War Is Politics

No duh:

Jim Miklaszewski reported that the new strategy will be announced next Tuesday, and that an administration official “admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one.”

As is often the case, I've blogged about Clausewitz a number of times before and I'll cite those posts since I ain't got the energy to add a whole lot of my usual incredible insight that gets me linked all over the blogosphere.  But first, a note about Uncle Clausie's oft-quoted and perhaps misinterpreted observation:

Having rejected his initial thesis that war is nothing but an act of untrammelled force, Clausewitz turned to the apparently more reasonable notion that war is a purely rational act of state policy. Writing in German, Clausewitz used the word Politik, and his most famous phrase has been variously translated as "War is a continuation of `policy'—or of `politics'—by other means." For the purpose of argument, he assumed that state policy would be rational, that is, aimed at improving the situation of the society it represented. He was quite aware, however, that in reality policy may be driven by very different motives.

He also believed along with most Westerners of his era that war was a legitimate means for a state's advancement of its interests. Because his discussion of war as an instrument of policy is usually read in isolation (if at all), Clausewitz is frequently convicted of advocating the resort to war as a routine extension of unilateral state policy. In fact, of course, Clausewitz's famous line is not meant to be an argument in itself. Rather, it is the antithesis to his earlier argument. Like any such dialectical discussion, it exposes contradictions or inadequacies in the given concepts, and tensions between them, which can only be resolved in some synthesis of the two. Clausewitz normally seeks to maintain the tensions—as they are maintained in the world in which we actually operate—rather than to resolve them philosophically.

It is nevertheless possible to derive much of Clausewitz's message from the discussion of war as an act of policy (or politics). In fact, the choice of translation for Politik—"policy" or "politics"—indicates differing emphases on the part of the translator, for the two concepts are quite different in English. "Policy" may be defined as rational action, undertaken by a group which already has power, in order to maintain and extend that power.

Politics, in contrast, is simply the process (comprising an inchoate mix of rational, irrational, and non-rational elements) by which power is distributed within a given society. (These are my definitions—Clausewitz never defines Politik.) And war is an expression of—not a substitute for—politics. Thus, in calling war a "continuation" of politics, Clausewitz was advocating nothing. In accordance with his belief that theory must be descriptive rather than prescriptive, he was merely recognizing an existing reality. War is an expression of both policy and politics, but "politics" is the interplay of conflicting forces, not the execution of one-sided policy initiatives.

Now to der Archiv:

• War is an Instrument of Policy
• History's Lessons
• Small War
• I'm Not Sure What This Means, But...

And I'm sure Bush has read Clausewitz in the original German...

ntodd