Political Booknotes

...Perhaps growing up was ever thus, but I feel a terrible sadness about what is happening...

...As deputy chief of the NSC’s Near East Office, he promptly found himself enmeshed in a typical Byzantine backroom battle over policy toward the Syrian-Palestinian-Israeli jockeying in Lebanon...

...Roger Morris...

...The humor in Augustine’s Laws was more intentional...

...Interservice rivalry has prompted immense wastes of energy and money...

...Arms Control Agency throughout the Reagan regency...

...Some readers may also find rather self-serving the discussion of “techflation,” the phenomenon by which the mounting unit costs of advanced weaponry far exceed the rate of dollar inflation...

...They are instead a rather mournful recitation of many factors that contribute to the decline of those rural communities that we still romantically identify as the bastion of what’s good about the USA...

...My far-from-comprehensive home library boasts no fewer than five books on defense reform published over the past year alone...

...Many of the locals he meets are incapable of coping with change or confused about their place on the planet...

...What this means, we are told, is that a no-real-growth defense budget, accounting for both inflation and techflation, must actually increase annually in nominal terms by 7.9 percent...

...Ward Sincluir The Defense Revolution: Strategy for the Brave New World...

...Westview Press, $24.95...

...A Phalangist dirt road in the Bekaa Valley would thus lead to Syrian missiles, to the Israeli invasion of 1982, eventually to 241 U.S...

...All in all, Defense Revolution is breezier and more entertaining than most of its ilk, but one still wishes the authors had avoided the irritating, George Willesque overreliance on recycled mots justes by luminaries great and small...

...Increasingly, economic considerations have become more important than spiritual ones...

...Better still, collected in book form, the essays become an important piece of reportage about the physical and emotional changes that are sweeping across the national outback...

...It really is a “crushing” waste of time...

...But to keep it in context, we Americans have always been weeds, pushing onto someone else’s turf, imposing our majority values, such as they are, and offering little respect for the land...

...Time has a way of healing, and maybe today, with the inclusion of the Fulton County piece in this collection of Rawls’s “Small Places” columns, the local critics will be less defensive, for compared with other small places, Fulton County is a gem...

...Like many NSC recruits, Tanter came to the staff in 1981 as a quasi-political academic, his resume by that time already including a stint with then-congressman Donald Rumsfeld, some teaching jobs in the Midwest, and several intervals in Jerusalem spent studying (and apparently admiring) Israeli foreign policy...

...Augustine’s wry wit and acerbic takes on the foibles of the “militaryindustrialcongressional complex” inform this joint effort as well-which only makes the book’s failure to break the important ground on what ails that complex all the more disappointing...

...This is precisely the tack Dick Cheney’s Pentagon has chosen to take...

...But on specific weaponry, they tend to favor most of the big-ticket, high-tech wonders-the B-2 stealth bomber and “Star Wars,” for example-now jostling for a place in a Pentagon budget increasingly incapable of accommodating them all...

...policy toward the recurrent Middle East crises of 1981-1983, including the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, seminal events that set the stage for so much to come, from Iran-contra to the current Punic expedition in the Persian Gulf...

...Congress to the defense industry...

...Still, it is expressive of the conformity and cult politics of the foreign policy establishment that so few have survived intellectually or morally to write about what they saw...

...In Missouri, they were monied absentee property owners around the Lake of the Ozarks whose need for flood protection led them to ignore the needs of poorer folk in the upstream town of Osceola...

...expeditionary force of 1990...

...In the rotten morganatic marriage between government and entertainment, metaphors are always instructive...

...It is all much too reminiscent of my own experience on the NSC staff on different issues, from a different perspective, more than a decade before Tanter...

...Rawls has a theory that modern urban America has created a class of weeds-hardy souls who, much like their botanical counterparts, seek new environments in which to flourish or simply dominate...

...The Reagan foreign policy, for instance, can be understood as the “Twin Peaks” of American diplomatic history, if not Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, complete with dancing dwarf, unaccountable casualties, crazed officers, and dazed citizenry...

...For weeks the newspaper printed letters from indignant nitpickers who expressed varying degrees of contumely for this itinerant editor’s offense of describing reality as he saw it...

...Over the past two decades, literally hundreds of eager staff members have passed through the gingerbread portals of the old Executive Office Building into the inner sanctum of NSC power...

