Reading Saul Bellow's Ravelstein. Because he's fun to read, most of the time, and because the novel is an homage or roman a clef of sorts for his late friend Allan Bloom, author of Closing of the American Mind. My curiosity piqued by Times article outlining the genealogy of the neo-conservatives around Bush & Pentagon "descended" from U. Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss (Joe Duemer & I talked around this a few weeks ago). Strauss, I think, is the character "Davarr" in the novel, though he's only mentioned in passing. Pentagon's Wolfowitz was a student of Bloom.

Bellow is "philosophical" in the pleasure he takes in big questions & big ideas, the way he addresses them both directly & obliquely, and the way he makes them accessible through humor, irony, and plain speaking. He comes from a generation of novelists that blurred fiction & autobiography; his character "Chick" is transparently Bellow himself. This leads to some self-indulgent writing, but Bellow's role, as a serious "thinker" in fiction, adds an extra dimension in a novel about a figure like Bloom, an educator so concerned with Platonic dialogue, the classics & the function of cultural heritage in thought & inquiry. "Chick" is the poet in Bloom's philosophical grove.

Interestingly, as Ravelstein is dying, his concerns turn from "Athens" toward "Jerusalem", as his conversations with Chick begin to focus on the fate of Jews in the 20th century. Through an episode about another thinly-disguised U. Chicago prof, a famous mythographer with a Nazi-sympathizer past (Mircea Eliade, I think), Ravelstein speaks about the Jewish sense of shock & isolation in a 20th-century in which the world seems eager to destroy them all; the great demonic ideologies of Stalin & Hitler, & the millions who gave their silent or vocal assent to them.

This reality underlies some of the multiple paradoxes in a novel about a Jewish classicist "invert" (his term) calling for a return to Western civilized values; another is the interplay between philosophical "clear-sightedness" and human cold-heartedness (Ravelstein's intellectual snobbery; the narrator's exhausted, somewhat effete disdain for the "rabble" of the underclass). Both characters come across as complex - humane & cold, warm & full of joie de vivre, hope, self-doubt. Not despair, though.

Is it possible that the neo-con emphasis (descended from Strauss?) on moral certainty, absolute vs. relative good & evil, could lead to a realpolitik in which ends justify the means (a sort of "moral hardheadedness" which is actually inhumane)? That would be an ironic twist. But I haven't even read Bloom's book (now I want to), nor do I really understand the innards of neo-con policymaking (sorry, Joe).

I wonder where Bellow came up with the name Ravelstein. Reminds me of course of my mother's unusual maiden name, Ravlin. I always thought it was a variant of Rawlin or Rawlins, maybe old french in origin? Dunno. Stubborn Grew & sequels are on one level a memorial to several Ravlins. The books were triggered by a simple elegy for my uncle James Ravlin (who was the same generation & could have stepped straight out of a Bellow novel), & turned into a complex elegy for his daughter Juliet.

OK Joe, finished the Hersh article. Interesting resonance between the business about Plato & Strauss ("the noble lie"), and your earlier remarks on Joseph Conrad. Plato didn't care much for democracy, did he?

But again, it seems to me that Hersh is sidestepping the factor of Saddam in this whole game. It's my guess that before they went to the UN, the Pentagon people & others in the Admin. had assessed a number of different outcomes very carefully. & the decision to overstate the WMD issue, the decision to seemingly deliberately waffle in their presentation to the UN of rationales for going to war (I'm saying it seemed almost deliberately weak, in shuffling from one justification to another) - these were messages designed not to persuade the US public in favor of war, so much as a disinformation strategy directed at Saddam himself. This was the trap they laid : allow the UN to fibrillate; present obviously weak & sloppy evidence (the British stuff drawn from magazine articles, etc.); waffle in your rationales; let Saddam think he was getting away with it, encourage him in his intransigence. It worked like a charm, both with the French & Germans & Russians, and with Saddam. As I say, he fell right into it. We have to remember there was something of a precedent for this, in the lead-up to the Gulf War. Whether or not the US ambassador was deliberately leading him on, in that fateful meeting just before the invasion of Kuwait, it was an obvious example of Saddam's tendency to read ambivalence or signs of weakness as a go-ahead to follow his own grandiose schemes.

Did they have to do it that way? Well, Saddam was given his chance. He could have come clean starting with the massive report on his weapons programs in December 2002, which Blix declared far from complete or accurate. But he remained in character. And it may be ironic, if my scenario here is accurate, that this psychotic master of deceit was himself finally brought down by a Venus fly-trap of diplomatic illusions.

