Late Night Laugh: Life After Football

Candy Bar Contest Winner Headed To Outer Space

From Discover:

Break me off a piece, break me off a piece, break me off a piece of that trip to outer space.

A French flight attendant is headed to even further reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere than her normal job takes her, thanks to buying a Kit Kat bar at her local supermarket. Mathilde Epron had the company’s winning wrapper, but rather than admission to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory, she won a ticket on a spacecraft.

Rocketplane, the same company we wrote about teaming up with a Japanese company to offer space weddings, will train Epron for four days in Oklahoma before blasting her and three others 60 miles up in the sky.

Epron actually threw away her Kit Kat wrapper without checking her contest results, then came back two hours later and fished it out of the trash. Luckily the trash collection didn’t come during that interim, or the space flight might have been one passenger short.

Show Me The Marshmellows: Monkeys And Money

From Psychology Today:

Money is a powerful force in human life and affairs. Its very power gives pause to those who look to evolution for full explanations of human behavior, because money has not existed long enough to have influenced evolution. By some estimates, money only goes back a couple thousand years, which is too short even to have influenced human evolution.
Still, one can get some clues as to how evolution prepared us for money from the burgeoning research that seeks to present animals with economic choices. To gain perspective on human financial decisions, one may ask, what would monkeys do?

Keith Chen and Marc Hauser at Yale University taught monkeys about resources that bear a strong resemblance to money. Monkeys don’t care about money, per se, but they do care about marshmallows. (This already is a difference of gigantic proportions in that monkeys must learn about resource-exchange using something that is already a primary reinforcer – food – whereas humans can extend the range of their motivations to secondary reinforcers.) A resource (marshmallows) exchange task was introduced whereby pressing a lever would give another monkey a marshmallow; hence this was a task that involved a bit of altruism. Not only were monkeys taught about the game. Two specific monkeys were conditioned (entrained), such that one always pulled the lever for his monkey partner (thus being a very generous partner) and the other never pulled the lever for his partner (stingy). Then they let these conditioned monkeys play the game with other monkeys. Monkeys that played with the highly generous monkey figured it out and quickly took advantage of him. Monkeys that played with the stingy monkey also figured it out quickly and subsequently shunned or were aggressive toward him.

Thus, monkeys can at least understand and respond effectively to the difference between a generous provider and a tightwad. Still, the fact that these differences had to be done with marshmallows instead of a more abstract representation of value (which is what money is) suggests a limited capacity to use or understand money.

Other studies have shown that monkeys take any handout above zero that is offered to them in a version of what, in humans, is called the Ultimatum Game. In the Ultimatum Game, one person is designated the Proposer (who thus offers the ultimatum) and the other becomes the Responder (who decides whether to take it or leave it). The Proposer offers an amount of money to the Responder out of a total amount that the Proposer has been given by the experimenter – usually this is $10. The whole game involves the Proposer offering the Responder an amount, which the Responder has the option to accept or reject. Accept the split and both sides get what was offered; reject it and both sides get no money at all. This obviously not an evenly matched game. The Proposer has the power to make the ultimatum. All the Responder can do is either take whatever is offered or say no, which is costly to both players.

When humans play this game, the Responders will sometimes refuse offers that they deem too low. Depending on the person and the circumstances, people tend to refuse offers below 20% of the total. Monkeys, however, have no such scruples, and will take anything above zero.

You can look at the monkeys’ responses in different ways. One way is that they are not bothered with issues of pride, self-esteem, and fairness. After all, a human is humiliated to accept a tiny share, especially if he or she expected an equal split. They know that the other person could have divided the pay equally and perhaps should have – but chose instead to claim the lion’s share for self and offer only a measly sop. Monkeys apparently either do not understand that they should be embarrassed, or they do not care.

Yet another way of looking at it is to suggest that monkeys are actually pretty smart. Economists continue to scratch their heads at the results of studies with the Ultimatum game. They assume that people are basically oriented to maximize their own profits. If you and someone else worked equally to earn $100, and that person has the power to divide it and chooses to offer you only one dollar while keeping $99 for self, well, you are still better off with one dollar than with nothing. Hence economic rationalists find it slightly scandalous that people ever refuse any offer. Economists think that if people were true to financial logic, they would act more like monkeys.

