‘In September 1941, Japan's leaders had a question for Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto: Could he cripple the U.S. fleet in Hawaii? Yes, he said. Then he had a question for the leaders: But then what?
Following an attack, he said, "I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence" after that. Yamamoto knew America: He had attended Harvard and been naval attaché in Japan's embassy in Washington. He knew Japan would be at war with an enraged industrial giant. The tide-turning defeat of Japan's navy at the Battle of Midway occurred June 7, 1942 – exactly six months after Pearl Harbor.’
The grand historical frame is a habitual practice of The Great Will (TGW) and he never tires of demonstrating his ‘expertise’ on all questions, with an emphasis on a close reading of the relevant historical precedent. Were any of his readers in doubt as to his self-regard or his ability to find historical analogies to the present, to unprecedented historical events? Though these events induce an actual perceptual vertigo in citizens who do not partake of the ‘clarifying wisdom’ available to our thinker.
The idea of a no fly zone over Libya and the practice of that military operation are fraught with risks, which TGW presents with his usual dispassion: a simple argument that a country waging war on two fronts in two different parts of the empire is overcommitted ,or at the least, its’ resources are leveraged to a maximum. TGW offers a set of questions and conjectures that are compelling. Could these arguments, in part, have made a difference in the decisions leading to the wars we are now fruitlessly waging or have reached stalemate? Will the forces of an interventionist foreign policy be moved, convinced by his forceful set of arguments? Is it possible that an empire and its thinkers be moved by the persuasive analysis presented by one of their own? Is that enough to curtail military intervention, and let the people of Libya make their own history? Is the painful prospect of American passivity, as political actor, too much for neo-imperial policy makers? The list of imperatives as presented by TGW might have been asked in the matters of Afghanistan and Iraq: these questions were, nor are, less valuable or germane. The salient question of all this argument and solemn conjecture is; at whom is he aiming this essay, Citizens or Policy Makers? Will this column play its part as mere introduction, after the indecisive policy decisions of the Obama administration, a touchstone with which to abuse and subvert confidence in the leadership of the President and his advisers?
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