Ed Luttwak

by **chiggerbit** » Sun Jul 10, 2005 3:15 pm

I have a morbid kind of fascination for Ed Luttwak, a neocon and adviser to the Bush administration, although I'm not sure what which he is wearing today for the Bush team. He calls himself a military strategist, but I would call him an expert in group psychology. I have a great deal of respect for the man (similar to the respect I have for snakes, I guess). I've cherry-picked through my file on him. When I read his Coup d'Etat book, I knew he was talking about other countries back at the time the book was written in the late 60's, but I kept relating what he said to the current political situation here in the US, and I have wondered if we could have a coup of one political party resulting in a successful coup of the coutry. Very chilling thought. Interesting man, well worth watching. <a href="http://www.subliminalnews.com/archives/000067.php">www.subliminalnews.com/ar...000067.php</a> Ch. 1 — What Is a Coup D'Etat? [p. 26 - 27] "A coup d'etat involves some elements of all these different methods by which power can be seized [i.e., putsch, revolution, civil war, war for liberation] but, unlike most of them the coup is not necessarily assisted by either the intervention of the masses, or, to any significant degree, by military-type force. [emphasis added] "The assistance of these forms of direct force would no doubt make it easier to seize power, but it would be unrealistic to think that they would be available [or desirable] to the organizers of a coup. "If a coup does not make use of the masses, or of warfare, what instrument of power will enable it to seize control of the state? The short answer is that the power will come from the state itself... "A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder." .................. ..........."The growth of the modern bureaucracy has two implications which are crucial to the feasibility of the coup: the development of a clear distinction between the permanent machinery of state and the political leadership, and the fact is, like most large organizations, the bureaucracy has a structured hierarchy with definite chains of command... ...."The importance of this development lies in the fact that if the bureaucrats are linked to the leadership, an illegal seizure of power must take the form of a 'Palace Revolution' and it essentially concerns the manipulation of the person of the ruler. He can be forced to accept to policies or advisors, he can be killed or held captive, but whatever happens the Palace Revolution can only be conducted from the 'inside', and by 'insiders'... "The coup is a much more democratic affair. It can be conducted from the 'outside' and it operates in that area outside the government but within the state which is formed by the permanent and professional civil service, the armed forces and police. The aim is to detach the permanent employees of the state from the political leadership, and this cannot usually take place if the two are linked by political, ethnic or traditional loyalties." "...[T]he state bureaucracy has to divide its work into clear-cut areas of competance, which are assigned to different departments. Within each department there must be an accepted chain of command, and standard procedures have to be followed. Thus a given piece of information, or a given order, is followed up in a stereotyped manner, and if the order comes from the appropriate source, at the appropriate level, it is carried out. "...The apparatus of the state is therefore to some extent a 'machine' which will normally behave in a fairly predictable and automatic manner. "A coup operates by taking advantage of this machine-like behavior: during the coup because it uses parts of the state apparatus to seize the controlling levers; afterwards because the value of the 'levers' depends on the fact that the state is a machine." [emphasis added] ......... ..............."Thus, after a coup, the village policeman comes to read out a proclamation, the radio says that the old government was corrupt and that the new one will provide food, health, schooling — and sometimes even glory. The majority of the people will neither believe nor disbelieve these promises or accusation, but merely feel that it is all happening somewhere else, far away. This lack of reaction is all the coup needs on the part of the people to stay in power. [emphasis added] "The lower levels of the bureaucracy will react — or rather fail to react — in a similar manner, and for similar reasons. ...The 'bosses' give the orders, can promote or demote and, above all, are the source of that power and prestige that make them village demi-gods. After the coup, the man who sits at district headquarters will still be obeyed — whether he is the man who was there before or not — so long as he can pay the salaries and has links to the political stratosphere in the capital city. "For the senior bureaucrats, army and police officers, the coup will be a mixture of dangers and opportunities. ...