Thus, when monkeys play, they behave as economists would have humans do – they accept any offer above zero. This means that, although rational (they have more when they leave the game than when they entered), monkeys are not sensitive to issues of fairness. Humans most certainly are. Humans feel all kinds of self-conscious emotions when they receive more than they think they ought to receive. Not always, of course, but it happens.

Other work suggests that monkeys do not have a fully developed sense of fairness. There are signs that they are acutely sensitive to getting less than their fair share, such as if they see another monkey getting more than they get. If you have two dogs and give one a biscuit treat, the other will look at you with a mixture of expectancy and indignation. Getting less than your fair share is called being underbenefited, and many animals seem to have that.

But a fully developed sense of fairness means that you are uncomfortable with being overbenefited as well. That is, it bothers you to get more than your fair share. Here is where humans seem to part company with other creatures.

What happens when monkeys overbenefit from an exchange – do they experience guilt, embarrassment, shame, or try to rectify the situation? Apparently not.

This may be why humans embraced money, because it allows for trade of resources on the basis of equity, which is subject to exchange rates. That is, imagine that I ask you to paint my living room walls; then by the virtue of the fact that I wanted you to paint my walls, I may not be skilled at or want to paint your walls. But I can repay you in another currency, namely money. In this way, humans can correct overbenefits in a manner that is separate from the original payment (in this case, wall painting).

Humans’ emphasis on fairness can be seen in other instances as well. One important study showed that people will spend their own money to punish others who do wrong. In these studies, even at a cost to themselves, people were willing to inflict harm on those who took advantage of others.

So maybe Adam Smith, that seer of economic truths, was right after all when he wrote, “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.”

Ibn Warraq: Democracy Versus Theocracy

From The New English Review:

I shall begin with a joke; and it is essential that you laugh, you will see why in a minute.

The time: 1950s (which is important). Place: The Holy Land. Two archaeologists are working on a site they believe is the true location of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Golgotha or Calvary just outside ancient Jerusalem. After months of careful digging they come across two skeletons six feet apart, and thinking perhaps these were the bones of the thieves crucified at the same time as Jesus, they shifted their attention to a spot where Jesus himself would have been crucified. Sure enough they find some bones, and the remains of a cross, and after weeks of further digging, and carbon-dating analysis conclude that these remains were of Jesus, and on the whole, the archaeological details were consistent with the account of the crucifixion as found in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). They looked at each other as they realized the implications of their findings, particularly for the Resurrection. This discovery is too important to release to the public, they thought, we must discuss it with some eminent theologians. They immediately thought of Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), the German theologian, and founder of “form-criticism”. Bultmann’s Gospel of John (1941) is now considered a classic in the field of research into the historical Jesus. Our archaeologists phoned him, and explained in breathless tones their discovery and its consequences. Bultmann listened patiently, and then there was a twenty second silence, and he said finally in a thick German accent, “You mean he really existed!”

Your laughter is the difference between a democracy that guarantees freedom of expression and a theocracy that stifles discussion of religion, and every other subject it considers taboo…

Sharia is the total collection of theoretical laws which apply in an ideal Muslim community which has surrendered to the will of God. It is based on divine authority which must be accepted without criticism. Islamic law is thus not a product of human intelligence, and in no way reflects a constantly changing or evolving social reality (as in European law). It is immutable, and the fiqh or the science of the Sharia constitutes the infallible and definitive interpretation of the Sacred Texts; infallible because the group of Doctors of Law have been granted the power to deduce from the Koran and the Traditions authoritative solutions; and definitive because after three centuries, all the solutions have been given. While European law is human and changing, the Sharia is divine and immutable. It depends on the inscrutable will of Allah, which cannot be grasped by human intelligence; it must be accepted without doubts and questions. The work of the learned doctors of the Sharia is but a simple application of the words of Allah or His Prophet, and it is only in certain narrowly defined limits, fixed by God Himself that one can use a kind of reasoning known as Qiyas, that is, reasoning by analogy. The decisions of the learned having the force of law rest on the infallibility of the community, an infallibility that God Himself conferred through Muhammed on his community.