...The government archetype was racy, unplotted, and a bit perverse in real life long before the show-biz version appeared in prime time...

...David C. Morrison Who’s At The Helm...

...He concludes his survey of a "map for mismanagement" with some remarkably bland assertionsthat the president should run foreign policy along with the secretaries of state and defense, while the NSC advisor acts as a mere "honest broker...

...With the inimitable Reagan quartet of Richard V. Allen, William Clark, Robert McFarlane, and John Poindexter, it grew still larger and more powerful, sometimes confused with a drug or arms cartel, dabbling occasionally in snow tires for Oliver North or furtive White House tours for right-wing contributors...

...After more than four decades of blue-ribbon commissions, official reports, and books such as this, it should be abundantly clear that jawboning alone will not revolutionize a defense establishment that, if and when the Soviet Union fully implements the Shatalin econornic reform plan, will be the largest socialist economy in the world...

...Washington could think of, and agree on, nothing better than to scold (but then quickly resupply) the Israelis after their invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut...

...A way of life gives way to making a good living...

...Hmmm . . . none of Augustine’s colleagues have yet been frogmarched through the streets in dunce caps to be jeered at by the populace...

...Like the television creation of director David Lynch, the Reagan policy seems to have been without lasting purpose, its expectant audience now baffled, now exploited, mistaking contrivance for design, effect for achievement...

...An odd literary couple, the authors both worked at Fort Fumble in the mid-seventies-Adelman as an assistant secretary of defense and Augustine as an undersecretary of the Army...

...Cleared of the gauze of academic or NSC prose, it was the hoary struggle between some of Washington’s oldest factions-the robust pro-Israeli, Soviets-in-thedesert interventionists versus the cautious career officers and their occasional cabinet allies, men who were scarcely pro-Arab or soft on the Reds (Habib, after all, was once among our most passionate proconsuls in Saigon) but who instinctively shied away from the diplomatic costs and unpredictability of yet another Israeli attack...

...Rawls is right and his sense of dissolution is correct...

...Tanter gives his own partisan but revealing account of the tortuous period from 1981 through 1983, when U.S...

...The sounds of the voices in any one place and even the landscape itself begin to resemble those found in other places...

...Raymond Tanter...

...Secretary of State Alexander Haig and various “globalists” like Tanter were on one side, with, as the book tells it, assorted villains on the other, among them “regionalist” state department negotiator Philip Habib, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and, not least, special envoy and later NSC Advisor Bud McFarlane...

...The authors may be right in arguing that changes in budgets, the political climate, and procurement rules mean that defense contracting is now far less of a money lode than it was during the first half of the roaring eighties...

...Augustine is chairman of the defense-industrial titan, Martin-Marietta Corp., and Adelman directed the U.S...

...The Pentagon will never manage its sizable share of the taxpayer’s tribute with the care that trove deserves as long as The Building is dominated by an ethic that the only way to get along is for officers and officials to go along...

...And Congress will never be able to do the job either as long as it functions largely as a pork barrel for the collection of campaign contributions to perpetuate eternal incumbency...

...Like its many predecessors, this volume contains much advice that is sensible...

...Either the constitutionally elected leadership runs the nation's foreign affairs in and out of crisis or it doesn't...

...As it is, the few hundred Marines at the Beirut airport in 1982 have become the 400,000-plus U.S...

...Around Keuka Lake, New York, they were the outsiders who injected new hope and vitality into a sagging wine industry...

...In some places, the locals themselves are the probleminsular, resistant to change, defensive and suspicious, unimaginative and yes, even mean and spiteful...

...Rawls’s point, however, was lost on the locals, and he soon became Public Enemy Number One in Fulton County...

...Actions taken to monitor America’s defense industry,” for example, are compared to the political terror unleashed by “the Red Guard during its heyday in communist China...

...This is not a woolly theoretician’s prescription for stemming or reshaping change...

...policy was paralyzed by intramural politics while the Middle East protagonists plunged ever deeper into the fathomless factionalism of the Lebanese civil war...

...From relatively modest beginnings as a White House foreign affairs staff under Eisenhower and Kennedy, the NSC has borne the mark and steady bloat of its successive masters...

