Ronan Farrow, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (2018) — a book review

24 May 2018

Worthy, although irritatingly structured

Ronan Farrow's War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (W. W. Norton, 2018) is a valuable account regarding the United States' almost vanished ability to conduct diplomacy. Diplomacy having been displaced by the Military Industrial Complex's strategy-lacking use of force.

Negatively speaking, Farrow adopts journalism's penchant for badly scrambling chronology and losing his topical points while doing so. Two hundred pages in, I was almost ready to cast the book aside.

Figuratively, the author starts off recently, plunges disjointedly backwards, returns momentarily to mid-spectrum, backtracks again and finally pops out "now".

This characteristic journalistic style almost always proceeds without:

providing any contextual indication of exactly "when" we are — in relationship to what we just read

nor

specifically "where" the new action is taking place — until at least a few sentences or paragraphs down-road

nor

"who" the new character is — in relationship to the book's diplomatic theme

nor

"why" the presentation is being done in such a discombobulated and disorienting fashion.

Even Farrow's chapter headings make no obvious sense with regard to their content. They seem to have been chosen for poetic effect. For example: White Beast, The Shortest Spring and Midnight at the Ranch. I challenge readers to recall which chapter title goes with which content.

Why a Yale Law School grad has so much difficulty writing coherently and staying on visible point beats me, speaking as an attorney myself. Which may be why Farrow avoided dealing with impatient and competence-demanding judges and took instead to journalism.

In fairness to Mr. Farrow, millions of people seem to like modern journalism's meandering inability to stay on chronological or thematic point.

What War on Peace is about

Instead of re-wading through Farrow's book — trying to bring coherence to what is not — I quote his publisher:

Offices across the State Department sit empty, while abroad the military-industrial complex has assumed the work once undertaken by peacemakers. We’re becoming a nation that shoots first and asks questions later.

In an astonishing journey from the corridors of power in Washington, DC, to some of the most remote and dangerous places on earth—Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Korea among them—acclaimed investigative journalist Ronan Farrow illuminates one of the most consequential and poorly understood changes in American history.

His firsthand experience as a former State Department official affords a personal look at some of the last standard bearers of traditional statecraft, including Richard Holbrooke, who made peace in Bosnia and died while trying to do so in Afghanistan.

Drawing on newly unearthed documents, and richly informed by rare interviews with warlords, whistle-blowers, and policymakers—including every living former secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton to Rex Tillerson—War on Peace makes a powerful case for an endangered profession.

Diplomacy, Farrow argues, has declined after decades of political cowardice, shortsightedness, and outright malice—but it may just offer America a way out of a world at war.

W. W. Norton's description is overblown

What Farrow actually did was write vignettes. Those are generally limited to overviews of his 200-plus interviews, research and personal experience. A thorough history this is not. Nor does it need to be, to make his point.

Ambassador Holbrooke is, arguably, the thematic core of Farrow's writing effort

From my perspective, the substantive (decline of diplomacy) core of War on Peace follows Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's often blocked attempts to "talk" peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Farrow's account is valuable because it shows the myriad ways in which American militarism consistently squashes more productive ways of getting what we say we want.

On the other hand (as we will see below), Farrow admits that the widely despised Holbrooke was an "asshole" — but a necessary and effective one. That Holbrooke survived as long as he did in the political fire that he was subjected to is almost miraculous. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can be thanked (or criticized) for this.

The book is at its most emotionally touching in Farrow's brief references to Holbrooke's mentorship of him. One such passage will knock your soul awry with its poignance. A volume of human experience is incorporated into that one line. Perfectly positioned and presented. Slicing.

This is Farrow at his admirable best.

A too favorable Holbrooke bias?

Farrow clearly admired Ambassador Holbrooke, even when that universally acknowledged as abrasive man hammered him, as was his custom.

I am not persuaded that Farrow's favorable view of Holbrooke is justified by the latter's history. See, for example, here and here.

Consequently, one of my criticisms of Farrow's perspective is his implicitly harsh treatment regarding the hostility that (a) National Security Advisor and General Jim Jones and (b) Lieutenant General Douglas Lute displayed toward the Ambassador. See page 107.

And I certainly understand why President (and former mild-mannered professor) Obama found Holbrooke insufferable.

Being an arrogant ass is rarely a prescription for success in fields that require persuading people to do things that they don't want to do. A major part of getting things done is tolerably getting along with one's own team.

Fortunately (as to proving his theme), Farrow's many other examples of excessive American militarization remove the confounding Holbrooke personality component from the mix.

Not a comprehensive work — and evidently not intended to be

War on Peace is a melange of impressions that the reader has to cobble together to demonstrate the validity of Farrow's claim that American diplomacy has essentially been abandoned. And further, that war (rather than peace) has been the result.

What is arguably missing is a balanced, more scholarly overview. One that presents both the State Department and the American military's perspectives on evolving situations and how both coped with them.

In this regard, Professor Andrew Bacevich's America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016) is a useful supplement to Farrow's work.