Pondering, while dawdling around pretty Fox Point (all the trees & flowers flow'ring), how to respond to Joe D.'s comments.

Not that anybody besides Joe & Anastasios is interested, but anyway.

Joe. Your statements coalesce around 3 points, among some others:
1) confronting "the lie" (ala Heart of Darkness);
2) the evasions of the Bush position before the latest war;
3) the relation between speech, dialogue & ethics.

I respond in reverse order:
3) In an ideal world, all problems will be resolved through peaceful dialogue & negotiation. But let's remember that in a non-ideal world, NOT ONLY do we witness the prevalence of the use of force & violence to serve selfish interests; we also witness the futility of language. We see false dialogue and timeserving debates carried on not just by the affected parties in a situation, but by 3rd parties taking advantage of crises by self-serving obfuscation & abuse of language. Sometimes "consensus" is impossible when you have the opposing interests of 2 or 3, meddled with by 15 other interested or "neutral" parties. For example, to read what happened at the UN before the latest war as simply a morality tale about US arrogance, is quite reductive; I think it is hard to deny that the stress of the crisis pressed France & Germany into hypocritical, self-serving positions, which underwrote Saddam's crazed intransigence.

2) I disagree with you that Bush Administration behavior leading up to this war was rendered ambiguous & murky by lies & hidden agendas. You seem to have 2 sides to your position : 1st, that Bush et al. have a hidden agenda(s); 2nd, that their vaunted "moral clarity" is in reality verbal cover for the unilateral use of force.

I think they have been pretty clear & forthright about their agenda. After 9/11, a global war on terror was declared; regimes engaging in terror, harboring terrorists, or unlawfully dealing in WMDs, would be considered enemies of the US and subject to attack. They had a difficult case in attempting to align the UN for war against Iraq, for lack of specific evidence of immediate threat; but I think their overall position was strong and convincing. The sanctions arrangement was a brutal failure; Saddam & his criminal mafia had ejected weapons monitors back in 1998; Saddam refused to comply fully with resolution 1441 (the 12000 pp document was a joke). It is clear in the aftermath that Saddam chose intransigence & self-defeating delusion, because his entire regime was built on oppression, lies & violence; he had no fallback position.

I think the second part of your argument (moral clarity as verbal cover), is more interesting, and leads to a consideration of your point #1): the supreme value in confronting "the lie".

There was an interesting article in the Week in Review section of the Sunday Times, about the genealogy of the Bush neo-cons from philosopher Leo Strauss. Somehow, when disciples of Strauss like Wolfowitz & Perle move into power positions, the philosophical notion that ethical absolutes are just that, and were outlined clearly for our civilization by the ancient Greeks, gets elided or translated into a concept of political "realism", wherein power or force can be projected in an aggressive way as long as the moral purpose or aim is clear and correct. This is not that different from the traditional "realists" of foreign policy, except that the latter were maybe more circumspect about projecting arrogance along with power.

The whole situation seems extremely new & complex, & doesn't lend itself to snap judgements or finger-pointing from any side. There is some truth in the analogy between the challenge represented by Islamic fundamentalist terrorism & state tyranny (Iraq, Iran, N. Korea) combined with weapons dealing, on the one hand, and the challenge represented by totalitarianism in the previous century, and I think that those self-righteous ones who don't want to sully their moral platitudes or their knee-jerk hatred of the US government with considerations of historical reality, are not really engaging in any useful activity in the realm of foreign policy. Another side of the equation, however, is the imbalance throughout the world between stable & rich 1st-world democracies, and the poverty-stricken regions of the Middle East, Asia, Latin America & Africa. Here is where the severe limitations of moral self-righteousness and a concept of national security based solely on military might become very clear. It's mirrored in a domestic policy which has found a way to equate "moral realism" with social darwinist individualism and laissez-faire.

& this leads me to a third aspect of this whole situation that interests me, and get's at the notion of your point #1 (confronting "the lie"). I think it might be good to look at the Straussian world-view of the power-playing neo-cons, not in isolation, but as an element of Republican party politics. In other words, it's USEFUL to develop an aggressive, power-projecting foreign policy grounded in the "moral clarity of Western democratic tradition" - since it provides a raison d'etre for a national party with a somewhat narrow demographic base, in the absence of Cold War stringencies.

Maybe I'm moving here in the direction of a John Kerry : attempting to combine a forthright attitude toward terrorism & dictatorship, on the one hand, with a demystification of a (partisan) politics based solely on glorified "force projection", on the other.