Among my favorite authors there is but one Brit, unless of course you count Conrad, who though he may have been flattered (he was never amused) by the notion, would have more than likely protested the honor as undeserved.
That leaves Graham Greene.
His was a complex life that included work in military intelligence, a fraught relationship with god and church, many affairs and marriages, and an astonishingly long list of first rate work including It's a Battlefield, England Made Me, A Gun for Sale, Brighton Rock, The Confidential Agent, The Power and the Glory, The Ministry of Fear, The Heart of the Matter, The Third Man, The End of the Affair, Our Man in Havana, A Burnt-Out Case, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor and surpassing them all The Quiet American.
In the most recent issue of World Affairs Journal the distinguished historian Andrew Bacevich sets his sizzling intellect and critical eye on some rather straightforward lessons we could do to relearn from Mister Greene.
To get the ball rolling Professor Bacevich first takes a warm up swipe at the MSM and the wise men of Washington ...
In Washington, where the honorific “historic” ornaments every speech, appointment, conclave, and legislative initiative however trivial, those who earn their living purporting to explain “what it all means” have a limitless supply of material. Small wonder that the senatorial defection of an unprincipled hack from one party to the other qualifies as Big News, while the nomination of an associate justice to a seat on the Supreme Court becomes equivalent in significance to the Normandy invasion.
... and reminds us that hubris and undiluted arrogance are the mothers milk of beltway self importance ...
To suggest that this rampant narcissism induces a distorted, not to say warped, view of reality is to understate the case. Rebutting this presumption of Washington’s supreme importance requires a constant effort. Students of U.S. foreign policy might feel some obligation to sample the cascade of pretentiously titled tomes produced by movers and shakers situated In the Stream of History or At the Center of the Storm who claim to have engineered or participated in or at least witnessed events of enduring significance.
... and that among the most important archetypes in our body politic are the truth tellers ...
Yet a steady diet of such excretions results in the need to cleanse the palate and flush the mind of accumulated toxins. To assist in that effort, Americans are fortunate in being able to draw on a rich homegrown tradition of observers who have devoted themselves to puncturing Washington’s conceit and delighting in its folly, a tradition running from Mark Twain all the way down to Garry Trudeau and Jon Stewart.
... who unlike the teeming sycophants and grandees live not to serve power, but rather to poke it in the eye with a pointed stick ...
Greene has little interest in Washington or in those who genuflect before the White House as the cathedral of supreme power. To locate the nub of the matter he looks elsewhere, to the grimy world where functionaries labor to translate Washington’s high-sounding clichés into actual policy, with the consequences borne by ordinary people who never fly on Air Force One or appear on the Sunday morning talk shows
.
Now Having dispatched the tribe with a flick of the wrist Professor Bacevich gets down to action with a brief overview of Greene's plot and characters ...
In this case, the setting is Saigon, near the end of the first Indochina War. French efforts to suppress the Viet Minh insurgency and retain their empire in the Far East are failing. The United States, although nominally supporting France, is actually positioning itself to supplant its ally as the region’s dominant outside power. Within a decade, of course, this effort will yield a second Indochina War and ultimately a second Western defeat.
...
Into this relationship comes Alden Pyle, a young American newly assigned as an economic attaché with the U.S. mission. Pyle is polite, modest, and boyish. “With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze,” Greene writes, “he seemed incapable of harm.”
Yet appearance and manner are deceiving. Pyle’s nominal assignment is a tissue-thin cover; he is actually a CIA agent (although the agency is never identified as such). To stem the Communist tide threatening to inundate Southeast Asia, the agency wants to conjure up an indigenous democratic alternative to French colonialism. Pyle’s job is to devise this Third Way.
...
As eager and as earnest as he is naive, Pyle first cultivates Fowler as a source of information, but soon falls in love with Phuong. Professing his intention to do the right thing by everyone, Pyle promises Phuong that which Fowler cannot: he will make her his bride, taking her back home to New England to live happily ever after. When Phuong accepts, Pyle compensates Fowler with apologies and assurances of his own everlasting friendship and respect.
When not conspiring to steal Fowler’s girl, Pyle is conspiring to devise the Third Way, his efforts to find the right leader centering on a shadowy figure known as General Thé. As with the U.S. officials who in our own day fell under the spell of Ahmed Chalabi, Pyle has persuaded himself that General Thé’s aims and America’s aims align neatly. As was the case with Chalabi, this turns out to be a massive misjudgment.
...
