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Файл:Speak and Write like The Economist говори и пиши как The Economist
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War, violence, terrorism, spying, diplomacy, crime, hunting
Americans like fi rearms. According to a report from the Congressional
Research Service there were 294m guns in the country in 2007, up from
192m in 1994.
Do not underestimate the power of a piece of paper.
The Chinese military just don’t understand how to do “warm and fuzzy”
when they engage with the outside world.
Mr Kjos has the ambition and appetite for risk of a Viking hopping on alongboat and paddling off to pillage Northumberland.
The statistics of the war are almost mind-numbing. Estimates differ, but
up to 70m people died as a direct consequence of the fi ghting between
1939 and 1945, about two-thirds of them non-combatants, making it in
absolute terms the deadliest confl ict ever. Nearly one in ten Germans
died and 30% of their army. About 15m Chinese perished and 27m Soviets. Squeezed between two totalitarian neighbours, Poland lost 16% of
its population, about half of them Jews who were part of Hitler’s fi nal
solution. On ave rage, nearly 30,000 people were being killed every day.
American and British generals had to eschew the dashing aggression of
their Russian and German counterparts, who could squander lives with
impunity. Thanks to the bloodbath in Russia, where the Wermacht was
broken and nine out of ten German soldiers who died in the war met
their end, they could permit themselves to be more cautious.
Some years ago, Mr Hague says, it was predicted that the world
would evolve into a series of fi xed blocks. The only telephone
numbers needed for diplomacy would be in Washington, Brussels and Beijing. That has been proved wrong: the world has never looked more multipolar and networked.
In war, it is said, there are no unwounded soldiers. Bombs that shatter
bones also batter brains.
Military technology, unsurprisingly, is at the forefront of the
march towards self-determining machines Its evolution is producing an extraordinary variety of species. The Sand Flea can
leap through a window or onto a roof, fi lming all the while. It
then rolls along on wheels until it needs to jump again. RiSE,
a six-legged robo-cockroach, can climb walls. LS 3, a dog-like
robot, trots behind a human over rough terrain, carrying up to
180kg of supplies. SUGV, a briefcase-sized robot, can identify a
151
Часть I
man in a crowd and follow him. There is a fl ying surveillance
drone the weight of a wedding ring, and one that carries 2.7
tonnes of bombs.
The Iranian hostage-takers were astounded to fi nd that, of the four CIA
offi cers in the American embassy in Tehran, none could speak Persian.
There is no point in beating a dead snake.
International Herald Tribune, Jan. 2, 1985: Excerpt from Hitler’s speech
at the 1935 New Year’s reception in Berlin for the diplomatic corps: “The
German people and its government are determined to contribute their
best to the shaping of international relations which will guarantee honest cooperation on the basis of equality for all and which alone will ensure the progress and welfare of the community”.
Guerrilla warfare, however, is harder to model than open battle
of this sort, and the civil insurrection that often precedes it is
harder still. Which, from the generals’ point of view, is a pity,
because such confl ict is the dominant form of strife these days.
The reason for the diffi culty is that the fuel of popular uprisings
is not hardware, but social factors of a type that computer programmers fi nd it diffi cult to capture in their algorithms. Analysing the emotional temperature of postings on Facebook and
Twitter, or the telephone traffi c between groups of villages, is
always going to be a harder task than analysing physics-based
data like atank’s fi ring range or an army’s stocks of ammunition and fuel.
A mass rally in Pyongyang this week to swear allegiance to Mr Kim junior on behalf of the 1.2m members of the army, made the pledge to “wipe
out the enemies to the last one if they intrude into the inviolable sky, land
and seas of the country even 0.001mm.”
When the tribes of ancient Israel defeated the Midianites, the victors got the losers’ 675,000 sheep, 72,000 oxen, 61,000 asses and
32,000 female virgins (males and non-virgin women were slaughtered), as well as the gold and jewels. The biblical account suggests that, in that era at least, this was a standard post-confl ict
resolution of property questions.
Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments (Frederick
the Great).
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War, violence, terrorism, spying, diplomacy, crime, hunting
What matters is the ability to knit everything together on the battlefi eld through what the Chinese called “informatisation” and
what is known in the West as “unifi ed C 4ISR”. (The four Cs are
command, control, communications, and computers; ISR stands
for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; the Pentagon
loves its abbreviations.)
I refer you to some apt lines uttered by Orson Welles in “The Third Man”:
“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder,
and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and
the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500
years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo
clock.”
