POLITICAL JUDGMENT

by William H. Benson

March 19, 2009

     On March 19, 2003 at 9:30 p.m. est, two hours past the deadline for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to resign, U.S. and British forces began a concerted air strike against Hussein’s government. A ground campaign followed, and by April 9, allied forces had control of Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein had gone into hiding.

     On May 1, President George W. Bush announced the end of major military operations in Iraq, stating “Mission Accomplished!” However, a peacekeeping force remained in place to subdue the insurgents. On December 13, 2003, U.S. forces found Hussein hiding in a hole in the ground. He was brought to trial, convicted, and eventually executed for his mass slaughter of the Kurds, a decade before.

     In selling the idea of a war against a destitute third world Middle Eastern country that most Americans knew little about, both the President and Vice President used words and language based more on wishful thinking than reality.

     In September of 2002, Dick Cheney tried to persuade Dick Armey, the Republican House majority leader, saying, “We have great information. They’re going to welcome us. It’ll be like the American army going through the streets of Paris. They’re sitting there ready to form a new government. The people will be so happy with their freedoms that we’ll probably back ourselves out there within a month or two.”

     In late 2002, George W. Bush described Saddam Hussein as “a man who would likely team up with Al Qaeda. . . .This is a man who told the world he wouldn’t have weapons of mass destruction, promised he wouldn’t have them. He’s got them!”

     In a recent book entitled Dead Certain, the author Robert Draper, wrote, “Bush wasn’t relying on intelligence to buttress his claims of Saddam’s dark fantasies of plotting attacks on America with Al Qaeda, or direct contact with Al Qaeda. For no such intelligence existed.” And the thin intelligence that claimed Hussein owned weapons of mass destruction was proven incorrect.

     Judgment, especially judgment in the political arena, is a rare quality. A columnist Michael Ignatieff recently wrote: “I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with learning when to admit your mistakes.” That means loosening your attachment to an idea that may be novel, curious, or even interesting but is patently false and will prove catastrophic.

     There are any number of ideas about a given issue, but only a few of them are true and applicable to human life, embedded in reality. It is those few ideas that can be trusted, and upon them decisions can be made. “Fail again; but fail better.”

     Ignatieff also wrote, “Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself.” That means listening closely to those internal warning bells ringing inside when being led toward a decision. The difficulty though is that in certain people who have lived charmed lives, warning bells do not ever sound.  

     Ignatieff suggested that a wise political leader must avoid staying in his or her cocoon of imaginings, but instead must confront the world every day, deciding who to trust, who to believe, and who to avoid. “Prudent leaders force themselves to listen equally to advocates and opponents of the course of action they are thinking of pursuing.” He or she must challenge all fixed ideas.

     There were some thinkers and writers in the early days of 2003 who showed good judgment on Iraq and predicted quite accurately the dire consequences that actually unfolded there. These people did not have more knowledge than those working in the White House, or even access to better intelligence.

     What they had was outright skepticism and a recognition of the limits of American power and authority. “They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror.” “They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country.”

     Paul O’Neill, Bush’s first secretary of the Treasury, was extremely skeptical of the war, when he said that the U.S. was “grabbing a python by the tail, by dropping a hundred thousand troops into the middle of twenty-four million Iraqis and an Arab world of one billion Muslims. Trust me, they haven’t thought this through.”  

MICHEL de MONTAIGNE

by William H. Benson

March 5, 2009

     On February 28, 1571, a French nobleman and a lawyer in Paris’s royal court named Michel de Montaigne retired. Coincidentally, it was his thirty-eighth birthday. He had shown no signs of literary ambitions, but he was determined to devote his remaining days to living in his country estate where he would think and write about nothing but himself.

     “Because I found I had nothing else to write about,” he said, “I presented myself as a subject. When I wrote of anything else, I wandered and lost the way.”

      For the next twenty-one years, until his passing at the age of fifty-nine from kidney stones, he wrote a series of, what he called, “essais,” a French word meaning “attempts” or “trials.” This was a first, for no one in all of literature had written only about themselves, using first person singular.

     Montaigne wrote “about his boyhood, his family, his education, his house, his travels, his books, his illnesses, his friends, his dreams, his interests, his habits, his experiences, his opinions, his religion”—a compendium of all thoughts that occurred to him, written down as they slipped in and through his mind, done without any plan or organization.

     He then gave each—some only two pages and others as much as fifty—a title: Of Smells, Of Friendship, Of Sadness, Of Idleness, Of Liars, Of Constancy, Of Solitude, Of Sleep, Of Fear, Of Age, Of Prayers, Of Conscience, How We Cry and Laugh for the Same Thing, Of Moderation, Of Thumbs, Of Cannibals, Of Names, Of Virtue, Of Anger, Of Vanity, Of Cruelty, Of Cripples, Of Glory, Of Presumption, Of Books, How Our Mind Hinders Itself, and Of Experience.

     In another essay that he entitled “Of Repentance,” he answered his critics when he wrote, “If the world finds fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves.”   

      A reader can see in Montaigne’s essays his humanity, his warm self-deprecating humor, and his endless curiosity. “I set forth a humble and inglorious life,” he said, and in his “Preface” he wrote, “Reader, thou hast here an honest book.” His motto was his ever constant question: “Que sais-je?”, meaning “What do I know?,” in which he professed his absolute ignorance about many things.

     Again, in “Of Repentance,” he wrote, “So, all in all, I may indeed contradict myself now and then; but truth, . . . I do not contradict. If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.” An admirer of Montaigne’s once wrote, “He renounced all intellectual and spiritual authority and that renunciation became his authority.”

     Was Montaigne’s life a waste of his talents? His contemporaries, no doubt, believed so. Did he make a huge mistake retiring from his job as a lawyer at age thirty-eight to write drivel about himself? His colleagues probably believed so. But Montaigne came to believe “that human beings must discover their own nature in order to live with others in peace and dignity,” and this self-imposed isolation was Montaigne’s way.

     How shall I live? What should I do with my life? What do I know? These are questions some people ask of themselves, but few seem to act upon the answers they receive back. Life comes at us in a rush—childhood, education, marriage, children, jobs, purchasing a home, television, the news, sports, theatre, all happening while we are trying to find our way—and the crucial questions of life we can lay aside, easily. Life happens whether I or you think deeply about it or not.

     Montaigne thought deeply about his. Toward the end of his final and grandiloquent essay, “Of Experience,” he wrote: “For my part then, I love life and cultivate it, such as it has pleased God to bestow it upon us. I do not desire it should be without the necessity of eating and drinking; and I should think it a not less excusable failing to wish it had been twice as long. ‘A wise man is the keenest seeker for natural riches.’”