuchman goes on to identify specific historical circumstances that qualify, in her opinion, as utter, complete folly, and proceeds to examine each in detail, trying to fathom for us and for herself just how and why these disasters were allowed to occur.

Among the examples of supreme folly Ms. Tuchman explores are these four:

Folly #1:The actions or, rather the inactions, of six consecutive Renaissance Popes of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries –all of members the worldly and wealthy Borgia, Di Medici, and della Rovera families – six Popes who had little or no interest in even the most modest of reforms of an utterly corrupt Catholic Church. By fiddling while the Roman Church burned, so to speak, the Popes not only fractured Christendom, but in their folly, contributed mightily to the spawning of a host of religious wars that devastated Europe over the next hundred years…

Folly #2: If not madness, exactly, then certainly the blind stubbornness of King George III of England, and his circle of advisors, over a ten-year period prior to 1776, in refusing to redress the relatively straight-forward grievances of the citizens of His Majesty’s colonies in North America. By refusing to give an inch, when the entire matter of “taxation without representation” could have been settled by the creation of a baker’s dozen of colonial seats in the British House of Commons, King George et al were ultimately compelled to give away a mile, in terms of conceding the recognition of an independent American republic in 1783…

I’ve already mentioned Folly #3, well covered by Tuchman in "The Guns of August": namely, the absurd comedy of diplomatic errors that followed the assassination in Serbia in June 1914, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Hapsburg heir, an event leading quite absurdly to the Great War that would destroy the fabric of European civilization as surely as one false step by an errant mountaineer drags his roped-together companions into the abyss…

And Folly #4 would be the tragedy of Vietnam, when the United States, despite never actually making a conscious decision to do so, found itself embroiled in a major war in southeast Asia, defending a native government that was indefensible, fighting an enemy against whom traditional military power was largely ineffective, and ultimately withdrawing from the region after domestic discord had made further barking up the wrong tree politically impossible.

In many ways, "The March of Folly" is Barbara Tuchman’s most ambitious work, so we should not be terribly surprised that it is also her most flawed. It is her only major work not dedicated to a very specific historical subject; in "Folly," she steps back from the trees, so to speak, to look at the whole forest, pulling together disparate threads from her own histororiographic travels. Coverage is uneven; topics like Vietnam are done to death, while dismissed in a page or two are others equally intriguing -- the Japanese decision to bomb Pearl Harbor, for example, a decision that sparked a “war of choice,” against a still-isolationist United States, a war that at the outset even most Japanese military and civilian leaders knew could not be won.

Yet despite its flaws, "The March of Folly" remains a wonderful read, if only because the author stands one piece of conventional wisdom firmly on its head. We study history, we are told while growing up, so that we can learn from our mistakes. But evidently we human beings are very bad students, or at the very least, slow learners.

So what then, exactly, does Tuchman consider “folly” in the realm of public affairs? Certainly not everything that goes awry. In public as well as private life, bad things happen to good people, all the time. Where might we be today, for example, as regards the Israel/Palestine dispute, had Yitzhak Rabin not been assassinated in 1995?

No, folly is not about the accidents of history; folly is the special preserve of those who make their own bad luck. Ms. Tuchman offers three criteria for judging whether or not a particular governmental policy qualifies as blind folly. First, she says, the course of action “must be perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight.” Second, “a feasible alternative course of action must have been available.” And third, “the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler,” her argument here being that throughout history, “misgovernment by a single sovereign or tyrant is too frequent and too individual to be worth a generalized inquiry.” In cases of leaders like Nero and Hitler, Ms. Tuchman suggests, insanity, not folly, is at work.

The examples I outlined above, I hope you can see, meet all these criteria. All were self-inflicted gunshot wounds. And all were what we might call products of consistent effort. Persistence in folly is critical to Ms. Tuchman’s analysis of the phenomenon; even the best leaders make foolish decisions, but it takes repetition and stubbornness for bad decisions to become outright foolishness. She beautifully describes this tendency as “wooden-headedness,” wooden-headedness being the act of “assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs.” She offers, as an example of a wooden head, King Philip II of Spanish Armada fame, described by one historian she cites as a monarch for whom “no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.”

Wooden-headedness, then, is critical to folly. I was reminded of that fact when I got my tattered paperback copy of "The March of Folly" down from the bookshelf in the fall of 2002. I was drawn back to the book then, some four years ago, when it became increasingly clear, in the aftermath of 9/11, that the Bush Administration intended to make armed intervention in Iraq – “regime change,” as it would come to be called – the cornerstone of its “war on terror.”

