May 31, 1999
Web posted at: 11:14 a.m. EDT (1514 GMT)

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 Bal- kans. 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.

Cover Date: June 7, 1999

• The Cox report hypes the China danger, but the rivalry is real and growing.
• Is China's military the biggest winner from the boom in trade with U.S. technology firms?
• China wants to be a world power on a par with the U.S., but it has a lot of catching up to do
• When the U.S. bungles, the world sees a conspiracy. The story may be simpler
• Gore joins the choir, saying that faith has a role in public life. How did the idea go mainstream?
• Mental health reform: What it would really take
• Inside Kosovo: A visit to a devastated land
• On the stump, Hillary comes down in size and sounds more like Al than Bill
• Judicious spending

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