Juan Cole:
Political scientists Stephen Walt, Robert Art and John Mearsheimer were
warmly welcomed at the US Naval War College
<http://mondoweiss.observer.com/2006/06/at-us-naval-war-college-scholar-likens-iraq-to-plague.html>
, despite the fact that they pulled no punches on the Iraq fiasco. They
told cadets seeking a way forward in Iraq that there are no good
options, that things could get even worse, and that we are faced with
Camus's The Plague. They nevertheless got a warm round of applause.
Unlike Cheney and Rumsfeld, real military men want to be told the
straight reality of things. Bravo.
The last one to speak was the one who had used the word "folly" in the
program: John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. Mearsheimer
is 58. He told the audience that when he was a teenager, he had
enlisted in the Army. Then he'd spent 1966-1970 at West Point. Then he
said this:
I remember once in English class we read Albert Camus's book The
Plague. I didn't know what The Plague was about or why we were
reading it. But afterwards the instructor explained to us that The
Plague was being read because of the Vietnam War. What Camus was
saying in The Plague was that the plague came and went of its own
accord. All sorts of minions ran around trying to deal with the
plague, and they operated under the illusion that they could
affect the plague one way or another. But the plague operated on
its own schedule. That is what we were told was going on in
Vietnam. Every time I look at the situation in Iraq today, I think
of Vietnam, and I think of The Plague, and I just don't think
there's very much we can do at this point. It is just out of our
hands. There are forces that we don't have control over that are
at play, and will determine the outcome of this one. I understand
that's very hard for Americans to understand, because Americans
believe that they can shape the world in their interests.
But I learned during the Vietnam years when I was a kid at West
Point, that there are some things in the world that you just don't
control, and I think that's where we're at in Iraq.
The panel was over. For a moment or two there was stunned silence, and
then applause—at once polite, sustained and thunderous.
Leigh
http://leighm.net/