While the Koran contains praiseworthy moral principles, even if not particularly original- the need for generosity, respect for parents, and so on, these are outweighed by unworthy principles: intolerance of pagans, the call to violence and murder, the lack of equality for women and non-Muslims, the acceptance of slavery, barbaric punishments, the contempt for human reason.

Is the Sharia still valid? We may well ask how a law whose elements were first laid down over a thousand years ago, and whose substance has not evolved with the times, can possibly be relevant in the 20th century. The Sharia only reflects the social and economic conditions of the time of the early Abbasids and has simply grown out of touch with all the later developments- social, economic and moral. It seems improbable but we have progressed morally-we no longer regard women as chattel, which we can dispose of how we will, we no longer believe that those who do not share our religious beliefs are not worthy of equal respect, we even accord children and animals rights. But as long as we continue to regard the Koran as eternally true, with an answer for all the problems of the modern world, we will have no progress. The principles enshrined in the Koran are inimical to moral progress.

Let us look at The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and compare it to Islamic law and doctrine.

Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2: Everyone is entitled to all rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4: No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Here are my comments on the above Articles:

Women are inferior under Islamic law; their testimony in a court of law is worth half that of a man; their movement is strictly restricted, they cannot marry a non-Muslim.

Non-Muslims living in Muslim countries have inferior status under Islamic law, they may not testify against a Muslim. In Saudi Arabia, following a tradition of Muhammed who said ‘Two religions cannot exist in the country of Arabia’, non-Muslims are forbidden to practice their religion, build churches, possess Bibles, and so on.

Non-believers- atheists in Muslim countries do not have ‘the right to life’. They are to be killed. Muslim doctors of law generally divide sins into great sins and little sins. Of the seventeen great sins, unbelief is the greatest, more heinous than murder, theft, and adultery.

Slavery is recognised in the Koran. Muslims are allowed to cohabit with any of their female slaves (Sura, iv.3); they are allowed to take possession of married women if they are slaves (Sura, iv.28).

Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Punishments for the transgressors of the Holy Law include amputations, crucifixion,
stoning to death, floggings.

Article 6: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

The whole notion of a person who can make choice, and can be held morally responsible is lacking in Islam; as is the entire notion of human rights.

Articles 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 deal with the rights of an accused person to a fair trial.

As Schacht has shown, under the Sharia, considerations of good faith, fairness, justice, truth, and so on play only a subordinate role. The idea of criminal guilt is lacking. Revenge for a killing is officially sanctioned, though a monetary recompense is also possible. The legal procedure, under Islam, can hardly be called impartial or fair, for in the matter of witnesses all sorts of injustices emerge. A non-Muslim may not testify against a Muslim. For example, a Muslim may rob a non-Muslim in his home with impunity if there are no witnesses except the non-Muslim himself. The evidence of Muslim women is admitted only very exceptionally and then only from twice the number required of men.

Article 16 deals with the rights of marriage of men and women.

Women under Islam do not have equal rights: they are not free to marry whom they wish, the rights of divorce are not equal.

Article 18: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or
in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Under Islam, one does not have the right to change one’s religion, if one is born into a Muslim family. Applying double standards, Muslims are quite happy to accept converts to their religion, but a Muslim may not convert to another religion, this would be apostasy which is punishable by death. Here is how the great commentator Baydawi (c.1291) sees the matter: “Whosoever turns back from his belief, openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever you find him, like any other infidel. Separate yourself from him altogether. Do not accept intercession in his regard’.

Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinion without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

The rights enshrined in articles 18 and 19 have been consistently violated in Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In all three countries, the rights of their Bahai, Ahmadi, Shia, and Christian minorities have been denied. All three countries justify their actions by reference to Sharia. Christians in these countries are frequently arrested on charges of blasphemy.

Article 23: Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

Women are not free to choose their work under Islam, certain jobs are forbidden to them, even in so-called liberal Muslim countries. Orthodox Islam forbids women from working outside the home. Non-Muslims are not free to choose their work in Muslim countries, or rather certain posts are not permitted them.

Article 26 deals with the right of education.

Again, certain fields of learning are denied to women.

