The Follies of Power Politics

...has "won" the war but lost the peace, shamelessly declaring military victory when no significant political objective was achieved...

...But can the October Revolution be regarded as a chapter in Schell's People's War...

...But there are some wars that simply had to be fought to the bloody end...

...Nor can one imagine the American Civil War having gone unfought or dealt with by other means...

...from the African National Congress' struggle against apartheid in South Africa to the U.S...

...What, then, has ever been meaningfully resolved by warfare...

...From the Spartacus uprising in Ancient Rome to Toussaint L'Ouverture's revolt in 19th-century Haiti, one might draw the conclusion that will and courage cannot defeat superior force, and that violence may after all have to serve as the midwife ofhistory...

...By drawing on the writings of dissident East European intellectuals like Poland's Adam Michnik and Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel, Schell implies that Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution represent additional examples of self-determination and the will of the people succeeding in bringing down oppressive regimes...

...Schell discusses other popular struggles, from the Spanish guerrillas fighting Napoleon to little Japan winning a war against mighty Russia in 1904...

...The most important decision made by two statesmen in the 20th century, Schell observes, referring to President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, was the decision not to use nuclear weapons...

...civil rights movement...

...Not much, according to Schell, who asks us to consider the many accomplishments that have been achieved short of fullscale warfare by a "People's War," happening everywhere in the countryside and in villages and jungles...

...and the fourth, most recently, to effect "regime change" in Baghdad, either to find weapons of mass destruction or to bring democracy to Iraq in expectation that it might spread elsewhere in the Arab world...

...Can the fall of Communism be regarded as another example of a People's War playing its proper role in history...

...He wisely points out that the framers destroyed the idea of sovereignty when they divided and separated powers in the Constitution...

...Schell is fully aware that if a resistance movement had to face Leninism instead of Lockeanism, the outcome would be quite different...

...The "War to end all wars" led to the Second World War...

...From Korea to Vietnam to today's Mideast, America has proven to be better at walking away from conflicts than solving them...

...On the contrary, they say, the future of freedom depends on the wisdom of the Pentagon and its strategy of "shock and awe...

...foreign policy has successfully contained its enemies and settled for stability and peaceful coexistence...

...That ended triumphantly, except for the beginning of the Cold War, which never went beyond a delicately balanced armed trace due to the presence of nuclear weapons and the doctrine of deterrence that held out the prospect of "mutually assured destruction...

...The war was undertaken for specific political objectives: to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, ferret out terrorists, bring peace and democracy to Iraq, win praise as liberators by an Arab world turned pro-American, and to somehow settle the Israel-Palestine conflict...

...has fought four wars: the first to end the ethnic atrocities in Kosovo to salve our conscience...

...Aside from a handful of generals who organized an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and a dozen or so students who valiantly yet vainly took up arms to fight the regime, there was no People's War against the Third Reich...

...What, then, did the war accomplish...

...Without discounting the courage of the dissidents, workers and students, we should also keep in mind four leaders: President Ronald Reagan, the only one who thought Communism could be brought down...

...There was no peaceful, democratic solution to America's "peculiar institution...

...deploying its hegemonic military weaponry, except perhaps in North Korea, another part of the world America withdrew from with no solution of the conflict there in sight...

...So declared Mao Zedong during the Vietnam War, when Communism seemed on the march...

...But nothing any longer stands in the way of the U.S...

...But he stops short of following Adams, who feared that undivided sovereignty was tantamount to tyranny and that any war made in the name of "the people," any revolution without a constitution, was headed in that direction...

...Today certain neoconservative thinkers, in a variation on the theme, have convinced themselves that the United States should go to war to bring its values to the rest of the non-Western world...

...Yet Adams was referring not to numbers but to a mentality that preceded the event...

...But on balance, the immediate urge to employ weapons has been, he contends, less productive in bringing about a better society than the long walk of patient diplomacy and the steady will of a people quietly working to free itself from oppression...

