Mark Helprin—author of my favorite novel when I was a naive fourteen—published another well-written, ur-conservative editorials in the Wall Street Journal today. You can (and will) disagree with the sentiment, but you must admit that the man can control his clauses:
The pity is that the war could have been successful and this equilibrium sustained had we struck immediately, preserving the link with September 11th; had we disciplined our objective to forcing upon regimes that nurture terrorism the choice of routing it out with their ruthless secret services or suffering the destruction of the means to power for which they live; had we husbanded our forces in the highly developed military areas of northern Saudi Arabia after deposing Saddam Hussein, where as a fleet in being they would suffer no casualties and remain at the ready to reach Baghdad, Damascus, or Riyadh in three days; and had we taken strong and effective measures for our domestic protection while striving to stay within constitutional limits and eloquently explaining the necessity—as has always been the case in war—for sometimes exceeding them.
The children on the Corner think otherwise. According to Peter Wehner, Helprin’s editorial is both wrong and chock-full of “very sloppy writing.” The above soundly refutes the sloppiness argument, but you should know better than to expect sound arguments from people who think “Charles Krauthammer [is] America’s best columnist and one of our finest geopolitical thinkers.” My favorite bits:
This is an example of very sloppy writing on the part of Helprin…
I gather that Helprin is lamenting the fact that we did not attack Iraq immediately after 9/11. But we could barely attack Afghanistan immediately after September 11, 2001, and Afghanistan required a strategic innovation that Halperin totally ignores…
Reading between the lines, his use of the word “eloquently” probably translates into “we need more speeches written by Mark Halperin.” It’s worth recalling, then, that Helprin’s most notable speechwriting achievement to date was penning Robert Dole’s 1996 acceptance speech, arguing that Dole would be our Bridge to the Past. The speech was a bust, and helped contribute to Dole’s loss to Bill Clinton…
Helprin is right that many Democrats have been feckless. But if everyone from George W. Bush to Democrats have been feckless—and surely Helprin would throw in every other global ally on that spectrum, too—then Halperin is saying everybody, but him, has got it wrong. This is akin to the man on the highway who is going the wrong way and talks to his wife on the phone about how many morons are going the wrong way.
However would he know what that feels like?
The Edge of the American West 
31 comments
December 19, 2008 at 11:55 am
kid bitzer
“had we husbanded our forces in the highly developed military areas of northern Saudi Arabia after deposing Saddam Hussein”
one of the weird little glitches in the grand and glorious plan was the simple fact that we didn’t catch saddam until december, eight months after the invasion.
that little loose end meant the end of rummies favorite plan, where you pull everyone back out now that you’ve destroyed the regime. there was wide-spread fear that, with s.h. still alive and on the loose, he would simply reconstitute his powers, little diminished. and of course bush wanted his head to put on the wall, for personal reasons.
so the fast in-fast out plan was scuppered by this silly little man’s ability to stay on the run for eight months. (not that it was a very good plan to begin with).
and after eight months of increasing involvement on the ground, the slow war was well under way.
(this same story can be told about the wmds–bush knew that they were a joke, but he at least thought they would quickly find enough to rub in the faces of blix and el-baradei. but they wasn’t there to be found. so the long search. so the slow war.)
anyhow–reading helprin’s fantasia is a good reminder of that old neo-con plan, and how it came a-cropper.
December 19, 2008 at 12:38 pm
TF Smith
What do you mean “we”, white man?
December 19, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Vance
preserving the link with September 11th
If I’m reading right, this is a positive avowal of the Green Lantern Theory — if we had only struck while we still vividly remembered the Maine, our wills would have remained strong.
December 19, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Neon Olive
I’ve met Helprin before myself, as a child (he has two daughters close to my age), and while I’ve enjoyed his creative writing, I strongly disagree with his politics. He also seems rather paranoid. I remember a particular instance where he charged down the hall, yelling and running at full speed, all because a goat had gotten its head stuck in a bucket.
/delurk
December 19, 2008 at 1:31 pm
JPool
but you must admit that the man can control his clauses
Well, he certainly uses a lot of them. I’ll give you that.
