Follies

Arthur Silber has written a very compelling series of posts featuring Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly" in several different contexts and it led me to go back and read it. It's an amazing analysis of a certain kind of willful governmental stupidity borne of hubris, mental laziness and bad judgment, and it's quite clear that we are seeing it being carried out right before our eyes. She defined "folly" this way: To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. This is important, because all policy is determined by the mores of its age. "Nothing is more unfair," as an English historian has well said, "than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory." To avoid judging by present-day values, we must take the opinion of the time and investigate only those episodes whose injury to self-interest was recognized even by contemporaries. Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. To remove the problem from personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime. Misgovernment by a single sovereign or tyrant is too frequent and too individual to be worth a generalized inquiry. Collective government or a succession of rulers in the same office, as in the case of the Renaissance popes, raises a more significant problem. Certainly, the first two criteria apply in spades. It's that last, that got my attention. In order for the current quagmire to be truly considered folly it must persist beyond any one political lifetime. In my view it already has.

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Digby refers to Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly". I read it years ago. She described several governmental follies ending with Vietnam. Were she alive today she would be able to add a new chapter titled "Iraq." If you want a better understanding of what is going on do read Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly." Here are links to Arthur Silber's series:

Walking into the Iran Trap

Part I: A Decision of Policy -- and the Intelligence Won't Matter

Part II: The Folly of Intervention

Part III: Mythic War, and Endless Enemies

Part IV: The National Myth that Sustains Us -- and Its Inevitable Racism

Part V: Flashback: Endless War, and the Destructive Search for "Meaning"

Part VI: Messianic Zealotry as Foreign Policy -- "Our Children Will Sing Great Songs..."

Conclusion (A): Folly Marches On -- and Seeking a New Direction