Note on commentary
Before deployment, the system failed in at least 40% of its tests, even allowing for some debate about what constituted success
I came to this article through Twitter and the remark I’ve quoted sent me back to a peculiar column of Ross Douthat’s from the middle of 2010. In terms purely of argument, Douthat’s writing lapses continually into sophistry, but it isn’t his ambition to afford us pure argument; in fact he produces the most literary columns available outside Simon Jenkins’ semiweekly ventings. Sadly, Douthat’s poised style doesn’t mitigate his sophistry, it abets it, for it achieves itself in a tone of ingenuous rumination and reasonableness which deflates opposition and bores criticism. This process is definitively in evidence in a column—Douthat’s attempt to hash out his understanding of the pragmatic and moral technicalities of the future of the Afganistan war—published on the occasion of Stanley McChrystal’s sacking in the wake of a sensationally incautious profile.
Insofar as it comes hastily round to a sorrowful defence of the status quo, Douthat’s column iterates the standard for conservative commentary, but the suppressed occulted violence of the route it takes there is also characteristic. It affects to proceed with a weighing-up of American debate’s two choices for the future of their Afghanistan policy: counterterrorism (this was reportedly Biden’s preference) and counterinsurgency (the Pentagon’s). When you pay it better than cursory attention, though, you realise that—quite absurdly—it doesn’t weigh one choice’s demerits and merits against the other’s, it weighs the failure of counterterrorism against the success of COIN. Indeed, Douthat’s vision of the malign implications of Biden’s preferred course—as ‘History suggests’ they may unfold—occupies a third of his piece, while at a pinch he omits both to relate anything of the rich range of what history suggests might be the tolls of COIN and to admit the tolls on Afghanistan’s people it had had already and was having at the time. In a column which is headed, portentously, ‘One Way Out’, and which evokes so judicious a voice, readers enjoy neither any legitimate attempt to picture the success of the counterterrorist option, nor any acknowledgement of the possibility and hazards of the failure of COIN. Worse, any imaginative synchrony with the radical depredations of war is shirked. If Douthat will condescend to be this clear about his belief that counterterrorism policy in Afghanistan can’t succeed, he should have been as explicit about his belief that counterinsurgency can’t fail. It would seem the column constitutes another instance (this time potentially exemplary) of a mode of error, besetting conservative commentary on Afghanistan, which one might validly subject to paraphrase in this way: escalation becomes escape only if one despises a policy of exit as intrinsically one of failure and hope against hope that escalation succeeds. To this extent, when I refer to Douthat’s understanding that COIN ‘can’t fail’, the operative sense of ‘can’t’ in my application verges on that of ‘mustn’t’: failure is not impossible, it is unthinkable, and were it to happen would be very dire.
The failing which goes the furthest to license his column is Douthat’s unconservative but quite American unreadiness to countenance inevitabilities. If that which is unthinkable is nevertheless possible, is not continuing as if unthinkability were enough apt to draw possibility into actuality, and to make life just in a general sense worse? This question, though, becomes redundant when one recognises that the end of most commentary is less to attain truth than to propagate a kind of entertainment—to which we subscribe to watch the prejudices of our opponents batted around for a thousand words but never taken in, and propositions after our own hearts put to a test which always eventually finds them vindicated—a kind of entertainment whose utility consists in diffusing the caffeine highs of a transatlantic middle class which is ennuyé, ineffectual, incapable, desolate. If I therefore assert that the bulk of commentary-writing is importantly trivial it is fair to reply that the importance I perceive I am perceiving out of self-interest: there is a blogger I’ve read probably daily since 2007 when I found him—Matthew Yglesias—whose reflex as a commentator, I now worry, is to make a gestural criticism of the status quo by prescribing an alternative course which stands no adequate chance of coming about. This is in effect, for him, to defend what one has nominally admitted is indefensible: and I take it for a comment on the pointlessness, the counterproductivenes, the self-defeatingness of commentary. In posts like those to which Yglesias often resorts in the cause of meeting his Stakhanovite quota, commentary degenerates into something to produce and consume—into a higher entertainment, I repeat—which distracts us from the obligatory practice of politics. The only gain (I now worry) is gloss. However, should we try to take the long view, I think we are bound to suspect that this is for the best, if we allow it is better to be resigned to coexistence with than condemned to humiliation by the inevitability which Douthat, evincing a form of conservatism for which I retain a shy sympathy, did concede in a recent column about Egypt: ‘history makes fools of us all.’ History does.
