Obama and the Usages of Power III

We’re talking about how much Obama showed us he has learned about the usage of power last week—when he got at least part of his health care reform through Congress after a year of abject failures. In earlier blogs I talked about how Obama’s biggest problem last year was believing his own press.
It’s hard to stay balanced when everyone from Vienna to Honolulu is cheering madly for you, calling you the culmination of the entire civil rights movement and proclaiming that the new millennium begins now with you.
Perhaps today he senses that power—whether it arrives from office, public adulation or military force—is essentially an illusion. And that nothing is easier to lose than the illusion of power—because it never had any reality in the first place.
On the other hand, nothing is more powerful, more frightening than illusory power because, unlike actual power, it has no limits in other people’s mind. It assumes a life of its own and seems more dangerous than a hundred hydrogen bombs.
Used properly and sparingly, it can accomplish more, prevent more problems and win more bloodless victories than all the armies of World War II. But you must have a monumentally acute sense of just how far you dare push it, how unreal, how unstable it truly is.
Let’s give a couple of practical examples. One has come and gone—poofed away in the wind. THE AMERICAN STRATEGIC BOMBER. The B-17, B-24, B-29, B-47, B-52. The world literally trembled at the mere thought of having such horror unleashed on it.
Everyone “knew” that the American bomber had won World War II. Photographs of German and Japanese cities in flames or covered with the puffs of exploding bombs, all falling in a deadly row, were seared into world consciousness.
Except that they—and unfortunately we—knew wrong. Bombers were frightening; they killed an awful lot of civilians—but they had a very limited impact on German and Japanese war making potential. All those photo-news shots of falling bombs were militarily an illusion.
(Caveat—we did cut German oil production to the point that German troops jumped off in the Battle of the Bulge (December, 1944—five months before it was all over) with only five days of fuel. They were expected to capture allied fuel dumps to resupply. People like Patton prevented that.)
But as long as the world THOUGHT that the American bomber was invincible—it was. Every so often in the 1950s and 60s, Russia’s fractious ally, the Chinese Communists (who had fought us to a draw in Korea) got feisty and threatened to take on the US again.
They kept calling us the “paper tiger”. Russia’s Khrushchev would publicly remind the Chinese that the American Strategic Air Command (SAC) had “nuclear teeth”, and ask the Chinese to shut up. But China knew something.
In Korea her troops had taken the brunt of World War II style mass bombing raids by B-29s and B-50s. They had endured terrible casualties. Enough, however, had survived to force the war to a stalemate. But the myth went on.
What was worse, we believed the myth. In Vietnam we destroyed it forever, like a shattered glass vase. We bombed and bombed and bombed. Our generals assured the White House that, just as they had defeated Germany and Japan, they would destroy the Viet Cong.
They killed lots and lots of human beings, true. But they only thing they destroyed with their own myth of invincibility. That was possibly the biggest loss we endured in Vietnam. Never again would a Russian leader publicly credit American bombers with mythological powers.
It can be expensive to shatter one’s own myth. We did it—by not recognizing that, at bottom, an illusion is an illusion is an illusion. It can protect you while it endures; when it falls apart, it can leave you terribly naked.
A bit more next time.