The memos gave the CIA licence to use “enhanced” techniques
derived from American training advice to pilots and other personnel on how to withstand torture if they should fall into enemy
hands. They are shocking for their bureaucratic punctiliousness.
They parse the degrees of pain that would constitute forbidden
torture (“an intensity akin to the pain accompanying serious
physical injury”). They set out in incongruous detail the limits
of abuse. A prisoner could be deprived of sleep, but for no more
than 180 hours before being allowed to rest for eight. He could be
stripped naked but only if the room was warmer than 68°F (20°C).
He could be doused in water but it had to be potable. He could
be waterboarded with cold (saline) water poured onto his face
but each application should not last more than 40 seconds, there
should be no more than six applications per session, no session
could last more than two hours and there could be only two sessions in 24 hours. One prisoner, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the
operational head of the September 11th 2001 attacks on America,
was waterboarded 183 times.
The world is more stable when one nation dominates, especially when
it is a nation like America. If American leadership does collapse, what
then.
You cannot make war on war and on your neighbor at the same
time.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi had to pack his bags to leave Hiroshima after
a three-month assignment as an engineer in the Mitsubishi shipyard;
there were goodbyes to say at the offi ce, then a 200-mile train journey
153
Часть I
back to Nagasaki to his wife Hisako and Katsutoshi, his baby son. It
was a beautiful August day and he noticed an aircraft circling, and two
parachutes dropping down… His status was recognised by the Japanese
government: he became offi cially (though there had been more than 100
others) the only nijyuu hibakusha, or twice-victim of the atom bomb.
America is estimated to have over 33,000 gangs, with approximately 1.4m members; the great bulk of these are in cities.
Teddy Roosevelt’s advice to speak softly and carry a big stick.
American Congressman says he is a friend on Monday and sends
money to extremists on Tuesday.
He made wild bets, too, on anything, as long as he was likely to win. He
bet on which of fi ve sugar cubes a fl y would land on; whether a stray cat
could carry a Coke bottle across a room; whether he could beat Bobby
Riggs at table tennis played with iron skillets, and Minnesota Fats at pool
with a broom; whether he dared ride a camel through the fanciest casino
in Marakesh, and whether he could hang on to a horse’s tail for a quarter
of a mile. He won them all until, as the song said, even the Devil wouldn’t
bet with him.
That Chongqing’s dirty linen was aired in front of American diplomats on his watch may matter more than the dirt itself.
The telegraph operator— incoming telegrams to large Berlin banks —
orders of securities to be purchased— speculator informed fi rst.
Even given more money, soldiers and equipment, the formula for
success in foreign wars remains mysterious. Iraq, Afghanistan
and even Libya have hardly been unqualifi ed successes for Western intervention.
The United States then made some 30 military interventions in and
around the Caribbean in the next 30 years, many of them under Smedley
Butler, a marine corps general, who summed up his career thus: “Ihelped
make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. Ihelped
make Mexico…safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make
Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. Ihelped in the raping of half a dozen Central American
republics for the benefi t of Wall Street… I helped purify Nicaragua for
the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–12. Ibrought
154
War, violence, terrorism, spying, diplomacy, crime, hunting
light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In
China, Ihelped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”
As Carl von Clausewitz, a great Prussian strategist, put it: “War is
not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means.”
He had been born during the war, grown up during the misery of the
infl ation and the restlessness of the postwar years, and had awakened
during a new war.
At weekends, a handy man with a spanner, he would get under the
hood of neighbours’ cars and mend children’s bikes. His ranchstyle house in Seven Hills sat on half an acre, where he proudly
grew tomatoes and zucchini. From 1977 to 1993, however, he became Ivan the Terrible, who had roamed the concentration camp
at Treblinka in Poland with a whip, or a sword, in his big mechanic’s hands. As the naked Jews ran shivering from the trains to the
gas chambers he would slash off an ear, rip open abelly, or fl og
them til they fell. He drilled the anus of one man with an auger,
and shoved the face of another hard into barbed wire. An expert
on engines, he had operated the diesels that pumped out carbon
monoxide to kill 870,000 people.
The country was the original home of the young man with explosive
underpants who tried to blow up an American airliner over Detroit at
Christmas.
When it comes to a 30-year partner of the United States, a man
who has helped keep peace in the region and been a durable ally
in the war on terrorism, Mr. Obama is quick to toss Mr. Mubarak
under the bus.
We’ve been studying nuclear waste for 40 years and we still have no idea
what to do with it.
There is a long tradition of shooting messengers who bring bad
news.