Iraq, again. Bush the Younger would pick up where Bush the Elder had left off in 1991. At the time, I remember thinking that this seemed a most peculiar call. Of the nineteen 9/11 suicide terrorists, exactly zero had had anything to do with Iraq or its megalomaniac dictator, Saddam Hussein. The admitted architect of the World Trade Center attacks, Osama Bin Laden, was a radical Islamic fundamentalist with deep connections with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but a man who, as a Wahabi Saudi Arabian, had little but contempt for Saddam’s secular version of Arab nationalism.

Indeed, aside from blanket assertions from the President and Vice President, there was no hard evidence of any direct connection between Bin Laden’s terrorist activities around the world, and the often-diabolical behavior Saddam Hussein displayed towards his own people in Iraq. Moreover, Saddam’s demonstrable outrages were, by 2002, more historical than current, given how the Iraqi army and economy had never really recovered from the country’s 1991 Gulf War defeat, and how Saddam’s internal military capabilities were severely constrained by UN-imposed and US-administered no-fly zones. Attacking Iraq as a response to the horrors of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, therefore, seemed to fly in the face of logic and common sense. At the time, I said aloud: bombing Baghdad in response to 9/11 would be like bombing Mexico City to avenge Pearl Harbor…

And after re-reading "The March of Folly," I became even more nervous about the prospect of our government’s undertaking a “war of choice” in Iraq. Having read just enough Middle Eastern history to be dangerous, I was concerned that President Bush and his closest foreign-policy advisors had read too little, or, at the very least, were reading from very different texts. I claim no great expertise on the subject, not least because I speak nary a word of Arabic. But neither, apparently, did anyone in the inner circle around the President that was then helping to formulate our country’s “war on terror” policies. If knowledge is power, as Jefferson said, then clearly, both myself and the President’s foremost advisors were all 98-pound weaklings.

Before joining the Bush Administration in 2001, virtually this entire group – Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and others – had participated in something called “The Project for the New American Century,” a neo-conservative think-tank formed in 1997 with the stated goal of strengthening the American military and “projecting” that military power wherever necessary, to insure the preservation our country’s dominant place in the post-Cold War world.

Foremost among this group’s goals was taking care of what its members all considered “unfinished business” in Iraq, where, they felt, the first President Bush had erred leaving Saddam Hussein in power after his 1991 Gulf War defeat. Indeed, one of the Project’s first initiatives in 1998 was to send a signed public letter to then-President Clinton, suggesting that the toppling of Saddam be made a major foreign-policy priority.

Members of the Project also set their sights upon creating a new Middle East order more favorable to America’s security and economic interests. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification,” noted a report produced by the Project in 2000, “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Given a blank check by the American public after 9/11 to strike against terrorism however he saw fit, George W. Bush chose to shape his “war on terror” around the blueprint provided by the New American Century advocates in his Cabinet. Sometime in the fall of 2002, the President decided to launch what he called a “preventive war” against the dysfunctional and largely defenseless nation of Iraq.

It was an action with few precedents in modern American history; never before, for example, had the US gone to war – as it would the following spring --over the strenuous objections of two or more of its UN Security Council counterparts. But President Bush asserted that striking hard against Saddam was necessary because Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction; he hammered home that thought so forcefully and consistently that the acronym “WMD” has now become an integral part of the English language.

No concrete proof of such weapons, however, had been found when Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched in March 2003. But a majority of Americans had been convinced: better that we get Saddam, before he gets the opportunity to get us.

I recall sitting on a barstool in Clearwater, Florida, three days after St. Patrick’s Day that spring, watching ABC News as “embedded journalist” Ted Koppel crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq with the 3rd Infantry. Barbara Tuchman’s odd little book crossed my mind yet again. I remember thinking that night that we perhaps had bitten off way more than we could chew, and considered the irony of the date. Operation Iraqi Freedom was being launched in March; would this third month of 2003 prove indeed to be a “March” of folly?

Ms. Tuchman, sadly, is no longer with us to answer that question. But having re-read her book yet again, in preparing this paper, I would suggest that her judgment of what has transpired over these past thirty-eight months would be very harsh. And while she would remind us all, no doubt, that writing history on the fly, so close to the events in question, is a perilous pursuit, she might also tell us that she had already started taking detailed notes about the strange, unhappy course of Operation Iraqi Freedom

Of course, she would apply the three criteria I mentioned earlier to the events of the past four years, before writing a word. But let us consider Operation Iraqi Freedom, then, in the context of the three Tuchman folly criteria:

