19 December 2010

East of Suez

(Mohammed Ben-Ahmed and the Bagdad Tribesman LP on Best Records.)

We were standing in the comforting darkness of the Willow bar the other night. Candles lit the bar. We were all veterans of one stripe or another, and the talk of course was about the defeat of the effort to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy about gays in the military.

All of us knew gay people who had served. We talked about some of them, and it may or not surprise you that the consensus was that we were proud of their service, and most of us had protected their privacy against the depredations of the goon squads where we could.

It was a matter of fact revelation, taken with some excellent white wine poured by Jim from Pittsburgh from behind the bar.

It thus came as a bit of a surprise that the exhausted lame-duck Senate roused itself to take up the matter again, as a separate bill. The Senior Chamber voted to repeal, 65-31.

Of course, the Pentagon has to “review” the law, and there is a sixty-day waiting period before anything can begin to happen. There is the usual boilerplate language that gives lip services- I am not being coy- that the repeal be made “consistent with military standards for readiness, effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention.”

Good order and discipline, in other words.

Some folks, notably Senator John McCain, see the seeds of disaster in this latest social experiment to be visited on the American military. I have to shrug. We have the best kids in uniform we ever have. The integration of people of color to the force in 1948 provoked controversy.

The introduction of women in combat arms during the 1980s provided challenges, to be sure. But they were overcome.

My son noticed a change in the officer candidate curriculum even in the short period he has been in uniform. He noted it is a kinder, gentler service now. He thus joins all veterans of all eras in remembering their “Old Navy,” or “Long Gray Line,” when things were really tough.

I remember the sardonic rhetorical response to adversity from the generation that immediately preceded mine in the Fleet: “What are you gong to do to me? Put me on an aircraft carrier and send me to Vietnam to fly two Alpha Strikes a day?”

The force will be fine. They will work it out. They always do.

There are moments that even the greatest powers must take a cool look at themselves and their works. Shelly’s Ozymandius invited strollers on the vast desert sands to look on his works and despair. Of course, only the battered head of the mighty statue remained in the emptiness.

(“Look my works, all ye mighty, and despair.” P.B. Shelly. Photo Sean Murphy.)

The British Empire, at its height was the largest in human history. In the years immediately after the catastrophe of the Great War in Europe held dominion over more than 450 million souls, a quarter of all who toiled under the sun, and controlled red swath of the globe measuring thirteen million square miles. Pretty impressive, it was, a four-century run in which the sun never set upon it.

Things can change with astonishing rapidity in the Superpower game. The loss of a generation of prospective colonial officials gave nationalists in the Sub-continent, among other places, the opportunity to begin to agitate for liberty. The catastrophe visited by the pyrrhic effort to destroy fascism left the old structure hollow and unsustainable.

It is a word we hear a lot about these days. In 1964, the incoming Labour Government in Whitehall had committed itself to a thorough review of Her Majesty’s defense establishment, something else we hear a lot about here in Washington. It was clear that British forces were overcommitted and underequipped, and the White Paper that resulted contained some hard choices.

(Britain's Retreat from East of Suez: The Choice between Europe and the World? By Saki Dockri. 2002.)

Commitment to the region “East of Suez” was abandoned and the great retrenchment began, which has not ended yet.

The United States filled the vacuum, or tried to. Things move faster in this wide world than they once did, and as we approach the half-century since the Royal Navy quietly withdrew from patrolling the sea-lanes for its Queen, we will see another major assessment of the strategic order.

The Empire of the Byzantines lasted 1,123 years, if you count the annals of Rome. They had no White Paper to guide the way to their fall. The much-weakened Empire was harried by attacks from the Crusaders, Latins, Serbians, the Bulgarians and most importantly, the Ottoman Turks.

By 1453, the empire was exhausted and consisted of a few square miles outside the city of Constantinople itself and a sprinkling of islands in the Sea of Mamara.

Mehmed II commenced his siege in 1453, and by May of that year was prepared for the final assault. He promised his troops three days of looting to stiffen their courage. If you wish something poignant on which to ponder, think of that last night in the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia.

Throughout the siege, holy services had been continued, and the church was the last refuge for those who could not participate in the defense of the city. Trapped under the soaring dome, congregants and refugees became booty to be divided amongst the invaders. The occupants were enslaved or killed, and the Empire of the East was done.

(Mehmed II enters Constantinople. Oil by famed orientalist painter Fausto Zonaro.)

Mehmed made Constantinople the Ottoman Empire's new capital, declared the cathedral a mosque, imposed Sharia law, and set about creating something new.

Several influential Christian intellectuals fled the city before and after the siege, traveling to what had been the Western Empire at Rome. Some scholars argue that it was the infusion of Eastern thought that helped fuel the Renaissance. I don’t know. Maybe it was the new threat from the East that got the European juices stirring.

But it is time to start thinking through things and what the world will look like when we are done with it. I am curious about the rising regional powers, the ones behind the BRIC- Brazil, Russia 2.0, India and China.

We are still here, of course. Perhaps the events in Korea in the next few days will prove illustrative about where exactly we are going to mark our Suez, and when we might be putting down the burden at long last.

Or rather, when the burden might be putting us down. I would never bet against America, but if we must,
I hope we can do it with good order and discipline.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
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