Momentarily taken aback by the bloody consequences of his handiwork—his shoes are spattered with human remains—Pyle quickly recovers and assures Fowler that the victims of the bombing had “died for democracy.” ... He knows he meant well. That knowledge obviates any need to take responsibility or to make amends. In his own mind, he remains blameless.
Fowler’s own determination to avoid taking sides does not survive this episode. In his innocence, Pyle has become like “a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm,” even as he contaminates everything he touches. The ease with which Pyle rationalizes and then dismisses the results of his own recklessness persuades Fowler that detachment has become untenable.
To prevent the American from committing further mayhem, Fowler initiates his own conspiracy, arranging for Pyle’s assassination by the Viet Minh.
Professor Bacevich then gets to the heart of the matter, an analysis of Green's critique of American power and exceptionalism, good intentions, ends and means, democracy, righteousness, and innocence ...
The Quiet American, deriving its energy from Greene’s scabrous anti-Americanism, offers one example. The novel stands in relation to Cold War America as Uncle Tom’s Cabin stands in relation to the antebellum South: it expresses its author’s ill-disguised loathing for the subject he depicts. Yet one need not share Greene’s animus toward the United States to appreciate his achievement. Indeed, Americans above all should be grateful to Greene since they—should they choose to do so—can benefit most directly from that achievement.
Is Pyle as naive as he appears? Are his professions of high ideals real or contrived? Does he take seriously the verities offered by York Harding in books like The Challenge to Democracy and The Role of the West? Or does he merely appropriate them to lend a veneer of respectability to a ruthless enterprise? When Pyle prattles on about freedom and democracy, does he mean what he says? Or is it just so much cant? ... Indeed, Greene suggests that the answers may not really matter. “Innocence,” he writes, “is a kind of insanity.” When it comes to the exercise of power, the idealist intent on doing God’s work is likely to wreak as much havoc as the cynic who rejects God’s very existence. ...
Only those who recognize the omnipresence of sin—recognizing first of all that they themselves number among the sinful—can possibly anticipate the moral snares inherent in the exercise of power. Righteousness induces blindness. The acknowledgment of guilt enables the blind to see. To press the point further, the statesman who assumes that “we” are good while “they” are evil—think George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11—will almost necessarily misinterpret the problem at hand and underestimate the complexity and costs entailed in trying to solve it. In this sense, an awareness of one’s own failings and foibles not only contributes to moral clarity but can help guard against strategic folly.
Whether feigned or real, therefore, innocence poses a problem. Good intentions informed by the simplistic belief that the world can be fixed and things set right only succeed in killing people.
He then pulls the critique together with a rather scathing report on America's culpability as it pertains to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ...
Back in Washington, those who dream up such policies somehow manage to evade accountability. Discredited policymakers depart with clear consciences, en route to a visiting chair at Georgetown or a cushy billet in some think tank. There is no blood on their hands, the dirty work having been contracted out to soldiers, whose compensation, writes Greene, “includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope” and who upon returning home from battle may find their sense of personal culpability more difficult to shake. ... The implications of trivializing Iraq are already evident in the debate regarding “Af--Pak”: the overriding concern becomes one of finding the general best able to apply to Obama’s war the “lessons” taken from Bush’s war. That such an approach should find favor in Washington would not have surprised Graham Greene. Those who conceived the Iraq War, the cheerleaders who promoted it from the sidelines, and critics of that war who have now succeeded to positions of power share a common interest in wiping the slate clean, refurbishing the claim that the United States meant well because the United States always means well. No doubt mistakes were made. Yet America’s benign intentions expiate sins committed along the way—or allow those in authority to assign responsibility for any sins to soldiers who in doing Washington’s bidding became sources of embarrassment.
Vietnam once laid waste to Washington’s claim of innocence, until Ronald Reagan helped restore that claim. Every indication suggests that American innocence will survive Iraq as well, this time with Barack Obama as chief enabler helping to sanitize or erase all that we do not wish to remember. A people famous for their self-professed religiosity won’t even bother to look for someone to whom they can express contrition.
As one who has made arguments in favor of the Obama approach to the war in Afghanistan from both national security and human rights perspectives, the words of Professor Bacevich and Graham Greene are sobering reminders about the limits of good intentions. Their unsentimental assessment of shared human failings; the capacity for self deception, moral corruption, the tragedy of faith over reason, a lack of historical perspective, psycho-emotional distresses, and the recurring base venality of key actors certainly gives pause and makes it hard not to waiver in the estimation that the war in Afghanistan can have a good outcome.
History suggests it can not ... and hope suggests nothing but hope.