December 19, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Anderson
He was a guy who talked with semicolons, like a heavy novel.
December 19, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Cosma
had we husbanded our forces in the highly developed military areas of northern Saudi Arabia … at the ready to reach … Riyadh in three days
Oh yeah, that would’ve worked without a glitch.
December 19, 2008 at 4:17 pm
jazzbumpa
“This is an example of very sloppy writing on the part of Helprin…”
Uh . . . don’t you mean on the part of Wehner?
Looks like Hel/Hal-prin/perin is attempting to emulate he writing style of Jane Austin, though he’s a semicolon or two sort of the mark. I’m in awe of anyone who can manage a 140 word sentence that does not spin out of control.
December 19, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Dan
The excerpt from the Helprin piece is not well-written. The bit about “disciplined our objective to forcing upon regimes” is a mess, and doesn’t make sense — what the hell is he trying to say? Later, he tells us we should “husband our forces,” but then those forces morph into “a fleet in being” — that’s sloppy thinking. Then he uses the gobbledygook phrases “domestic protection” and “explaining the necessity” and “sometimes exceeding them,” when he really means “repressing internal dissent” and “using effective propaganda” and “violating the Constitution” — such gobbledygook means you can’t trust him to say what he means.
Good writing stems from good thinking and sound ethics. Helprin exhibits sloppy thinking and questionable morality. Therefore this is not a well-written piece.
December 19, 2008 at 6:07 pm
SEK
Neon Olive, de-lurk more often! I know someone who knew his daughter at Harvard, and she wrote a mean—in all senses—description of a typical day at the Helprin household in a parody of Helprin’s style. Started with swimming, swimming, horses, swimming with horses, &c. That said, his fetish for only reading dead authors puts him an awkward position. In the same article (which I can’t locate at the moment) in which he claims to never have read a work of popular fiction, he says that Freddy and Fredericka was written in the style of Mark Twain. There’s a serious, serious lapse in logic there that no amount of reverence for bygone The Golden Age of Universal Appreciation for Great Works of Literature can spackle over.
jazzbumpa, that’s a quotation from Wehner.
As am I. People don’t understand how difficult it is to write a sentence that long that’s intelligible and seemingly necessary. Sure, I could write a epic catalog (or parody of one, a la Sterne or Pynchon) that beats Helprin’s sentence fifty-fold, but that’d be cheating. Not that Helprin doesn’t cheat a bit too: if his Haggadah looked like mine, he could’ve cribbed the structure from “Dayenu.”
DIE-AI-NU!
December 19, 2008 at 8:16 pm
nick
Dan, above, commits Orwell’s Fallacy, confusing rhetoric with “sloppy thinking”……
December 20, 2008 at 2:42 am
Michael Turner
I was just over a Google Image Search, trying to find a photo with Mark Helprin with a pith helmet and riding crop. No luck so far, but the excerpt above (and all the anecdotal horsiness since) encourages me in the belief that I’ll find one soon enough.
He’s right, of course: we should have positioned our cavalry to strike at Baghdad, Damascus or Riyadh, in three days of hard writing. I mean, hard riding. Oh, hell, I mean whatever Helprin means whenever he writes such damned nonsense so damned well.
Later on, though, he used “existential threat”. Whenever you see this on a road sign, it means “no through way (at least not to anything like coherent meaning.)” In that way, it’s sort of like “fiat money” when people are commenting on economics. Most econ bloggers should just set up their spam filters to automatically bounce comments with “fiat money” in them; I don’t know why they don’t.
Obviously, Helprin knows nothing of war. Why, back when I was in ‘Nam . . . .