...But it must be said that only when Moscow announced it would no longer send in tanks to prop up those satellite regimes did they become vulnerable...

...Wherever power comes from, we are now asked to believe that democracy can take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier...

...the second to drive an invading Iraq out of Kuwait to serve our convenience (keep the oil prices low...

...In the last dozen years the U.S...

...Reviewed by John Patrick Diggins Distinguished Professor of History, Graduate Center of the City University of New York...

...Rightly and intelligently, Schell would have us remember as well the many successes of nonviolence in bringing about a better world...

...and Russian President Boris N.Yeltsin, who knew the whole system had to go...

...All such accomplishments required either civil disobedience or participatory democracy or some action from below against the powers that be...

...His new work, elegantly written and thoughtfully argued, offers a telling indictment of the follies of power politics and the futility of war, whose violent consequences he sees as having done more harm than good...

...Even Western political philosophers told us that the legitimacy of the state depends on its control of power and its monopoly on violence...

...Henceforth we can call this "The Schell Question...

...Nevertheless, the latest war in Iraq amply validates SchelPs critique of the vanity of military adventures pushed forward by war lovers and their gluttony of conceit...

...The author compares passages from Leon Trotsky to those of John Adams to demonstrate how both thinkers— one a radical revolutionary, the other a prudent conservative—saw their revolutions as having taken place in the "hearts and minds" of the people and involving "'popular mass insurrections...

...In both cases the dominant power was not so much defeated as exhausted, having realized that the cause was ill-conceived and real victory may well be hopeless...

...Gandhi's genius, Schell points out, was to take the English philosopher John Locke's principle that all government is based on the consent of the governed and call upon his followers, first in Africa and later in India, to withdraw their consent, a strategy that won India its independence after World War II...

...At the outset of his valuable survey, Schell tells us he is by no means a pacifist and recognizes there can be situations where resorting to force may be necessary...

...Indeed, the ideas of the will of the people and of popular sovereignty were precisely the ones Stephen Douglas threw up against Lincoln to defend the right of slavery existing in the new territories...

...from the fall of the dictator Suharto in Indonesia to the election of Mexico's President Vicente Fox...

...Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who alone encouraged Reagan to work with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who in turn thought that Communism could be reformed...

...Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World, appearing as it does at a point when the George W Bush Administration sees war as the solution to problems abroad, thus could not be more timely...

...For forcing us to face it, every American should be grateful to Jonathan Schell...

...The First World War is Schell's prime example of a noble cause resulting in catastrophe...

...In trying to make the American revolutionary experience relevant to the rest of the world, Schell spends considerable time discussing sovereignty and consent...

...Schell is the author of the bestseller The Fate of the Earth and of other perceptive books on momentous issues that compel us to rethink where we are in history and what we are doing to it...

...While Schell keeps our focus on the success of nonviolent movements, we should also remember the many failures of nonviolent and other movements...

...In each instance the U.S...

...Gandhi's theory of Sataygraha entailed a spiritual politics of commitment to a "truth" or "soul" force of nonviolent action, though not necessarily passive resistance...

...He noted that only one-third of Americans supported the rebels' cause, and that the Revolution of '76 was a "revolution against innovation," not a transformation of the social order...

...Ironically, America never had to think profoundly about the consequences of war when the two superpowers found themselves in an armament race meant to prevent it...

...Woodrow Wilson proclaimed it the War to "make the world safe for democracy," yet it so disrupted the European continent that it brought starvation, disease, the Bolshevik Revolution, and a Red scare, prompting the rise of Fascism in Italy and later in Germany...

...It is not enough that U.S...

...the third to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden and AI Qaeda...

...He shows how the Bolsheviks posed as leading a mass movement of the people only to set up the dictatorship of (actually over) the proletariat...

...The American Revolution saw a small colony defeat the then greatest military power in the world—and in some respects, the author suggests, it anticipated Vietnam's struggle against America two centuries later...

...The dictum made sense...

...author, "John Adams" "Power flows from the barrel of a gun...