It is clear that Islamic militants are quite aware of the incompatibility of Islam and The 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. For these militants met in Paris in 1981 to draw up an Islamic Declaration of Human Rights which left out all freedoms that contradicted Islamic law. Even more worrying is the fact that under pressure from Muslim countries in November 1981, the United Nations Declaration on the elimination of religious discrimination was revised, and references to the right ‘to adopt’(Article 18, above) and, therefore to ‘change’ one’s religion were deleted, and only the right ‘to have’ a religion was retained.

The article is fascinating. Read it all.

‘This Is How We Lost to the White Man’: The audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism

Has Dr. Huxtable, the head of one of America’s most beloved television households, seen the truth: that the dream of integration should never supplant the pursuit of self-respect; that blacks should worry more about judging themselves and less about whether whites are judging them on the content of their character? Or has he lost his mind?

From The Atlantic:

…He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started like this,” Cosby said. “‘I was 5 years old. It was Saturday and I stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what helped turn her around. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.”

“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”

“…Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal … When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’

“I don’t want to talk about hatred of these people,” he continued. “I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our children. Now I got people in wheelchairs, paralyzed. A little girl in Camden, jumping rope, shot through the mouth. Grandmother saw it out the window. And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus is already within you.”

…Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past…

Black America does not entirely share the euphoria, though. The civil-rights generation is exiting the American stage—not in a haze of nostalgia but in a cloud of gloom, troubled by the persistence of racism, the apparent weaknesses of the generation following in its wake, and the seeming indifference of much of the country to black America’s fate. In that climate, Cosby’s gospel of discipline, moral reform, and self-reliance offers a way out—a promise that one need not cure America of its original sin in order to succeed. Racism may not be extinguished, but it can be beaten.

Has Dr. Huxtable, the head of one of America’s most beloved television households, seen the truth: that the dream of integration should never supplant the pursuit of self-respect; that blacks should worry more about judging themselves and less about whether whites are judging them on the content of their character? Or has he lost his mind?

…In 1985, Cosby riled NBC by placing an anti-apartheid sign in his Huxtable son’s bedroom. The network wanted no part of the debate. “There may be two sides to apartheid in Archie Bunker’s house,” the Toronto Star quoted Cosby as saying. “But it’s impossible that the Huxtables would be on any side but one. That sign will stay on that door. And I’ve told NBC that if they still want it down, or if they try to edit it out, there will be no show.” The sign stayed…

His anger and frustration erupted into public view during an NAACP awards ceremony in Washington in 2004 commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. At that moment, the shades of mortality and irrelevance seemed to be drawing over the civil-rights generation. Its matriarchs, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, would be dead within two years. The NAACP’s membership rolls had been shrinking; within months, its president, Kweisi Mfume, would resign (it was later revealed that he was under investigation by the NAACP for sexual harassment and nepotism—allegations that he denied). Other movement leaders were drifting into self-parody: Al Sharpton would soon be hosting a reality show and, a year later, would be doing ads for a predatory loan company; Sharpton and Jesse Jackson had recently asked MGM to issue an apology for the hit movie Barbershop.

That night, Cosby was one of the last honorees to take the podium. He began by noting that although civil-rights activists had opened the door for black America, young people today, instead of stepping through, were stepping backward. “No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband,” he told the crowd. “No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.”

There was cheering as Cosby went on. Perhaps sensing that he had the crowd, he grew looser. “The lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” he told the audience.

Cosby disparaged activists who charge the criminal-justice system with racism. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,” Cosby said. “Then we all run out and are outraged: ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.’”

Then he attacked African American naming traditions, and the style of dress among young blacks: “Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong … What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a damned thing about Africa— with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed, and all that crap, and all of them are in jail.” About then, people began to walk out of the auditorium and cluster in the lobby. There was still cheering, but some guests milled around and wondered what had happened. Some thought old age had gotten the best of Cosby. The mood was one of shock…

But Cosby’s rhetoric played well in black barbershops, churches, and backyard barbecues, where a unique brand of conservatism still runs strong. Outsiders may have heard haranguing in Cosby’s language and tone. But much of black America heard instead the possibility of changing their communities without having to wait on the consciences and attention spans of policy makers who might not have their interests at heart. Shortly after Cosby took his Pound Cake message on the road, I wrote an article denouncing him as an elitist. When my father, a former Black Panther, read it, he upbraided me for attacking what he saw as a message of black empowerment. Cosby’s argument has resonated with the black mainstream for just that reason…