December 20, 2008 at 3:14 am
SEK
I know Michael’s agreeing, er, lamenting with me here, but given that I can’t read Anderson’s responses after he thought my actual, non-sarcastic reading of “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” was “hippies suck,” I feel like I should clarify explicitly and definitively (and lay it on a wee bit bit thick):
Of course Helprin’s wrong here: I wouldn’t have said you’d disagree with him if I thought otherwise; nor would I have I highlighted how naive my fourteen-year-old faith in his aggressively libertarian epistemology was; nor would I have used the word “epistemology” so cavalierly if I didn’t, um, otherwise think you’d blame him for my overreaching; but my point is—if I have one—that stacking clauses ain’t as easy as it looks, no matter how easy the mannered prose of expert stylists make them (or it) look; that, in fact, there’s an artistry to pancaking clauses on atop another, comma-splice by comma-splice, I can’t replicate here without violating the very tenets of the things of which I’m trying to demonstrate the difficulty of doing elegantly, or even gracefully, without also thereby demonstrating how pitfully us (we?) highly critical mortal-type writers do at imitating the mannered, balanced rambling of a Rosa Coldfield.
December 20, 2008 at 5:13 am
chris y
preserving the link with September 11th
Well, given that Iraq had no link with September 11th whatsoever, I offer this as prima facie evidence of sloppy writing.
December 20, 2008 at 6:02 am
silbey
so the fast in-fast out plan was scuppered by this silly little man’s ability to stay on the run for eight months. (not that it was a very good plan to begin with).
“If so much of a sniff of Hussein appears near the government, we’re coming back, and it’ll take us another three weeks to do it.”
Oh yeah, that would’ve worked without a glitch.
Well, of course, it wouldn’t have worked without a glitch. War plans don’t. The question is would it have worked better than what we actually did, and I think there’s a strong argument that it would have.
Our (or Bush’s) argument was with the Iraqi *state*, which we defeated easily, not with the Iraqi *nation*, which we didn’t.
Of course Helprin’s wrong here
I don’t think he’s wrong militarily (ethically, politically, quite possibly).
But to put quote another somewhat disfavored political philosopher at the moment: “You go to war with the Army you have.” The Army we had in 2003 was not good at counterinsurgency but extremely good at conventional war. So either you don’t invade Iraq (my preferred choice), you do it as you did Afghanistan by getting local allies (not really possibly in Saddam’s Iraq, plus the aftermath of 1991 made local allies quite wary of joining in with us), or you invade in a way that avoids the counterinsurgency requirement.
The British did it all the time in the 19th century and militarily it worked quite well. (“expeditionary warfare” they called it).
December 20, 2008 at 6:05 am
silbey
Note that I’m separating military effectiveness from a whole range of other “effectivenesses,” like moral and ethical.
December 20, 2008 at 6:17 am
Michael Turner
Wait — hippies don’t suck?
Oh, I just don’t understand anything anymore.
It’s not sloppy writing, chris y, it’s just sloppy thinking.
Helprin’s armchair counterfactual strategizing is a little pathetic. If anything, Al Qaeda people probably hoped that the U.S. would concentrate forces in northern Saudi Arabia, and that those forces could be baited into marching on Riyadh, provoking outrage among Saudis, and sparking an insurgency. If that insurgency strategically retreated, taking heavy casualties around the peninsula, and then maneuvered so as to be pushed toward Mecca and Medina, the march of “infidel” forces on the trail of “jihadi martyrs” headed into the two holiest cities in Islam would have inflamed muslim sentiment worldwide. Inflaming anti-U.S. sentiment worldwide — isn’t that a lot of the reason why a little country like North Vietnam could send the biggest superpower packing?
As it was, Al Qaeda made out pretty well anyway. U.S. forces mostly left Saudi Arabia — satisfying one of bin Laden’s demands. Iraq became a jihadi practice ground, and insurgent techniques developed there are increasingly being used in Afghanistan. If, under the pressure of demographics and a drop in oil prices, Saudi Arabia goes through islamic revolution and becomes a sort of Al Qaeda Arabia, the U.S. will be more inclined to let it go as long as it has a toehold in Iraq and a guardian relationship with Iraqi oil production potential. A clever trade, in a way.