[F]or the greater number of those who are not too deeply committed, the coup will offer opportunities rather than dangers. They can accept the coup and, being collectively indispensable, can negotiate for even better salaries and positions... "As the coup will not usually represent a threat to most of the elite the choice is between the great dangers of opposition and the safety of inaction. All that is required in order to support the coup is, simply, to do nothing — and that is what will usually be done. "Thus, at all levels, the most like course of action following a coup is acceptance... This lack of reaction is the key to the victory of the coup...." <a href="http://kansalaistalo.jns.fi/tietoyhteiskunta/luttwak.htm">kansalaistalo.jns.fi/tiet...uttwak.htm</a> Luttwak was on television a good deal during the early days of the Nato bombardment of Serbia, explaining why peacetime leaders were no good at making war. "Tactics become ritualistic, weapons more baroque, and peacetime generals are promoted for managerial or political ability, so war comes as a great shock to them," he told me. He also advanced an interesting hypothesis to explain why the US could not tolerate any casualties of its own: today's parents have so few children that the loss of a son in the military has become an intolerable prospect.  (my emphasis) <a href="http://progressivetrail.org/articles/031202Burleigh.sht">progressivetrail.org/arti...rleigh.sht</a> Take for example, Edward N. Luttwak, who appeared at the Columbia forum. According to one of the many think tank Web sites that advertise his credibility—the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington where he is a "senior fellow"—Luttwak received a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University, has written nine books, lectured at every major university in the world and speaks French, Italian and Spanish. His recent performance was typical. Luttwak lumbered up to the podium in double-breasted navy and began speaking about the history of war starting with the Sassanians and Heraclitus. Luttwak spent most of his time, in fact, not talking about the looting of Iraq's art but about various obscure examples of cultural looting in history. When he finally got to Iraq, he expressed an almost gleeful, lip-curling disdain beginning with, "There is no such thing as the Iraqi people." He told his audience that he’d been "in meetings" with military officials before the war, and thus could authoritatively explain why the United States had failed to protect the Iraqi museum. The American war planners operated under a "prejudice" that the Iraqi people were educated, sophisticated people who could police themselves after a bombing blitzkrieg. Luttwak said he had urged the view that in fact the Iraqis were just settled nomads who would run amok. But his view had not prevailed, he said, though he'd been proven right. He pointed out that in most civilized countries, looting is carried out under cover of night. The Iraqi looters, though, looted in broad daylight, reflective of their clearly inferior "national character." Few and far between were audience members foolhardy enough to rise and question that blatantly racist assertion, or any of the other provocative (to put it politely) remarks he made about Iraq, a land he has never visited and wherein is spoken a language he has never studied. <a href="http://cceia.org/viewMedia.php/prmTemplateID/8/prmID/128">cceia.org/viewMedia.php/p.../prmID/128</a> Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace ".......strategy is governed by a contradictory, paradoxical, contrarian logic. For example, if you do well in business, you have a good product, you will be successful, and if you work