Resist the consilience

One of my favorite blogs this past year, Abu Muqawama, has recently started a series of guest posts debating the question "what are the strategic goals of the United States in Afghanistan"? An eminently worthy topic, and one that I agree has gotten short shrift. Yet this has been a blog that has conscientiously limited itself to tactical and operational questions, and has started to receive fire for allegedly dodging bigger issues. In answering tactical and opertational questions, he has done so sufficiently well to garner both employment, public citation, and professional consultation. So, can he limit himself to answering the question of how counterinsurgency can (should?) be waged without answering the question of whether it should. Specifically, without answering whether we should be in Iraq or Afghanistan while saying how we should be fighting?

Similarly, a movie I saw recently, The Hurt Locker, has received loving critical acclaim (deservedly so), yet it's most commonly cited fault is not with it's story telling, it's narration, characters, direction, or editing. It isn't poor plot or shabby writing. It is that it doesn't say anything "larger" about the war in Iraq. It isn't a movie about Iraq, played out by representative characters operating in a hostile, alientating environment, subject to forces outside their control. It isn't a metaphor for the war, or a microcosm thereof. It is a movie about characters, people at their elemental. To be fair, these criticisms haven't been been particularly prolific or vehement, so my issue is more with the need to say anything at all than with it's volume.

In both cases, contributions could be made by both to the greater dialogue, to add their voices to the tintinabulation of the vox populi. But by constraining their scope, they maintain both a purity and a humility not found in grander works. I have no idea what their motivations were for such restraint, but in an era where everyone feels qualified to offer opinions on almost any subject by merit of having an opinion, I find it refreshing. And when they do finally make comments or allusions, they are all the more salient for their silence.