Could Al Qaeda strategists have gamed out all these scenarios and more? How could they be that smart? Well, I understand that objection, but remember: thinking about stuff like this is what they do for a living, all day, every day, year in and year out. Strategists in Al Qaeda probably understand people like Helprin better than Helprin understands strategists in Al Qaeda. I bet if you could have penetrated Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in early 2001, you would have found all kinds of American neo-con writings in Arabic translation. Too much has been made of Qutb’s influence on these people, I think, but if Qutb’s American experiences taught them anything, it was: know the enemy. When Dubya was elected, they probably thought: wow, here’s a great chance, better not blow it. One airliner? No, let’s do four, just to be sure.
December 20, 2008 at 8:14 am
Otey
In what is a first for me, agree with the Cornerites that this is terrible writing. It’s both overdone and confused.
December 20, 2008 at 8:21 am
tf smith
You know, when my 14-year-old has a better understanding of grand strategy based on The Princess Bride than Mr. “British Merchant Navy, Israeli infantry, and Israeli Air Force,” I think we can all safely ignore his idiotic ramblings.
Vizzini for National Security Adviser.
December 20, 2008 at 10:31 am
Sir Charles
I”m unimpressed by the writing and even more underwhelmed by the “thinking.” This is hysterical thinking masquerading as tough guy prose. The idea of Iran + terrorists as existential threat is ludicrous, as is the notion that China or Russia as being serious threats.
How about getting our asses out of the Muslim world and using our best diplomatic efforts to do what we can to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, helping out, if possible, with the dispute over Kashmir, while undermining the hard line faction in Iran through constructive contact. I know we don’t get to blow shit up this way and the body count will be minimal, but it just might make us all safer and happier.
December 20, 2008 at 5:54 pm
jazzbumpa
Chris @ 5:13 a.m.
No, man, sloppy thinking. Sloppy writing would mean bad mechanics. Content is not a relevant criterion.
SEK –
Good effort. I think you made up to, but not including “I can’t replicate here” before it spun out of control. That gives you 103. Not bad at all.
December 20, 2008 at 5:56 pm
jazzbumpa
SEK –
“jazzbumpa, that’s a quotation from Wehner.”
Opps. My bad.
December 20, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Michael Turner
“This is hysterical thinking masquerading as tough guy prose.”
No, no. Hysterical thinking, maybe. But tough guy prose is something else.
Tough guys don’t use “husband” as a verb. Tough guys would never write “a fleet in being” — to them, it makes the troops sound (how would they say it? Ah– ) “a little light in their loafers — not that there’s anything wrong with that, ha ha.” Tough guys would never talk about the need to defend any policy “eloquently”. If you ended up resorting to eloquence, it’s obviously because you didn’t use the language of force nearly hard enough.
“Sir Charles” has inspired me with his second paragraph. It’s pretty “tough guy”, in its own way. I propose a contest: rewrite the quoted paragraph in “tough guy prose.” Here’s my entry:
“You want to know how we could’ve kept the respect of Middle East governments? We should’ve hit Iraq — hard — right after 9/11. All those terror-promoting regimes? They all torture. So we could’ve just told them: ‘Look, you round up some of those terrorists you love so much, and torture ’em until they tell you where all the rest of them are. You do it starting now. You don’t, and first it’s our bombers with the daisy-cutters, then it’s the cruise missiles hitting you wherever you’re hiding from the daisy-cutters, then it’s our boots, on your ground, and up your asses, in three days, tops. You think we won’t? Watch us do it Iraq, starting early next week.’ In the meantime, we should’ve clamped our borders shut, deported any foreign nationals who were are citizens of one of those terror-lovin’ nations, and if any candy-ass liberals complained about how we violated human rights in the process, we should’ve said, ‘Hey, you don’t like it here? Then leave. Nobody will miss you.'”
Well, that’s my entry. But what would I know? When I was sophomore in high school, I was the dweeby little guy that the football team members slammed against lockers in darkened hallways.
December 21, 2008 at 6:24 am
drip
The problem with tough guy prose is that you have to be able to do the tough guy thing to be a tough guy and tough guys, at least American tough guys, don’t talk — they do. They certainly don’t do what Helprin does — control their clauses. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” “I have not yet begun to fight,” and “Nuts!” lack clauses but not punch.
