The enemy of my enemy...

magicalsushi said:

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I wish the AI had a better understanding of this concept.

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LucyDuke said:

I agree, though, that diplomacy would be enriched if you could tell the machine what your attitude toward each leader was, and the AI could respond accordingly. Like you said.

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CivDude86 said:

You want this guy "working" your cottages?

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LlamaCat said:

Possibly you've hit on an improvement for Civ V. You could deal with other civs any way you want, but you could also provide an "official" report to each civ that gives your friendly status, and the AI would be programmed to respond accordingly under certain parameters that are set. the report could be sent periodically or at certain intervals in the game. And if you do not act in accordance to your offical declaration, this would be a new element that affects their attitude toward you. So if you officially declare yourself Very Friendly with Japan, then declare war while on that status, there would be repurcussions...

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mrt144 said:

It's a crap concept that creates quagmires like iraq and afghanistan you boob.

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csar508 said:

"Mission accomplished" GWB

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the faulty logic of "everyone hates saddam, so when we nab him everyone will love is" is displayed in that. maybe its the over simplistic wording of the platitude that irks me.

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mrt144 said:

a common belief among the administration that we would be welcomed with open arms and everything would be peachy because saddam was so loathed.

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mrt144 said:

the enemy of our enemy is an enemy that hasnt attacked us yet.

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Wodan said:

You think that, you think the administration thinks that? That implies either an imperialistic or "winner take all" attitude that simply isn't true in real life. Wodan

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CivDude86 said:

You want this guy "working" your cottages?

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Wodan said:

What evidence do you have that there is such a "common belief"? If it was so widespread, it should be easy to point to.

You make it sound like half the world doesn't hate America for our policies outside of the current conflict. Well, they do and have for a long time.


You think that or you think the administration thinks that? That implies either an imperialistic or "winner take all" attitude that simply isn't true in real life. Maybe in Civ. Shoot, not even in Civ. With non-military victory possibilities such as space and culture there are no such things as enemies.

Wodan

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mrt144 said:

the people who were the enemies of our enemies were the iraqi people. thats what i meant.

and the current admin certainly does view it as winner takes all. you look at people in the current admin and many of the groups they came from like PNAC etc and it seems like that.

anyway the point was eoeimf is a dream that doesnt occur in real life.

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by John Stuart Blackton | bio

The tradeoff of short term gain against the risk of unforeseen blowback is Bob Dreyfuss' big idea in the book: American reliance on the Kautilya principle (my enemy's enemy is my friend) in the Middle East has led us, not once but regularly, to choose to ally with (or at least deal with) Islamists of various stripes because they were the potential enemies both of International Communism and of Secular Pan-Arab nationalism. Dreyfuss suggests that we either did not foresee the potential for serious blowback, or we did understand, but sorely miscalculated the long term cost-benefit ratios.

Dreyfuss highlights our sometimes reckless application of the doctrine of trusting our enemy's enemies. And his examples from Eisenhower's White House meeting in 1953 with a scion of the Muslim Brotherhood (Said Ramadan) to our marriages of convenience with the Taliban and with Pakistan's notoriously Islamist military intelligence services record important moments in the history of American short-sightedness or miscalculation.

A central thesis of Bob Dreyfuss' interesting and provocative book is that, in the decades following the end of WWII, the United States approached the Middle East in general, and Islamists in particular, with a variant of the classical notion in international relations that "my enemy's enemy is my friend".

The concept has a long and lustrous background. It is such a simple and compelling notion that it probably has roots in pre-history, but as a written doctrine it is usually traced to the 4th Century BC Indian political theorist, Kautilya.

In Kautilya's Arthashastra: Book VI, "The Source of Sovereign States" he wrote:

* The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror's territory is termed the enemy.

* The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror).

The geometry of this notion was polished by the elegant realists who divided Europe at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and it has been a standby of foreign policy realists almost continuously thereafter.

Kaautilya's construct lay behind the decision of the CIA in 1945 and 1946 to repackage the Soviet specialists in the Nazi intelligence apparatus as newfound allies of the American intelligence efforts in the Cold War. We recruited two German Generals, Reinhard Gehlen and Adolf Heusinger and their top agents into what became knows as the Gehlen group. Spies who had been our enemies throughout the war were now the enemies of our enemies.

Bringing the Gehlen group into the American fold was controversial, but fully consistent with realist calculus of our national interest. And, to a degree, it paid off. The Gehlen group gave us intelligence windows into Russia and into the Arab world that we would not otherwise have had. It also produced unanticipated blowback, for it gave Soviet spies and Arab spies a window into our intelligence services that they would not otherwise have had.

This tradeoff of short term gain against the risk of unforeseen blowback is Bob Dreyfuss' big idea in the book: American reliance on the Kautilya principle in the Middle East has led us, not once but regularly, to choose to ally with (or at least deal with) Islamists of various stripes because they were the potential enemies both of International Communism and of Secular Pan-Arab nationalism. Dreyfuss suggests that we either did not foresee the potential for serious blowback, or we did understand, but sorely miscalculated the long term cost-benefit ratios.

Dreyfuss is right in highlighting our sometimes reckless application of the doctrine of trusting our enemy's enemies. And his examples from Eisenhower's White House meeting in 1953 with a scion of the Muslim Brotherhood (Said Ramadan) to our marriages of convenience with the Taliban and with Pakistan's notoriously Islamist military intelligence services record important moments in the history of American short-sightedness or miscalculation.

Where I believe Bob errs is in assuming that the idea of allying with Islamists against Communists and nationalists was a dominant organizing principle in American Middle East policy.

Here I should declare an interest. I am an Arabist and a retired government officer. I was involved (at varying levels of responsibility) in a number of the events recounted in Bob's book that transpired in Arab countries, in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. I also worked with or under a number of his official sources.

My vantage point inclines me towards explanations that revolve around American incompetence and inclines me against conspiratorial explanations or explanations that assume that a "grand strategy" was in play.

As a former player, I never underestimate our capacity to get things wrong. And I am seldom dismissive of our collective national capacity for misjudgment. I do, however, have very limited belief in our ability to conceive, articulate and assiduously stick to grand strategies and big ideas. American policy in the Middle East was almost always a blend of realism, pragmatism, short-termism and accident. My model has at least as much explanatory power as Dreyfuss' theory. But choosing between them is ultimately something for the reader to decide for herself.

I read The Devil's Game in tandem with another new book about the same region and the same period by another journalist. Robert Fisk's The Great War For Civilization represents a different journalistic genre. Dreyfuss is a policy journalist who works with documents and government sources. Bob Fisk is an Englishman in the Christiane Amanpour mold, an Arabist who hastens to the smell of cordite and the flash of White Phosphorous in a Toyota Landcruiser.

What both authors share is a generally leftish (in the manner of Noam Chomsky, not Lenin) worldview. That is not my own worldview, and I do not find that it overwhelms either book, but it can be tedious at times if one not is an adherent of the same faith.

I am going to close out this initial posting with an appreciative note to Bob Dreyfuss for including some remarks from one of my old bosses, the legendary Arabist diplomat Hermann Eilts. Speaking about the foreign service of the 1940s, Hermann tells Bob that "there was a view that Islam and Communism were simply antithetical. Very few people in government thought very much about Islam...there were those who said `it's helpful to keep the communists out.' But no one really took it very seriously. The general view in the U.S. was that Islam was becoming a shrinking political factor...."

Hermann Eilts, who has been around since the beginning of modern US policy in the Middle East gets it right. Our lack of cultural and historical appreciation for the Muslim World was (and Hermann would surely say) remains profoundly shallow.

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