*** Criteria #1: To be determined folly, a course of action “must be perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight.” Check. No other major power on the planet besides Britain backed the unilateral American invasion of Iraq. And at home, Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched without the support of Middle East experts in the State Department, with severe reservations expressed publicly by key military figures (remember General Eric Shinseki?), and opposition from most Middle East scholars both here and abroad. Recall that most of these objections from those who knew and understood the Middle East focused not upon whether the notion of spreading “democracy” was good or bad, but rather upon whether or not bringing such an abstraction to life in Iraq was even doable. And while the mainstream news media, sadly, ignored the experts’ warnings and jumped on the war bandwagon with both feet, millions of Americans voted with their feet, taking to the streets on the war’s eve on February 15,2003, delivering the t-shirt-logo message that “War is not the Answer,” perceiving a folly in the making…

*** Criteria #2: “A feasible alternative course of action must have been available.” Check. After 9/11, all kinds of alternative courses of action to combat terrorism presented themselves, e.g. working in conjunction with Interpol and the UN to seek and destroy bad apples, moving strongly against hotbeds of Wahabi fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, relentlessly pursuing Osama Bin Laden until he was captured and brought to justice. Equally as attractive: a “soft” ongoing alternative that involved developing policies to reduce American dependence upon imported oil from the powder keg that was the Middle East. None of these alternatives were pursued with consistency or enthusiasm. Instead, after briefly displacing the Taliban from government in Afghanistan – where today that extremist group once again controls over half the country – the Bush Administration put all its eggs in the Iraq basket, where they remain to this day…

*** Criteria #3: “The policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler.” Check. The group that decided upon the invasion of Iraq was in fact the same group that had founded The Project for The New American Century. Almost to a man, these neoconservatives had a fixed view of how American foreign policy should be conducted, and never once wavered in their convictions. Published reports suggest that there was little in the way of diversity of opinion among what might be considered the Bush kitchen cabinet, nothing comparable, for example, to the boisterous give-and-take among Presidential advisors that famously marked John F. Kennedy’s response to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Whatever else, no one can doubt that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had the courage of their convictions. Alas, few of those convictions were properly honed on the anvil of Iraqi reality. Our troops were not greeted as liberators, and there were not enough of them on the ground to keep “stuff” from happening. Having virtually ignored, in the run-up to war, the fact that sectarian division in this sad country was a fundamental part of its historical existence, the Bush Administration found itself holding onto a tiger by its tail in the power vacuum that the unseating of Saddam Hussein had created. As a result, the mission thus far accomplished in Iraq is a far cry from the one President Bush celebrated on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise three long years ago this month…

The jury is still out on why exactly this “war of choice” was launched in March 2003. Was the failure to learn that Iraq did NOT in fact possess WMDs the product of woefully inept intelligence, or was something perhaps more sinister at play in the lead-up to war? What, exactly, was the role played by the so-called military-industrial complex in preparing for, promoting and executing this war? And how and why did this purported “liberation” of Iraq turn so quickly on the ground into something better resembling old-style colonial occupation?

These are questions, of course, that will require years if not decades of inquiry and research before they can be successfully answered by historians. But one way or other, I feel confident that Ms. Tuchman, wherever she may be today, has already added the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in the first decade of the twenty-first century onto her list of the great political follies. I have no doubt but that she would agree with the prescient comments made back in February 2004, on the first anniversary of the decision to invade Iraq, by former Reagan Secretary of the Navy James Webb, in a USA Today editorial. Said Secretary Webb at the time:

“Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence.

“There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment that he deserves.”

Perhaps that judgment is now in the offing, if current opinion polls are any indication. For better or worse, Iraq has become George W. Bush’s Vietnam, a subject that occupies much of the second half of Ms. Tuchman’s "March of Folly." Indeed, this over-weighting of material about the Vietnam War led many book reviewers to comment, not altogether unreasonably, that the premise behind "The March of Folly" was simply an artificial construct designed to give the author an opportunity to express her own views on the Vietnam War, still very fresh in the American consciousness, when Folly was written in 1984.

I think the truth is, as always, perhaps a little more complicated. Far be it from me to put words in a deceased author’s mouth, but my guess is that the Vietnam experience simply overwhelmed Barbara Tuchman, an author who had roamed far and wide around the globe in her detailed study of the minutia of history. The tragedy of Vietnam, after all, reinforced a truism – that folly reigns supreme -- that Tuchman was hopeful of seeing dismissed in her own lifetime. Why, she wondered in print, did successive American governments squander vast amounts of military, economic, and human resources in Vietnam, attempting to “control” a part of the world that was in fact of little geopolitical significance? Why did three successive presidential administrations take the fateful steps they took in southeast Asia, going, in poker terms, from simply seeing a $1 bet, to going all-in with a pair of sevens? And what in the world were the Robert McNamaras and William Westmorelands of that age thinking? Why did they persist in this Vietnam folly for so, so long?