...Reformers love to quantify the ills of the system they are dissecting by pointing to the paper indices of regulation and oversight run riot: the 30,000 pages of federal acquisition rules issued by 79 different government offices and the 120,000 written requests for information that flow every year from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon...

...Presidential uninvolvement," Tanter nimbly calls it...

...There is the ready perversion of intelligence, the all-purpose evocation of Soviet might and cunning, and the interminable bureaucratic squabbling, distraction, and distortion...

...With the spread of us weed people, homogeneity between towns is becoming the rule...

...As individual magazine pieces, Rawls’s reports made interesting and even compelling reading for their bright writing and insightful observations...

...The local weekly newspaper excerpted his piece under a front-page headline, “COUNTY PANNED IN YUPPIE MAGAZINE,” and all hell broke loose...

...Defense Revolution joins that groaning shelf...

...In Holmes County, Ohio, the weeds were the Amish, who created an edenic way of life, which Rawls describes with tender and respectful awe...

...And the outsiders too often come in and take charge, imposing the very values that made them flee the city in the first place, creating separation and tackying up the countryside...

...In any case, Tanter should be required reading this ominous winterand not only for his surgical rendition of past dithering and debacle...

...NSC staff members find they exert their real statesmanship not toward some coalition of exotic states, but in detente with Defense, grand alliances with the CIA, DIA, or the Joint Chiefs, covert action behind the secretaries at State or Treasury, and preemptive strikes on the Oval Office...

...Far more eloquent is the unstatedthe bureaucratlexpert's utter absorption in the barren geopolitical and bureaucratic gaming, his dismissal and negligence of the root policy issue of our Middle East anguish: the settlement of Palestinian sovereignty, and, at long last, the final exit of Western colonialism in all its forms...

...Adelman and Augustine don’t address the military’s thus far unfulfilled promises that cheaper operating costs for these new weapons will compensate for their much higher procurement costs...

...It is also true that alleged waste and fraud on such highly publicized items as $7,000 coffee pots do not consume as much of the $300 billion annual defense budget as many critics want to believe...

...In last year’s The Great Universal Embrace: Arms Summit ry-A Skeptic’s A c co u n t , Adelman, no fan of arms control, slipped on a Freudian banana peel, describing himself-erroneously, if appropriately-as the former director of the “Arms Agency...

...There are few vantage points on the Potomac spectacle more educational than that of the NSC staff...

...Yes, “the age-old dichotomy between authorization and appropriation legislation should end...

...Rawls found Fulton County altogether charming and noteworthy for a local ethos that proudly treasures its ruralness even as the disconcerting fringes of the eastern megalopolis creep ever nearer...

...The piece appeared as another of the “Small Places” that Rawls was writing up for Harrowsmith, a magazine about country life that he edits in Vermont...

...But if America’s vanishing forests are being sacrificed to feed this insatiable bureaucratic maw, the pulp mills are kept no less busy supporting the publishing efforts of the reformers...

...Raymond Tanter, who saw it from the inside as a member of the National Security Council (NSC) staff in the early eighties, writes about one of the more obscure and fateful episodes of the prolonged drama-U.S...

...Eve1 Knievel and Nicholas I, Yogi Berra and Oliver Cromwell-everyone gets to stick an oar in here, Winston Churchill no fewer than six times...

...It’s no surprise, considering the source, that this book is indignantly supportive of that industry...

...The intention today appears to be to improve small places rather than adapt to them,” Rawls writes...

...But the authors also badly overplay their hand...

...In other places, it is the outsiders, the “weeds” Rawls talks about, who cause trouble...

...that the "structure" should avoid the lethal bureaucratic rivalries...

...Kenneth L. Adelman, Norman R. Augustine, ICs Press, $19.95...

...The essence of the piece was that the people of Fulton County, whose own Chamber of Commerce trumpeted the theme “country still is country,” deserved praise for resisting the pressures of Californication that have debauched large swatches of America’s rural landscape...

...For instance, after working for months on a “conventional combat priorities” study, a distinguished panel assembled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently endorsed stealth fighters and the rest of the Pentagon’s current torrent of “priorities...

...If only the Washington show had been merely a matter of ratings, reviews, and network fortunes, instead of blood and chaos...

...He deserves to be read for that alone, although the book also reminds us that amid their ceaseless bureaucratic writhing, these people were about some serious business...

...All beg rather simple questions...