The bomber always get through. Charles Portal was thrilled to learn in
1944 that a single Lancaster bomber had eliminated more German manhours on its fi rst sortie than the number of British man-hours required
to build it, suggesting that all subsequent sorties would be “clear profi t”.
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Часть I
Swastika— to some a 5,000-year-old symbol of peace— Sanskrit
svastika — “good-luck sign,” from svasti “good luck”.
Next time you bury a beet bottle stuffed with money in a park, you
should ponder what cameras and sensors may be hidden in the trees
nearby. Like so many other once-solid professions, spying is becoming
less of a career and more a job for free lancers.
Precedent suggests that voters unhappy about the economy will
dump successful war leaders. The fi rst George Bush’s triumph
in the fi rst Gulf war did not win him a second term. British voters turfed out Winston Churchill two months after his victory
against Hitler. And Mr Obama has not “won” the war against alQaeda. Killing Mr bin Laden has scotched the snake, not killed it.
NATO was making in Afghanistan the best of a bad job.
General Tommy Franks describes him as the “dumbest fucking
guy on the planet”.
George Bush repeated like a scratched gramophone record that Americans were at war with the terrorists who had attacked them on 9/11, not
at war with Islam.
Sun Tzu, a Chinese general, was writing “The Art of War”, a book
that celebrates cunning by arguing that the way to win is by always doing the opposite of what your opponent expects.
Could Mrs Thatcher have survived as prime minister had the Falklands
not been retaken? (In her memoirs, she says not.) Would the Tories
have won the 1983 election had Argentina never invaded? (Probably).
Lady Thatcher’s victory suggested that war could achieve political ends
quickly and effi ciently.
In 1993 Colin Powell (then the top soldier) told the Senate that
when the world dialled 911, the emergency phone number, America was expected to answer.
The odour of a police station like the ammoniac smell of zoos all over
the world.
And to defend against the invading legions of would-be gardeners and hotel cleaners, the US-Mexican frontier is also equipped
156
War, violence, terrorism, spying, diplomacy, crime, hunting
with high-tech military gizmos, such as unmanned spy planes
with infra-red cameras.
In England between the 13th and 16th centuries, extramarital sex was
policed with such energy that up to 90% of the litigation handled by
church courts was about combating fornication, adultery, sodomy and
prostitution. The punishments were often savage. When the Reformation
got going in the mid-16th.
A weathered Middle East truism holds that, while there can be no
all-out Arab-Israeli war without Egypt, there can be no long-term
peace without Syria.
On April 2nd 2003, during the second Gulf war, a hundred or so Iraqi
armoured vehicles approached a far smaller American reconnaissance
unit south of Baghdad. Responding to a call for help, a B-52 bomber attacked the fi rst 30 or so vehicles in the column with a single, historic pass.
It dropped two new CBU-105 bombs, and the result shocked the soldiers
of both sides— and, soon enough, military observers everywhere. While
falling, the CBU-105 bombs popped open, each releasing ten submunitions which were slowed by parachutes. Each of these used mini rockets
to spin and eject outward four discs the size of ice-hockey pucks. The 80
free-falling discs from the pair of bombs then scanned the ground with
lasers and heat-detecting infra-red sensors to locate armoured vehicles.
Those discs that identifi ed a target exploded dozens of metres up. The
blast propelled a tangerine-sized slug of copper down into the target, destroying it with the impact and the accompanying shrapnel. The soldiers
in the 70 vehicles farther back in the column surrendered immediately.
In the 20 years since the end of the cold war NATO’s obituary has
been written many times, so far always prematurely. In aworld
of few dragons but a great many more snakes, it can look clumsy.
Seven of the world’s eight most violent countries lie on the bloody traffi cking route from the cocaine fi elds of the Andes to the nostrils of North
America.
Somalia is not important until it launches a terrorist attack which
makes it important.
There are over 17,000 Border Patrol agents on the border with Mexico, a
fi vefold increase over 1993. They patrol in cars and all-terrain vehicles,
on bicycles and horses, in boats, planes and helicopters. When there are
157
Часть I
no agents around, cameras, reconnaissance drones and three different types of sensors— seismic, magnetic and infra-red— keep tabs on
things. A third of the border is fenced, and most of the rest is in areas so
remote or rugged as to make fences pointless or impractical. Some parts
of the fence are 17 feet high, with metal plates extending ten feet below
ground to prevent tunneling.
To bomb Iran’s programme out of existence.
