William R Polk has an impressive resume, summed up in the short bio published with his articles at Consortiumnews.com:
William R. Polk was a member of the Policy Planning Council, responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and West Asia, for four years under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, He was a member of the three-men Crisis Management Committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis. During those years he wrote two proposed peace treaties for the American government and negotiated one major ceasefire between Israel and Egypt. Later he was Professor of History at the University of Chicago, founding director of the Middle Eastern Studies Center and President of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of some 17 books on world affairs, including The United States and the Arab World; The Elusive Peace, the Middle East in the Twentieth Century; Understanding Iraq; Understanding Iran; Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency and Terrorism; Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs and numerous articles in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, Harpers, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Le Monde Diplomatique . He has lectured at many universities and at the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, Sciences Po, the Soviet Academy of Sciences and has appeared frequently on NPR, the BBC, CBS and other networks. His most recent books, both available on Amazon, are Humpty Dumpty: The Fate of Regime Change and Blind Man’s Buff, a Novel.
A serious man, indeed. Polk is a highly-respected historian who falls into that small category of mainstream thinkers who can be highly critical of those in the mainstream, business leaders and cultural leaders as well as political leaders and intelligence or foreign service personnel. He writes in polite but straightforward terms about the incompetence and irresponsibility of the leaders of the West in a recent essay: Standing in an Adversary’s Shoes . This essay ends with these short and powerful paragraphs:
So it is not surprising that today we are moving away from coherent, well-reasoned and effective strategy and indulging in scattered, short-sighted and unsuccessful tactics. We jump from one crisis to the next with little thought on how we keep repeating our mistakes.
There is truth in the old saying that when one is in a hole, his first step ought to be to stop digging. We need to pause and take our bearings. We need to do this for our sakes as much as for “theirs.”
I end on a very personal demonstration of a proof for what I have written: when many years ago I was first visiting such Asian and African lands as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, both Sudans, Libya and Algeria, I was welcomed — as an American — with open arms. Today, I would be in danger of being shot.
Remember, many of those American responses to crises, often created by our leaders or allies, resulted in devastated countries with piles of bodies, hospitals and schools in rubble, and poisoned soils resulting in high rates of birth defects. If our leaders, and most of our citizens, fail to see that we wreak death and general havoc wherever we go in recent decades, then it is ignorance and blindness which is a form of evil.
I’ll leave it to the reader to explore Polk’s essay and maybe find other works by Polk on the Internet, in an accessible library, or in a bookstore. For now, I’m going to respond to one of his specific comments:
The Special Forces or Green Beret soldier apparently, in the words I have heard them say, positively delight in their power to inflict pain and death. What is the long-term effect of such experiences on our own society and culture? Surely, they cannot be beneficial.
Back in April of this year of 2014, I published an essay, The Moral Superiority of the Modern Military Over Modern Civilian Society, where I claimed “that communal being in the American military is better formed than is nearly any other communal being in the United States.” It could be said that this is a low standard and it has to be said that military communal being isn’t independent from the greater communal being of the societies or nations or empires in which those military men and military units serve. See Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American for a discussion of American moral character in light of the trigger-happy self-righteousness which shows in both our preferred entertainment and our foreign policy adventures.
Some, including W. Patrick Lang who runs the blog at Sic Semper Tyrannis , have spoken differently, based upon experience that might not be fully relevant to current American conditions, cultural and military. Lang, who is “a commentator on the Middle East, a retired US Army officer [Colonel] and private intelligence analyst, and an author[,]” has spoken of an earlier generation of Green Berets as being men who could kill when they had to but were inclined to try and understand those in other cultures and to treat them with respect. Another retired Green Beret who blogs on Lang’s site under the user-name of “The Twisted Genius” refers to himself as a hard-hearted empath.
Let’s consider such men, able to kill with detachment of their feelings—in a manner of speaking, but under the overall control of… What?
Under my way of understanding, men have both individual and communal nature. We human beings are images of the one God who is three Persons; we human beings are each individuals but will be saved as one perfect man (in St Paul’s terms) and yet will remain our individual selves. I also have a more complex view of that one perfect man, the Body of Christ, than can be derived directly from St Paul’s letters. We are imperfect versions in this world of what we can be if we are resurrected to share Christ’s life. We will not live as individual, freestanding creatures even in this world as is the dominant belief in the modern world, especially in the United States. We are members of a variety of communities and share being in each of those communities with all the other members. This is all quite consistent with modern understandings of man from genetics and from evolutionary biology, especially sociobiology. See Social and Biological: Being Honest About the Basics of Human Nature for some background.
Americans, even in the Colonial period, have shown a streak of self-righteousness which borders on, or crosses into, moral insanity. I discussed this with respect to a brutal war waged on New England Amerinds in The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding. Note that men capable of moral detachment might well be more capable of this sort of higher moral reasoning than the most of us—particularly if they are raised in a morally well-ordered society.
I’m going to assume those Green Berets discussed by Polk were from a younger generation than Colonel Lang or The Twisted Genius, though my discussion linked to in the above paragraph covers Americans from earlier generations. Parents and other adults in recent decades thought it proper to sit children in front of violent cartoons and then Rambo and The Terminator and a lot of movies and TV shows about drug gangsters and undercover cops shooting up Miami or Los Angeles. A few decades ago, I remember reading about less elegant gangsters in New Haven who held their gun battles in the hallways of the projects. The walls and doors weren’t built to stop bullets and a few children and other innocent people stopped those bullets instead.
These youngsters, even some just a few years younger than me—I was in the last Vietnam era draft in 1973, also grew up with war-mongering governments and news media who had learned not to televise images of frightened young girls running down the road trying to escape the napalm burning into their backs. They grew up seeing the fireworks of Baghdad being destroyed and it all seemed so clean and so righteous. And they grew up hearing about American Exceptionalism. They grew up seeing gangsters glorified on television and George Washington debunked at school.
In short, anyone born after 1965 or so grew up in an age of serious moral disorder which had even penetrated to the small towns and farmlands by way of television and the movies. Even most of those who were guided by wise parents and clergymen and neighbors still grew up in an age of malformed moral nature in their larger-scale communities, including the malformed moral nature of the American state and its citizens as a body. We are a morally disordered people and even our seemingly good individuals have a share of that disorder. It takes a positive effort and a willingness to be `un-American’ to retain a clear vision, a willingness to just leave when it’s not possible to correct errors. There are some who will listen if you try to tell them it’s the United States and its vassals who are causing the trouble in Ukraine and are among the ultimate sources of trouble in the Near East and Middle East. There are some who simply stare at them if you try to argue that Putin might well be a bastard, but he’s the sort of bastard that good Christian men sometimes have to be to protect their country.
I’ll repeat the quotation from Polk’s essay:
The Special Forces or Green Beret soldier apparently, in the words I have heard them say, positively delight in their power to inflict pain and death. What is the long-term effect of such experiences on our own society and culture? Surely, they cannot be beneficial.
What I said is, “They went there with disordered communal moral natures and often with disordered individual moral natures.” And I could add, “Polk is right that their experiences further damage their moral natures, individual and communal. Even the ones who partly or largely pull out of it do so by way of dealing with horrible memories of the evil they found themselves able and willing to do—if only willing during the period of blood-lust or fear.”