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Reflection Eternal
By: Spencer Ackerman Friday March 6, 2009 3:57 pm	Tweet

Call me a kiss-ass, particularly after this, but when was the last time you saw an author publicly admit to coming off like a jerk in his book?

Mr Nordlinger also criticizes me (again fairly, I think, on reflection) for portraying myself as more culturally adept than others I worked with in the field, writing “the author likes to paint himself as the one native-knower—the Malinowski of the warrior class—amid oaﬁsh and insensitive palefaces. This, too, is unbecoming (even if occasionally—occasionally—true).” He has a point – I was abashed to read this in his review, went back and looked at the book, and realized that he is quite correct. I do often seem to suggest that I knew better than the others around me. It was indeed unbecoming of me, and I apologize unreservedly for giving that impression.

3 Comments

3 Responses to “Reflection Eternal”

WilliamOckham March 6th, 2009 at 5:16 pm

I really wonder about Kilcullen. From the review you linked:

But whatever the reason, the fact is that the book Mr Bacevich criticizes so harshly is simply not the book I wrote…

Some examples. Mr Bacevich writes “the consummate counterinsurgency professional understands that the application of technique, however skillful, will not suffice to salvage the Long War. Yet as someone deeply invested in that conflict, [Kilcullen] cannot bring himself to acknowledge the conclusion to which his own analysis points: the very concept of waging a Long War as the antidote to Islamism is fundamentally and irrevocably flawed.”

I agree completely. I said so in the book, actually, in chapter 5. At the top of page 268, I write “counterinsurgency in general is a game we need to avoid wherever possible. If we we are forced to intervene, we now (through much hard experience) have a reasonably sound idea of how to do so. But we should avoid such interventions wherever possible, simply because the costs are so high and the benefits so doubtful.”

Who in their right minds equates “fundamentally and irrevocably flawed” with “avoid wherever possible”? Kilcullen seems to think his job is to help other people do a better job with things that are fundamentally and irrevocably flawed (or, to use his own words to you, f**king stupid which does seem equivalent to fundamentally and irrevocably flawed). He may be really, really, smart, but he’s nowhere near as wise as Bacevich.

Kilo March 6th, 2009 at 9:00 pm

…he’s nowhere near as wise as Bacevich.

How did you write that after reading a resounding arsekicking of his sloppy, lazy, fundamentally flawed review ?

WilliamOckham March 7th, 2009 at 5:25 pm

In response to Kilo @ 2

I haven’t read the book or the review, only Kilcullen’s response. Far from being ‘a resounding arsekicking’, Kilcullen’s response proved Bacevich right. Look again at the bit of the response I included. If you can’t see the difference between what the Bacevich quote and the Kilcullen quote, you are as blinded by Kilcullen’s brilliance as he is himself. If so, you are blinded to the moral depravity of Kilcullen’s position.

Later on in his response, Kilcullen appears not to see the difference between Bacevich’s call to ’stop digging the hole’ and his own position of ‘doing a better job of digging the hole’. In short, Kilcullen shows himself to be a fool. He can’t grasp the notion (which Bacevich has clearly stated) that there is an alternative to fighting the Long War and that alternative is to stop fighting it.

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