The United States then made some 30 military interventions in and
around the Caribbean in the next 30 years, many of them under Smedley
Butler, a marine corps general, who summed up his career thus: “Ihelped
make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903. Ihelped
make Mexico…safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make
Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. Ihelped in the raping of half a dozen Central American
republics for the benefi t of Wall Street…I helped purify Nicaragua for
the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–12. Ibrought
light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In
China, Ihelped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”
But then the army began marching in the wrong direction, and its
general shot himself in the foot.
Turkish generals are down, but they are not out.
If humans, for example, were black-and-white striped then the
history of intercommunal violence the species has suffered when
different races have met might not have been quite as bad.
“The Godfather’s Michael Corleone: “Never hate your enemies. It affects
your judgment.”
I Since Dunblane, handguns have been outlawed in Britain,
meaning that even the Olympic shooting squad has had to train
abroad. Because of these strict laws, plus Britain’s relative lack
of a hunting culture, gun ownership is unusual: there are just 56
guns per thousand people in Britain, compared with 300 per thousand in Germany and 900 in America.
A fi refi ghter’s fi rst rule of survival is “know your way out”.
The defeats are more painful than the victories are sweet.
158
Russia, USSR, mysterious Russian soul, communism, vodka, fatalism
Napoleon: “Let China sleep, for when she wakes the world will shake.”
Mr Putin uses his KGB training to cultivate those who might be of
use to him. He likes to quote a remark once made to him by Henry
Kissinger, whom he greatly admires: “All decent people started
their careers in intelligence.”
Russia, USSR, mysterious Russian
soul, communism, vodka, fatalism
“
But what exactly makes Russia unique?
It was an old rule in Russia that the subordinate must never be
cleverer than the boss.
The Crimean war was certainly the most signifi cant confl ict of the second half of the 19th century. If deaths from disease are included, it cost at
least 750,000 lives, two-thirds of them Russian, and it triggered big social
and cultural changes in all the countries affected.
Catherine the Great: “Ihave no way to defend my borders but to
extend them.”
Russia holds plenty of promise.
Only Fyodor Dostoyevsky can offer a double lesson on the love of
God and the love of a good woman.
Not everyone will be in a condition to toast death’s imminence with
champagne, as Anton Chekhov did.
Killing someone, Sleed discovers, is “like winning at Russian roulette and having the taste of gunmetal forever on your tongue because even if you win, you lose.”
To the slopes clings Clee Hill village which, until it closed, had Shropshire’s highest pub (called “The Kremlin” because, via the radar aerials
on the hill, its juke box could pick up Radio Moscow).
159
Часть I
As the news broke of the upheaval at home, Lenin became increasingly
desperate. He even considered trying to reach Russia on a false passport, as a Swedish deaf mute. His ever-practical wife reminded him that
this was bound to fail because of his habit of talking— in Russian, angrily, about politics— in his sleep… Lenin lambasted an anti-war article
in The Economist— dismissing it caustically as “a journal which speaks
for British millionaires” — on the ground that the authors wanted peace
only because they were “afraid of revolution”.
“Hitler nudged, so did Stalin,” writes Mr Sunstein.
The Russians are very good at linking two unrelated issues in a negotiation.
Mr Correa, who has a respectable approval rating of 42%, is not
acandidate. He is counting on Lenin Moreno, a former vice-president, and his running mate, Jorge Glas, the current vice-president,
to carry on his “citizens’ revolution”. Mr Moreno, who shares his
alarming fi rst name with 18,000 other Ecuadoreans, hopes to win
in the fi rst round by capturing the bulk of Mr Correa’s support
and adding to it.
The fi rst Russian to inquire about political asylum in Britain may have
been Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who wrote to Queen Elizabeth I in 1570 asking
whether she would take him in if things got too hairy in Moscow. (Elizabeth replied that he could come if he paid his own way.) Ivan never came,
but England has since offered refuge to generations of Russian political
exiles. Alexander Herzen, Russia’s fi rst socialist, came to London in the
1850s and published his newspaper Kolokol (Bell), which was smuggled
back into Russia. Lenin lived briefl y in Bloomsbury, and is said to have met
Stalin at a pub in Clerkenwell. Today London is home both to Mr Putin’s
cronies and to opponents of his regime trying to lay the groundwork for
the day it vanishes.
In cheap action fi lms the bad guy is taken out by force. In the better sort, he falls victim to his own hubris. The great risk, though,
is that Europe and Russia fi nd themselves in a fi lm noir, where the
villain’s plot fails but takes everyone down with it.
Having been caught off guard by online protest movements, many governments are now investing heavily in their web-based propaganda
infrastructure. Russian government agencies, for instance, are not just
good at setting up social-media bots and other spamming weapons to
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