...The weeds who appear in the “Small Places” columns either have taken over or have meshed and made their contributions...

...After Tom Rawls visit.!d Fulton County, Pennsylvania, several years ago, he went home and turned out a sympathetic portrait of the rural redoubt and two “outsiders”-this reviewer and his partner-who were struggling to move from daily journalism to fulltime farming...

...And all the while, like the Hound of the Baskervilles, Ronald Reagan is amiably absent from the history...

...Through all of these pieces, however, runs a rhread of lament about the changes being forced on rural America...

...Before this transformation, each individual rural community might have been limited, but in total, these small places offered a rich diversity...

...that crisis is the White House's opportunity for leadership...

...Marines dead in the wreckage both of makeshift barracks and of an equally flimsy policy-and still further into the mists of the Iran-contra scandal and even Iraq's seizure of Kuwait...

...And while it is poised on yet another line in the quicksand of Middle East politics, many of the same dwarfs still dance in Washington...

...Either he "structures" a veritable coup d'etat to replace the half-centuryold system or he doesn't...

...But in the face of such egregious abuses as the one that forced the Marine Corps to stand down Harrier jump jets during the Persian Gulf crisis thanks to fraudulent parts testing by Northrup Corp., Red Guard tactics don’t sound all that extreme...

...Tanter sees the essential issue as the globalists’ creative if somewhat vague wish to “combine force and diplomacy” marshaled against those timorous bureaucrats “hesitant to reap whatever benefits there may have been for the United States in Israel’s threats and use of force...

...In Nye, Montana, weeds were the hard-rock miners who came to work in a huge platinum mine...

...To deal with this steady erosion of buying power, of course, the authors come down firmly in favor of cutting force structure while preserving the “bowwave” of costly weaponry authorized during the highflying Reagan era that ties up so much future funding...

...In Antelope, Oregon, the weeds were the disruptive Rajneeshees who intruded onto the landscape and openly warred with the locals...

...In Point Reyes, California, the weeds were outsiders who helped the locals understand the importance of land preservation...

...The problem is that “out there” isn’t there any more and we’ve yet to come to terms with that...

...Unwilling or unable to transcend his often pedantic approach, Tanter misses the precious chance to tell the rich human yam of all this blundering and shortsightedness...

...This is less than helpful, but it may also be something of an occupational hazard for conservative “defense reformers...

...But there are deeply entrenched political and bureaucratic reasons why these and other patently unsensible phenomena persist...

...Discounting personal advertisements and the “as told to” genre, Tanter’s is one of only about a half-dozen genuine eyewitness accounts...

...Whole herds of hobby horses are ridden to exhaustion in the six chapters of this book expounding on geostrategy and military policy, six “myths” about the defense acquisition system, five “realities” that must be addressed if that system is to be fixed, and seven “memos to policymakers,” ranging from George Bush to Mikhail Gorbachev, from the U.S...

...Some of Adelman and Augustine’s suggestions do manage to run against the Washington grain: their call for implementation of some sort of national industrial policy, for instance...

...Either a president knows and makes foreign policy or he doesn't...

...Political Booknotes Small Places:‘ In Search of a Vanishing Am\!rica...

...There they were usually stripped of ideology or illusion and soon learned the ultimate little secret of national security politics-that regardless of president or party, the real enemy is not some foreign power but rather the omnipresent bureaucracy with its own election-proof agenda and interests...

...To Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, it was the praetorian guard of their expanding bureaucratic empire...

...And, yes, we should “ensure that our military forces are an integrated operating entity, not merely a collection of individual service contributions...

...They are both also authors of recent books on arms control and arms building, from which much material appears to have been recycled here...

...The towns, he finds, are either dying or being killed...

...Under Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski mistook it for some Danubian foreign ministry from the 1930s, with growth and titles to match...

...Though written during a time when mean-spirited Reaganism was attempting to kill the federal programs that provided some small developmental uplift to rural America, Rawls’s pieces are free of political cant...

...What followed was the PLO expulsion from the Levant and the still more bloody and convoluted turmoil among Lebanese factions and their Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi sponsors, making the crises of 198 1 - 1983 in many ways the parent of the Intifada, the hostage agonies of the late eighties, and the wider Arab despair with American policy, a despair so deep that it now greets even Saddam Hussein as a hero...