IT'S THE STUPIDITY, STUPID

When The U.S. Bungles, The World Sees A Conspiracy

I had dinner in New York City with a Chinese friend who makes huge
business deals on the mainland. She was just back from Beijing.
"Business is business," she said, when I asked the obvious question.
"Politics is politics." And so a multimillion-dollar sale proceeded
smoothly even as NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the
Cox report detailed Chinese nuclear espionage in America.

But her eyes clouded when she talked about the funeral in Beijing for
the three Chinese killed in the embassy attack. Her words became
bruised, accusatory. I asked, "Do you really believe the Americans did
it deliberately?" "Absolutely!" she said. "Makes no sense," I replied.
"Why would we do such a thing?" "Ah," she said, "there had to be a
deeper reason: CIA out to subvert..." Her line of conspiratorial
inference trailed off. "Possibly," I allowed. "But more likely the
reason was stupidity. Just look at all the adjacent stupidities--like
hitting that K.L.A. camp thinking it was a Serb military base even
though Western media had done stories about how the Kosovars had taken
it over. Or hitting the Belgrade hospital, or that prison, or almost
bombing a Swiss diplomatic reception."

My Chinese friend would not budge. The options on the dinner table
were 1) conspiracy--which, after all, answers human nature's need to
blame a hidden hand, a deeper complexity of cause, and 2) stupidity,
that great but underappreciated presence in human history.

I think I backed the more plausible option. In fact, the allies' war
in Yugoslavia has begun to acquire an alarming dimension of
stupidity--from the manifest inability of NATO to read a Belgrade
street map or phone book (lemme see, would it be under E for embassy
or C for China?) to a certain overall Ben Tre logic (named for the
Vietnamese town about which an American officer said, "It became
necessary to destroy the town in order to save it"), and drifting
further on to an even deeper moral obtuseness.

Stupidity is one of my favorite subjects. "It is always amazing," Jean
Cocteau wrote, "no matter how often one encounters it." Like sleep,
stupidity is a universal, surreal and mysterious phenomenon, a
brownout, the mind passing through a tunnel. Sometimes stupidity is
hilarious; most of the world's jokes are told by one ethnic group
about the stupidity of another ethnic group. In its sinister forms,
stupidity turns up as evil's incompetent half brother--evil without
supernatural prestige. The "Evil Empire" was, in a more practical
sense, the stupid empire; systemic stupidity, not evil or good,
brought the Soviet Union down.

The greater the enormity committed, of course, the less we are willing
to attribute it to sheer, blind dumbness. We expect history to be
imposing, complex, with an elaborate machinery of cause and effect.
But great history may get made by stupidity (the colossal stupidity,
for example, of the Japanese in attacking Pearl Harbor, thereby
bringing America into the war).

Things get complicated when stupidity and conspiracy go into business
together--as they like to do. Remember the Watergate plots hatched in the
White House basement: Nixon's "plumbers" had the low cunning of Daffy Duck
thinking hard. Impressive: an entire Administration brought down by an
immense yet pissant doofusness, culminating in Nixon's inexplicable failure
to burn the tapes.

The virus is cosmopolitan; in more recent times, stupidity infected
the Chinese effort to bribe a sitting Democratic President with
$300,000--the equivalent of entering the most expensive restaurant in
New York and slipping the maitre d' a quarter for a good table.

There are worse consequences in the Balkans. Peacekeeping by means of
smart bombs that now and then drop down hospital chimneys breeds
contradictions. The physician's--and presumably the
peacekeeper's--principle, "First, do no harm," loses to the general's
"You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Everyone
expects mistakes and stupidities in war; but when you make war by
remote control, a superpower ex machina raining destruction without
concomitant risk to self, then your invulnerability (the arrogance of
powers unwilling to pay war's reciprocal price in blood) tends to
subvert the moral basis of the exercise--and, incidentally, to magnify
the importance of errors. Further, the use of computerized high
technology creates an expectation of perfect precision. But war drags
technology down to its level.

Stupidity gets to be dangerous. It gets to be tragic. The late Senator
Everett McKinley Dirksen had a famous funny line about federal
spending: "A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you're
talking about real money."

A stupidity here, an incompetence there, and pretty soon you're
talking about real folly.