David Halberstam's breathless, deathless prose.
Dear Sarah,
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StumbleUponYes, I know I'm being tough on Halberstam, but it's a form of tough love. I think someone who holds himself to a high journalistic standard deserves to hear it straight. And no one holds himself to a higher one than Mr. Pulitzer Prize-winner. Plus, I was put off by the usual blurbs about how seminal and magnificent this work was going to be. Most outrageous was the blurb from Les Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who wrote that "what Halberstam has written is nothing less than a War and Peace for our generation." Excuse me? Whose generation is he talking about--aren't Gelb/Kerouac and Halberstam/Tolstoy both like 60 years old? I'm really looking forward to the day the '60s finally end. These guys are going to be telling us about Khe Sanh and Greensboro and Pete Seeger until we drop.
You're right about the things Halberstam does well. He is certainly a dogged reporter, and generally objective. Long stretches of this book are great. I'll be more precise: I think he's very good at taking us from the high-water mark of the victory over Saddam Hussein through the severe problems at the end of Bush 1 (which give the lie to his reputation as a great foreign-policy president) and into the murk of Clinton's first term, up to, say 1995. It's helpful to see that foreign policy crises do not obey the whims of American domestic politics--exhibits A and B being Bosnia and Somalia, which were huge problems for both Bush and Clinton (and the Joint Chiefs chairman who advised both of them, Colin Powell). The main story line, to the extent there is one, is pretty good: how people with very different backgrounds (but all shaped to some extent by Vietnam) came together in the middle of the Clinton administration to hammer out an extremely difficult peace at Dayton. At least, that's what I think the main story line is--there are a lot of deviations, and an editor who wasn't afraid of Halberstam could have done some judicious pruning.
These strengths are bolstered by consistently interesting profiles of top-level military and diplomatic personalities--though I share your sense that some bias creeps in with his favorite interviewees. That's hard to avoid. He's skillful at translating complex discussions of weaponry into readable prose. His prose does not exactly sparkle, but he has a way of getting inside a meeting that makes all the participants come alive. Best, he conveys his deep sense that this stuff matters--that it's not just a bunch of creaky old men making decisions about places thousands of miles away. On second thought, that's exactly what it is, but his point is that these decisions affect all of us directly, and that we should make an effort to understand what's at stake. He's right. And that point especially hits home under Bush 2, when our global strategy seems to be a massive brainwashing effort to deny that the rest of the world exists.
I think the book runs into a quagmire (Vietnam guys love that word) when it gets into Clinton's second term. His profiles of Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright are perfunctory in comparison to his deeper probing of Richard Holbrooke and Tony Lake, and the result is a less-gripping section on Kosovo. That's too bad, because Kosovo is deeply connected to Dayton, and arguably to Vietnam. It's not just the Democrats I miss--I think more attention should have been paid to Bob Dole, who took a personal interest in southeastern Europe, before and after the '96 election. Halberstam could have explored more deeply how the failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda helped build consensus to protect refugees in Kosovo.
As I hinted in my last note, I also was troubled by a bit of myopia concerning the non-Balkan issues in front of the White House in this period. There is almost no mention of Northern Ireland, the Middle East, or other issues in which the Clinton administration was deeply involved--driven by Clinton's own connection. If this book is only about the Balkans, fine--but it isn't; it clearly is about big issues of foreign policy, and I thought he should have looked at some places where the United States was advancing peace through old-fashioned diplomacy. He also could have done more with any of the following: the growing importance of global health and the environment as foreign policy issues; the rise of Treasury as a factor in global affairs (e.g., Mexican peso bailout, containment of Asian economic contagion, or struggle to bring China into the WTO); Clinton's use of personal diplomacy in the developing world (Africa, India, and China trips); the ups and downs of Russia policy in the '90s (the last of which affected every step in the Balkans). I know, this would have made the book impossibly long, but I can't help mentioning it.
To get to some of your questions, Sarah, I do think he gets the personalities right by and large, I just think he misses some of the important ones. And no, it doesn't bother me too much when he talks about "we" and "us" and "our" foreign policy. I've been trained to think that way ever since hearing Michael Jackson and friends sing "We Are the World"--the song that probably forced our involvement in Somalia, which led to our noninvolvement and then involvement in the Balkans, Halberstam's book, and this overextended e-mail.
Best,
Ted
This week, Slate's Book Clubbers tackle War in a Time of Peace, David Halberstam's examination of America's post-Vietnam military actions. Click here for an explanation of our format and here to buy the book. 
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Both posts below are part of an interesting, and continuing, thread.]
The only reason Vietnam has cast a shadow over all other 'engagements' since then is that the war in Southeast Asia was so poorly managed and executed by the Yale and Harvard grads who occupied Washington during that time. We should never confuse war with politics ever again lest this country wants another civil war. If America finds herself at the brink of war ever again, it's all the way or nothing, there is no "in between."
I'm just afraid that Washington is still populated by Yale and Harvard grads, who have been coddled and supported by their own parents for so long, that their only motivation is power and prestige, whose perspective has been warped by wealth and privilege, and who really no nothing about sacrifice and courage.
--Forward Observer
(To reply, click here.)
I was there, too, FO. I don't draw the same conclusions as you do.
Warfare goes through ages and stages. Vietnam was the last of the era of wars that started with the American Civil War. They were characterized by heavy industry technology and civilian conscription. They tended to be ideological wars, because ideology and propaganda are how you motivate populations to sacrifice. Because of this characteristic, they tended also to become total wars, i.e., virtually all weapons and tactics available were employed and the distinction between military and civilians was blurred or ignored.
In our lifetimes a new type of warfare has emerged. Not just new technologically, but psychological and politically as well. Its levels of violence are relatively lower than in the old mass-levy wars, but its violence can be in certain ways more shocking because it is inflicted suddenly while an illusion of peace is still preserved, and can end just as suddenly. The violence of this style of warfare is, in theory at least, much more precisely calibrated to make political statements.
I was initially skeptical of this type of war, but it has grown and developed and is being employed or prepared for by a number of countries besides the U.S. Israel is an obvious example; but the Palestinians are also a less obvious one. They can't employ Israel's high technology, but they have found a fairly effective low-tech substitute: the suicide bomber, the ultimate smart bomb. The suicide bomber is, obviously, a political statement. If the Palestinians ever get what they want (and exactly what they want remains elusive to me), it will not be because they killed more Israelis, but because they mastered the military grammar of their particular conflict.
--Yukon
(To reply, click here.)
(9/5)