harder and you do it on a bigger scale, you will be more successful. But in strategy, if you have the right formula and you win victories, you just have to continue to do the same thing and you will unfailingly reach a culminating point of success, and then you will collapse, because your very victory evokes reactions. That is why your Napoleons, your Hitlers, their mistake was to overshoot the culminating point of success. Once McDonald's has 2,730 franchises, getting one more would weaken the company. Not in strategy, because as you become more successful, people who were neutral towards you now become concerned that your power might get to them, so they turn against you. And your enemies that you defeated suddenly find allies and supporters. Overshooting applies to every level of strategy, right down to the tactical level, and it works in all kinds of ways. Let's say somebody came up with a really magical antitank weapon which cannot be defeated by countermeasures. The effect will be no more tanks. You can overshoot yourself to the point where you annihilate yourself just by your effectiveness. One of the great challenges of statesmanship, therefore, has always been to sense when you are approaching the culminating point of success and to stop short of it. Why is this such a challenge? Because you are inflamed, empowered and driven by the winds of victory, the sense of success, and everywhere you look people are applauding. It takes enormous, cold, calculating intellect to stop at the very moment when it is easiest to go ahead......" "........War is terrible, war is hard to do, but it is tremendous fun, and that is one reason why we have quite a lot of it. But, even though war is enjoyable, it is very painful for people who don't enjoy it. So the issue is: Why war? Because war is the only way to lead to peace. Strategy is governed by the paradoxical logic where everything turns into its opposite. War brings peace by literally burning, destroying the resources needed to make war to some extent; much more importantly, by destroying the hopes, the ambitions, the expectations that drive war. If you don't like war, you can say, "Oh, war is horrible." Even then, you must recognize it has a virtue. It is not self-perpetuating; it is self-destroying. War brings peace by destroying the ideas in people's minds that lead to war and, if necessary, even their means to make war. If you look at the Middle East, for example, the Arab-Israeli conflict, what you have in 1947 is that instead of war leading to peace, you have the U.N. intervening to stop it. Just as the war is beginning to do its work of bringing peace by forcing people to accept the realities of power, out comes a cease-fire, constant interruptions and interventions. About half the population of Sweden has served as mediators to the Arab-Israeli conflict. You had unemployed and underemployed diplomats organizing conferences, meetings, special missions, envoys. All of these are interruptions in the processes of war. If you had this machinery, if we were living in a multi-planetary system and all of us were small powers and there were greater powers outside the Earth, the second World War would still be continuing because it kept being interrupted by imposed cease-fires, armistices. Today we have the era of international intervention, and that is why we have the era of war suspended, which means war endless. In Kashmir, in Arab-Israeli contexts, and others, these wars simply do not resolve themselves because they are not allowed to do so." <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19990701faessay990/edward-n-luttwak/give-war-a-chance.html">www.foreignaffairs.org/19...hance.html</a> Summary: Since the establishment of the United Nations, great powers have rarely let small wars burn themselves out. Bosnia and Kosovo are the latest examples of this meddling. Conflicts are interrupted by a steady stream of cease-fires and armistices that only postpone war-induced exhaustion and let belligerents rearm and regroup. Even worse are U.N. refugee-relief operations and NGOs, which keep resentful populations festering in camps and sometimes supply both sides in armed conflicts. This well-intentioned interference only intensifies and prolongs struggles in the long run. The unpleasant truth is that war does have one useful function: it brings peace. Let it.