Also good, is Rosa Brooks' How Everything became War and the Military became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (Simon & Schuster, 2016). That book is reviewed, here.

Writing excerpts

These make more sense extracted, as I have here, than they do in the book.

Farrow's constant chronological jumping around — and his frequent inability to reliably complete a thought, or logically and concisely deliver a full vignette — are at their most annoying in this section.

A mass grave in Afghanistan

You can smell a mass grave before you see it.

Leaning and Heffernan had been dispatched by the watchdog group Physicians for Human Rights to investigate the treatment of the prisoners of the new war on terror.

The grave was within visual range of the stronghold of one of the most feared and mythologized warlords in modern Afghan history: a horseback-riding, sword-wielding Uzbek warrior named General Abdul Rashid Dostum. He had been an ally and a traitor to every side in the Cold War.

In the months following the September 11 attacks, he was at the heart of the United States' new strategy in Afghanistan. Armed by the Americans and shadowed by special forces, his horse-back fighters toppled Taliban strongholds across the country's north.

The prisoners the Physicians for Human Rights investigators were tracking had surrendered in Dostum's battles.

Elevating war criminals to power

It was August 2016. General Dostum had by then gone from anti-American warlord, to American proxy fighter, to vice president of Afghanistan.

He was a living embodiment of the militarization of American foreign policy: a warlord, who had, off the back of collaboration with the Americans, ascended to the very top of the new power structures created in his country by the United States.

Regarding accountability

The warlords' footholds in those American-backed power structures bedeviled efforts to create accountability. The mystery of Dostum's [possibly 5,000] missing prisoners was a prime example.

Two successive American presidents effectively evaded questions about the matter. The Bush administration quashed at least three efforts to investigate the grave, across multiple agencies.

[I]n 2009, President Obama had pledged to open a new inquiry into the massacre. Four years later . . . the White House quietly acknowledged that an investigation had been completed, but would remain sealed.

Human rights groups had brought well-documented charges of mass atrocities and murders against Dotsum dating back to the 1990s.

Methods of prisoner execution

When I asked him about the mass grave at Dasht-i-Leili, Dostum initially gave the same answer the Americans had given for years. "There are so many graves," he said shaking his head. "So many bodies."

According to [a witness], other drivers, and surviving prisoners, Dostum's men herded screaming detainees into the containers . . . . "stacked like cordwood," hundreds to a truck, before the doors were slammed and locked.

They spoke of screaming and beating the walls, of licking sweat and urine to stave off death by dehydration, of gnawing each other's limbs, from hunger or madness.

It was a well-worn method of execution in the Afghan desert — locking prisoners in containers and allowing them to burn alive or suffocate, depending on the season.

When drivers tried to punch holes in the containers for ventilation or to discretely pass in water bottles, they claimed they were beaten by Dostum's forces. Survivors claimed that in some cases those soldiers even opened fire directly into the trucks, silencing the screams.

Regarding the obvious "Nuremberg" question

Thornier still was the question of how much the Americans saw.

The tacit answer to which presents the obvious reason for the American cover-ups.

Also thematically strong in War on Peace . . .

. . . are Farrow's treatments of U.S. military presences in Somalia and Colombia.

If you want to know why American military policy so consistently backfires in strategically destructive ways — in less prominently "in the news" locales — read those chapters.

And a telling example of how paranoid security thinking crushes born diplomats

One of the saddest sections of War on Peace is Farrow's lengthy (but arguably too scattered) treatment of Ambassador and Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel's story.

After approximately 40 years of diplomatic service, especially with regard to Pakistan, Raphel was accused of espionage by the FBI.

Those accusations, though subsequently dropped, ruined her.

Farrow interprets the evaporating progress of her legal case as indication that prosecutors had misinterpreted her old-fashioned, relationship dependent style of diplomacy.

In this regard, imagine how difficult it would be to evoke trust from a diplomat's foreign contacts, when the NSA (for example) is spying on every word. Or under circumstances (as they exist today) in which any and everything is labeled "secret" by an excessively paranoid government.

There would be no room to move or speak. Everything would have to be kicked upstairs to the very top for approval. Meaning that the only people who actually know anything (those on the ground) are powerless to design and act.

Talk about the death of diplomacy.

Footnotes are good — though not numbered in-text

Footnotes follow the now typical end pages listing, in which the reader has to find the page number and remember a few words of the original text.

Unnecessarily time-consuming, but workable.

Index — sometimes useless

Farrow skips around so much — both as to subject matter and chronology — that his index occasionally refers readers to pages all over the book. It is often impossible to tell which page reference is the sought one.

The moral? — An insightful, often poignant book — irritatingly organized

I highly recommend War on Peace. But if you are wired for tightly reasoned, chronologically apt and logically ordered presentations, drink a gallon of patience before imbibing.

After finishing the book, I suspect I had the same feeling that a professor does after one of her genius students presents telling insights in an obtuse fashion that almost obliterates them.

We must take blazing talent where, and to the extent that, we find it.

PeteFree.com

Ronan Farrow, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (2018) — a book review