Part of what drives Cosby’s activism, and reinforces his message, is the rage that lives in all African Americans, a collective feeling of disgrace that borders on self-hatred. As the comedian Chris Rock put it in one of his infamous routines, “Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people … It’s like a civil war going on with black people, and it’s two sides—there’s black people and there’s niggas, and niggas have got to go … Boy, I wish they’d let me join the Ku Klux Klan. Shit, I’d do a drive-by from here to Brooklyn.” (Rock stopped performing the routine when he noticed that his white fans were laughing a little too hard.) Liberalism, with its pat logic and focus on structural inequities, offers no balm for this sort of raw pain. Like the people he preaches to, Cosby has grown tired of hanging his head…

Read it all.

What Rumsfeld Got Right: How Donald Rumsfeld remade the U.S. military for a more uncertain world

From The Atlantic:

There are accompanying videos here.

In 1962, a Harvard economics professor named Thomas C. Schelling wrote an introduction to Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. In a few hundred words, Schelling, a future Nobel Prize winner, delivered a tour de force about the failure to anticipate events. “We were so busy thinking through some ‘obvious’ Japanese moves,” he writes,

that we neglected to hedge against the choice that they actually made … There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable … Furthermore, we made the terrible mistake … of forgetting that a fine deterrent can make a superb target.

Schelling’s introduction so impressed Donald H. Rumsfeld that he memorized parts of it and, as others have reported, regularly handed it out before the Pearl Harbor–level attack of 9/11. In his subsequent planning for the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld took Schelling’s precepts to heart, thought pessimistically about all sorts of dire scenarios, and got the best possible result.

But only up to the point when organized Iraqi military resistance collapsed. In a tragic, latter-day extension of Schelling’s analysis, Rumsfeld was so busy thinking about the Iraqis’ “obvious” military moves—launching chemical weapons, making a last stand in Baghdad—that he neglected to hedge against what they actually did: melt away and return weeks later as small bands of insurgents. Because of the meager resistance to our interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, and the swiftness of our apparent victory in Afghanistan in 2001, which Rumsfeld had played a great part in orchestrating, by early 2003 the specter of a debilitating Vietnam-scale insurgency against the United States military had been sufficiently exorcised to seem “unfamiliar,” and therefore to be confused with “the improbable.” By the time Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in Baghdad, we had become too impressed with our own military to see it as a “superb target.”

Rumsfeld, one former Pentagon official told me, saw Iraq’s degraded military as an easy target for our own; its destruction would provide a quick demonstration of American power, as well as get rid of the regional threat that the Iraqi regime constituted. No firm believer in democratic transformation, he probably assumed, as did many other people at the time, that any new regime in Baghdad, even a military one, would be a dramatic improvement, in strategic terms for the U.S. and in human-rights terms for the Iraqis. Rather than a fear of chaos, what is more apparent at this stage is a certain complacency on Rumsfeld’s part. For example, he evidently did not challenge the personnel system’s choice of ground commander in post-invasion Iraq. The Army’s 5th Corps was slated to rotate out of Germany and into Iraq. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the 5th Corps commander, and his staff, despite their service in Bosnia, had done little thinking about counterinsurgency. From that set of circumstances, a long trail of well-documented mistakes followed. In this and other cases, Rumsfeld, who is often accused of micromanaging, did not micromanage enough.

“Rumsfeld got war and transformation only half-right,” says Richard H. Shultz Jr., the director of international security studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy near Boston. “He was right that the lethality and speed of a military advance could be transformational, but he didn’t realize that the enemy might have an answer to that in the form of a war after the war.” As Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, puts it, Rumsfeld’s view of transformation was “profoundly self-referential,” concerned with what we could do, not what the enemy could.