by **chiggerbit** » Sun Jul 10, 2005 3:21 pm

how do I edit?

by **chiggerbit** » Sun Jul 10, 2005 5:54 pm

Do I see Luttwak's hand here? Defence Minister John Reid said: "A leaked document from Britain's Defence Ministry says the British and U.S. governments are planning to reduce their troop levels in Iraq by more than half by mid-2006, the Mail on Sunday newspaper reported." Luttwak said: "The paradoxical logic of conflict tells you that the way you win is by doing the unexpected to get surprise" Defence Minister John Reid said: "Emerging U.S. plans assume 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006," Luttwak said: "....don't overshoot the culminating point of victory, don't overdo it, avoid that fate of being defeated by your own success."

by **albion** » Sun Jul 10, 2005 7:32 pm

That's good stuff chiggerbit, thanks! I haven't been following Luttwak's adventures very closely, but his name has caught my eye a few times since reading Edward Jay Epstein's (early assasination researcher with possible neocon leanings?) book on Nixon's domestic "Drug War," Agency of Fear. It's pretty one-sided but probably an essential Watergate text. Epstein puts quotes from Luttwak's Coup D'Etat at the chapter head of the print version, and quotes him a few places in the text. There's an online version if you're interested. For some reason the excellent prologue is with the endnotes: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>This book is based on the view that the American president under ordinary circumstances reigns rather than rules over the government of the United States. To be sure, the president is nominally in command of the executive branch of the government, and he has the authority to fire the officials that in fact control such critical agencies as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the criminal division of the Department of Justice, etc. (though he does not in many cases have the authority unilaterally to appoint a replacement). In practice, however, this presidential power is severely mitigated, if not entirely counterbalanced, by the ability of officials in these key agencies to disclose secrets and private evaluations to the public that could severely damage the image of the president. For example, in theory, six presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, had the power to fire J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI, but in each case he had the power to retaliate by revealing illicit activities that occurred during their administrations (as well as information about the private lives of the presidents). This potential for retribution by government officials is compounded by the fact that in the vast complexity of the executive branch a president cannot be sure where embarrassing secrets exist, and he must assume that most officials have developed subterranean channels to journalists, who will both conceal their sources and give wide circulation to the "leak." A president could seize control over the various parts of the government only if he first nullified the threat of disclosures by severing the conduits through which dissidents might leak scandalous information to the press. This prerequisite for power is in fact exactly what President Nixon attempted when he set up a series of special units which, it was hoped, would conduct clandestine surveillance of both government officials and newsmen during his first administration. If he had succeeded in establishing such an investigative force, he would have so radically changed the balance of power within the government that it would have been tantamount to an American coup d'etat. A coup d'etat is not the same as a revolution, where power is seized by those outside the government, or even necessarily a military putsch, whereby the military government takes over from the civilian government; it is, as Edward Luttwak points out in his book Coup d'Etat, "a seizure of power within the present system." The technique of the coup involves the use of one part of the government to disrupt communications between other parts of the government, confounding and paralyzing noncooperating agencies while displacing the dissident cliques from power. If successful, the organizers of the coup can gain control over all the levers of real power in the government, then legitimize the new configuration under the name of eliminating some great evil in society. <a href="http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/agency/endnotes.htm">www.edwardjayepstein.com/...dnotes.htm</a><hr></blockquote> Sounds like something you could read on any number of 'conspiracy' sites today, but it was written 30 years ago!

by **Starman** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 12:39 am

Chiggerbit: Fascinating and repulsive, like looking into the squirming guts of something stinkingly dead but still dangerous ... What a splendid lickspittel salesman for the logical efficiency of war -- I imagine the Elks and Knights just cream themselves at his clever promotional rallying-speechs, where his unique brand of military history and neocon propaganda is a perfect accompaniment to the daydream delusions of feelgood Patriotism -- What arrogance -- Iraqi are recently-settled nomads and so they'd naturally revert to plundering and looting -- Good christ, any people under over 30 years of a superpower-brokered massive swindle and betrayal, provoked with a bitter war under an autocratic illegitimate leader who was protected by US and GB intrigue, and then crippled under 12 years of a ruinous trade-and-commerce sanction in the run-up to being mercilessly bombed and invaded -- I daresay the most posh sophisticated cream of American society would have acted with the same abandon in looting anything of value when society and rule of law has been so deliberately obliterated -- the real foulness is that Americans don't understand how little distinguishes them from those 'others' they think are their cultural inferiors; And Luttwak's analysis of Arab conflict as being continuously delayed by armistace and peace agreements -- My GOD this guy has no concept of social justice and human rights and rule of law, everything to him boils down to straight-power equations of rule-by-force -- He ignores or discounts the US, Germany, GB and France's deliberate provocation and staging of the enormous crime which was the theft and dismemberment of Yugoslavia -- and he ignores the US's massive subsidy and military/economic aid that allowed Israel to fight a modern mechanized war against disarmed peasants who have been forcefully and legally displaced from the land of their heritage and birth; I imagine he's highly-regarded by the Bush Cabal, he complements their strutting self-importance and arrogant conceit. Indeed, his 'lessons' from history could be analysis of current events, notably in Haiti, the failed Venezuela coup, Afghanistan, the Balkans -- lessons developed in Latin America, the Phillipines, dozens of struggling, budding wannabe-democracies betrayed for the sake of global oligarch's kleptocratic interests. Starman A thoroughly repugnant fella. I see why you refer to him as an expert of group psychology. Starman

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