As for Helprin’s prose, I find that its form outweighs its substance. It’s amazing in its technical accomplishment, but it meanders. That doesn’t help him make his case to tough guys.
December 21, 2008 at 12:42 pm
SEK
Chris and Sir Charles: jazzbumpa’s correct, there’s no direct correlation between prose style and agreeing-with-us-politically. There may seem to be, but 1) Edmund Burke, 2) Wordsworth, and 3) every conservative student I’ve ever taught. I think 3) is what convinces me that pedagogical arguments which run the course yours do—that bad thinking manifests in bad writing or vice versa, i.e. “the linguistic turn,” which flattened all language usage into politics, such that it became theoretically impossible to untangle the two in the classroom—are highly problematic. Writing a clean, crisp sentence forces you to come to terms with your ideological assumptions, but you might well be C.S. Lewis and produce crisp, clean articulations of Christian doctrine.
Also, jazzbumpa:
I think you made up to, but not including “I can’t replicate here” before it spun out of control. That gives you 103. Not bad at all.
I did that on purpose! (I comma-spliced immediately after lamenting comma splices, because I’m arrogant and want to be known as being too clever by whole.) (See! I did it again! I can’t hardly stand me!)
December 21, 2008 at 7:40 pm
jazzbumpa
SEK –
OK. I’ll give you a promotion from “not bad at all” to “a little bit better than pretty good.”
But you’re still only too clever by .618. Try to stand yourself a little bit.
December 22, 2008 at 6:56 am
ajay
In that way, it’s sort of like “fiat money” when people are commenting on economics. Most econ bloggers should just set up their spam filters to automatically bounce comments with “fiat money” in them; I don’t know why they don’t.
In these days of state bailouts for GM, Ford and Chrysler, the existence of Fiat money is an important political question.
December 22, 2008 at 8:39 am
silbey
at least American tough guys, don’t talk — they do.
*mythical* american tough guys don’t talk. Actual American tough guys have been quite chatty, indeed. Think of Theodore Roosevelt (who never actually did speak softly) and George Patton (although does the talking count if every other word is an expletive?).
December 22, 2008 at 11:31 am
matt w
I think the description of what Helprin is doing is not “tough guy talk” but “blowhardiness.”
I’m not sure whether any of my problems with the passage have to do with the form rather than the content, and I’m not interested in being sure. (I also don’t think you can always draw a sharp distinction.) When Helprin talks about “ruthless secret services” and regimes “suffering the destruction of the means to power” and, as Dan already noted, “eloquently explaining the necessity—as has always been the case in war—for sometimes exceeding” constitutional protections, he’s engaging in manly martial bluster designed to cast an honorable veneer over his proposed plan of killing people, torturing people, and having nasty regimes torture them for us. Whether this is a flaw in his writing per se may depend on whether Orwell was right that bad writing covers up unpleasant realities, or whether good writing can also be used to cover up unpleasant realities. Perhaps I should say “technically adept writing” there. Coincidentally, I think the two passages I just quoted spin out of control a little.
As for what Wehner said, it seemed to me that he was (sloppily) accusing Helprin of sloppy quotation, and that his inconsistency in spelling Helprin’s name has bugger-all to do with the soundness of his argument. But this topic is a little less worthy of attention than the story of whatever happened to the third runner-up on the second season of Survivor.
On a subject maybe of more interest, Scott, this woman wrote a long and very interesting post comparing the visions of the city in A Winter’s Tale and Batman Begins. Her argument, IIRC, was that Batman Begins represents a rejection of the temptation of A Winter’s Tale. But I can’t find the post; maybe if you ask her she can find it for you.
May 18, 2009 at 9:15 pm
mike bailey
Nobody found fault with “…the choice of routing it out with their ruthless secret services…”? Let me just say: rooting it out, rooting, rooting, rooting, dash it all!
May 18, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Vance
The dictionaries seem to tolerate “rout out” as a variant of “root out”.