Rumsfeld, an amateur wrestler and Navy S-2 Tracker pilot, had always seen the world as something that would bend to the force of his will. His early career was a triumph: a four-term congressman in his 30s, he was soon afterward director of the president’s office of economic opportunity, and then ambassador to NATO. Under Gerald R. Ford, he became, at 43, the youngest secretary of defense ever, oversaw the creation of the all-volunteer Army, and fought for a bigger defense budget to restore what he saw as a declining strategic advantage for the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union—just before the Kremlin’s geopolitical gains in Africa and Central America in the late 1970s. From 1977 to 1985, he ran the pharmaceutical company G. D. Searle.

Rumsfeld’s reputation in the 1970s was as it would be when he returned to government decades later. The dark master himself, Richard M. Nixon, had pronounced him a “ruthless little bastard.” If Franklin Delano Roosevelt possessed, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. supposedly put it, “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament,” Rumsfeld was a man with a first-class intellect, but a third-class temperament. His in-your-face disposition led to dreadful relations with Congress and the so-called Revolt of the Generals in 2006, when a half-dozen retired senior officers demanded his resignation. “The man is capable of raking down all opposition, and has an astonishing ability not to listen to experts,” said retired Army General Barry McCaffrey, who says he admires Rumsfeld’s patriotism, ferocious intelligence, and formidable charm. But heeding experts, McCaffrey went on, is what has saved the career of many a high official not nearly as intelligent.

During the Clinton years, the military gained too much power over the civilian defense leadership, subtly using the president’s lack of military service to get its way. Rumsfeld, a civilian primacist, shifted that dynamic too far in the other direction. His method of creative destruction, brought over from his years in the corporate world, was simply too much for a static, hidebound institution like the Pentagon. “Rumsfeld was more effective as a critic of the Pentagon than as a leader of it,” says Richard J. Danzig, a Clinton-era secretary of the Navy, now an adviser to Barack Obama. A critic sees problems; a leader creates dynamic consensus.

A Tom Toles cartoon in 2006 declared Rumsfeld “Wrong About Everything.” Not quite. I discussed Rumsfeld with more than two dozen defense experts, Republicans and Democrats alike (though mostly centrists), many of whom had government experience. Their impressions were more measured than Rumsfeld’s toxic image in the media would suggest. Although I had briefed Rumsfeld twice, in 2002 and 2006, about my worries regarding Iraq, when I reached out to him a year ago he wouldn’t meet with me. For this piece, he provided matter-of-fact, occasionally opaque written responses to some of my questions. Thanks to his long tenure and personal dynamism, Rumsfeld has had an impact that will go far beyond Iraq in shaping the actions of future administrations. Obsessed with what could go wrong, Rumsfeld was a brilliant worrier. It is in his Schelling-inspired pessimism where we might find some saving graces to his legacy.

MANIFEST UNCERTAINTY

Even before 9/11, Rumsfeld saw a new strategic landscape of manifest uncertainty, of fundamental and catastrophic surprise. Consider the conclusions drawn in 1998 by the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which Rumsfeld chaired (and which had, among its members, Paul D. Wolfowitz): the ballistic-missile threat to the United States was growing; our intelligence community’s ability to track that threat was diminishing; and the “U.S. might well have little or no warning before operational deployment” by countries like Iran of ballistic missiles that could reach our soil.
Not surprisingly, that threat and the need to counter it topped Rumsfeld’s fret list when he returned to the Pentagon, in January 2001. Before his first year in office was over, the United States had moved to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty it had signed with the U.S.S.R. in 1972, limiting missile-defense systems. As Rumsfeld saw it, while the logic of mutually assured destruction still held for two rational and conservative defense bureaucracies in Washington and Moscow, it might not work with terrorist groups or rogue states that lacked proper command-and-control oversight. Development of a missile-defense system accelerated; as of early 2008, there were 24 interceptors in silos in Alaska and California, and 25 on board U.S. ships in the Pacific. The system remains far from foolproof; it is also the single most expensive weapons system in the Pentagon’s budget, as well as its most costly R&D program. And the money spent on missile defense might have been better used to counter more-immediate nuclear threats, such as dirty bombs and the cross-border smuggling of enriched uranium. Yet there have been big improvements in the system’s capabilities, and even a partial missile defense will give America more leverage and freedom of action in dealing with adversaries than did a relic like the ABM treaty.