I find myself with the same frustrations when I view the events of the past four years. Like Ms. Tuchman, and perhaps like historians of every generation before our own, I felt that somehow we who came to this age at this time would indeed learn from the mistakes of the past rather than repeat them.

Alas, I feel that, for nearly five years now, I have been watching, in slow motion, the deliberate evolution of a head-on automobile collision, watching from a slight distance away, from the top of a hill perhaps, aware of what’s about to happen, but powerless to do much if anything about it.

I claim no special genius in having this insight; this is not, believe me, an “I told you so” moment. After all, millions of Americans – and tens of millions around the world – saw the car wreck that Operation Iraqi Freedom would become long before the engine, so to speak, was even started, and did everything they could to keep it from happening. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, events were in the saddle in the spring of 2003, and today, as a result, “the terrible ifs accumulate.”

Two decades ago, Barbara Tuchman no doubt felt herself in the same position, wrestling with her Iraq, our Vietnam. No doubt that’s why she wrote "The March of Folly," and ended that book by quoting Samuel Coleridge’s famous observation about how every generation ignores the lessons of the past. We should all commit it to memory, though we may all be powerless to make it ever less valid:

"If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is (but) a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us.”

Thank you for your patience with this over-long paper.

Posted by: Kenneth Neill at April 8, 2007 07:20 AM | Permalink to this comment

Greg, I'd argue that it's worse than just pursuing policies against our own interests. The Bush administation seems intent on pursuing policies that advance those of our enemies.

Did you catch the Economist piece on Bashar Assad this week? Add Syria to the growing list of regional adversaries who have benefitted from the Iraq War.

It's one thing to fight an elective war. It's another to do it with the Salvation Army.

Posted by: Headline Junky at April 8, 2007 09:28 AM | Permalink to this comment

The questions answer themselves by the array of noble adjectives chosen. Was the Magna Carta the result of enlightened insight or the confluence of self-interest, avarice and circumstances? Nobility is often an afterthought fondly applied. If you fervently believe in two things - that rich people are better than poor people and that liberalism is a plague destroying the West - then Bush would have been your perfect president: those dark Rovian powers just miscalculated how dumb of a guy they could get away with.

Posted by: Kempis at April 8, 2007 12:37 PM | Permalink to this comment

Kenneth's not the only one. I've been calling the war in Iraq a textbook example of woodenheaded folly for years.

If we're interested in not repeating history, the Tuchman Principle of Folly would be an excellent tool for evaluating politicians and their proposals. It doesn't have to apply only to war, either. Bush's ideas about Social Security reform, for example, fall under Criteria 1 and 2 - and one that isn't listed, but could be described as "Making a Crisis of a Non-Crisis; or, Exaggerating the Threat."

If the politician or policy is near and dear to your heart, that calls for an even more rigorous application of the Principle.

Posted by: CaseyL at April 8, 2007 07:10 PM | Permalink to this comment

This quote, of course, argues for humility in our government -- not just in the foreign policy sphere , but in domestic policy initiatives as well. A question for the liberals out there -- would you really like Bush-type wisdom governing our entire health care policy? It's not exactly thrilling that the government has control of a good portion of our retirement, CaseyL. (Though the Bush plan, bluntly, was fiscally hilarious)

Posted by: Appalled Moderate at April 9, 2007 02:35 PM | Permalink to this comment

It's not exactly thrilling that the government has control of a good portion of our retirement, CaseyL.

I'm not actually sure what you mean by this.

Social Security is supposed to be a rather passive program, in that "the government" doesn't make investments or investment decisions, it just plunks SocSec monies into T-Bills/T-Notes. That's the most conservative form of savings ever, and no one has to think hard about it. "Just do it," as they say.

Now, if your objection has to do with someone carrying off the interest that SocSec earns - to, say, make the deficit look smaller - that is something the government does, and it stinks, but it doesn't actually have to do with SocSec per se. it's a misuse of SocSec rather than something wrong with the program itself.

Posted by: CaseyL at April 9, 2007 06:48 PM | Permalink to this comment

All Social Security is is an unsecured promise to pay an amount in the future. There is no fund -- there is just the faith and credit of politicians, and no provision in the law (unlike with private pensions) that you are vested in what you have earned. Realistically, there is no way Social Security will be wiped away. But there is no reason to believe that earned benefits will not be reduced in the future.

When you trust government to provide services, you trust the American people not to elect a series of doofuses who mess up the delivery of those services. And, sometimes, we the people really can make a mess of things in our selections.

Posted by: Appalled Moderate at April 9, 2007 08:08 PM | Permalink to this comment