Just as Rumsfeld wanted to do away with the enshrined assumptions of Cold War deterrence, he was keenly focused on altering the Pentagon mind-set captured by the so-called Powell doctrine. When Rumsfeld was secretary of defense in the 1970s, Colin Powell was an Army colonel. By the time Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon, a quarter century later, Powell’s canonical fingerprints were all over the building. As the senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the early 1980s, Powell had helped devise the Weinberger doctrine, from which his own doctrine emanated. Both favored major conventional combat operations with beginnings, middles, and ends, to be undertaken only when a vital national interest was threatened. Powell, in his later roles as national-security adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, emphasized overwhelming force, exit strategies, and clear, attainable objectives, not to mention the need for broad international support. The Powell doctrine essentially saw the military as a precious national asset that stupid civilians should not be able to deploy too casually. But Rumsfeld worried that the world was too messy, too fluid—with one crisis flowing into the next across geographical regions—and the dangers facing America too complex and varied for such a cut-and-dried approach.

Of course, by violating aspects of the Powell doctrine in Iraq, Rumsfeld and his subordinates arguably showed themselves to be precisely the stupid civilians the doctrine was meant to guard against. Yet the Powell doctrine isn’t perfect. Kuwait was pillaged in 1990 while Powell spent months building up forces in Saudi Arabia. His doctrine seemingly justified ignoring the Balkans in the 1990s, but we inserted troops anyway, and debilitating wars did not result—indeed, the stabilization of the former Yugoslavia and the expansion of NATO to the Black Sea indicate that the Balkan interventions were in the nation’s interest. An unwillingness to engage in any but the smallest deployments, or in big ones that carried the certainty of a clean conventional victory, can itself be a form of retreat and defeat. “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?” Madeleine Albright, then-ambassador to the United Nations, asked then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Powell in 1993, during a discussion of intervention in Bosnia. Rumsfeld might have complained similarly, though his conception of the national interest was very different from hers.

In Rumsfeld’s view, U.S. troops in one part of the world would have to be ready to deploy to another on a moment’s notice, and be ready to fight or to provide relief. Everything would be expeditionary. Hence his fixation with changing the global posture of the military, and transforming it as a fighting force. The intellectual groundwork for both transitions was started during Bill Clinton’s administration, but Rumsfeld is the one who got them going.

In the mid-1980s, the United States had a cluster of large, fully developed bases in Europe and the Far East, with 250,000 personnel in West Germany and 125,000 in East Asia. By 9/11, because of a process begun by the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, those numbers had dropped to 118,000 in Europe and 89,000 in East Asia. Rumsfeld wasn’t satisfied, though. Afghanistan and Iraq had justified his worries that our troops were not only poorly positioned to fight where they were needed, but also unable to move quickly or freely because of the occasional need to secure transit permission from host countries. In 2003, for example, Austria forbade the use of its airspace and declined to give the U.S. any transit rights en route to Iraq.

Thus, by 2004, the Pentagon unveiled plans to bring home an additional 70,000 troops from those fixed garrisons, even as it moved to expand a network of bare-bones sites in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America to support rotational rather than permanently stationed forces. Such “lily pad” bases would be different from the “Little Americas” of the Cold War: no soldiers’ spouses, no kids, no day-care centers, no dogs, no churches. A leaner presence might prove less of an impediment to bilateral relations. The number of status-of-forces agreements with host countries doubled from the end of the Cold War through the end of Rumsfeld’s tenure, from 45 to over 90. And the Air Force signed more than 20 comparable gas-and-go agreements with countries in Africa while Rumsfeld was secretary of defense. Andrew Krepinevich and Robert Work, president and vice president, respectively, at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told me that Rumsfeld got global posture basically right for a chaotic world by emphasizing, in Work’s words, an austere “global coaling-station network.” Other experts, including some from Democratic administrations, echoed their views.

A counterargument is that troops are needed not just to fight but to show political will. As one Democratic former defense official told me, “You need to demonstrate to the Russians that NATO still matters,” and that means troops in Europe. McCaffrey, in particular, poured scorn on Rumsfeld’s desire to draw down further in Germany, noting that American troops there not only are important to the Poles and other eastern Europeans threatened by Russia, but also are much closer to the Middle East than they would be back in “fortress America.”

Read it all.