Mark Riebling quotes

Every time the Secretary of Defense tries to get a hand on his many intelligence programs, we hear warnings about the dire consequences to liberty. When you look behind those warnings, what you really see is the CIA trying to preserve its perks. (Mark Riebling)
The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military's motives.
Mark Riebling
When the Soviets faced these two leaders of shared purpose and conviction, they faced their worst-case scenario: a moral-political meta-power.
Mark Riebling
Perhaps most surprisingly, the papers show that that, as late as 1984, the pope did not believe the Communist Polish government could be changed.
Mark Riebling
Personal responsibility is a big idea about which little is known. It has received far less study than other key conservative tenets, like economic choice. This lack of attention is striking because personal responsibility is a defining assumption in American thought.
Mark Riebling
We are what we think. To change how people act, we must change what they believe.
Mark Riebling
A Moral Reckoning is, among its other faults, a 352-page exercise in intellectual bad manners. Reading it is like listening for three days to Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe.
Mark Riebling
The flaw in the work is the flaw in the man.
Mark Riebling
I think that in the emergency situations like we have with potentially weapons of mass destruction, the agent in the field needs as much flexibility as he can and the decision of probable cause as to what's going to occur needs to be made not in headquarters and not by the attorney general and not by a special court in Washington, but by the agent in the field who needs to respond immediately.
Mark Riebling
Military intelligence officers cannot afford to be celebrators of diversity, Utopians, game-theorists, apostles of negotiation, or purveyors of the idea that the Internet will bring us all together.
Mark Riebling
Though espionage is supposed to be thrilling, CIA memoirs are often boring. Usually written decades after the fact, always sanitized by government censors, the typical "autospyography" has the vague, approximate effect of a police sketch drawn from the memory of a traumatized witness. (Mark Riebling)
What then is the moral of Churchill's life? He was the twentieth century's great man, but we must sharply circumscribe his greatness. Because he drew the sword from the stone in 1940, what he did before and after seems admirable. Through his steadfast stance, Churchill rallied the English to die with honor-therefore they deserved to win. Whoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whoever shall lose his life shall preserve it (Luke 17:33). Yet were it not for this one courageous triumph, we might now say of him: Never had one man done so little with so much.
Mark Riebling
Though the words "personal" and "personality" date to the 1380s, "responsibility" emerged only in the 1640s, as England began its great democratic ferment. This linguistic lag marked an arrested moral development. Our civilization developed personality early and responsibility late. Only the duties of democratic governance required a word to express the abstract principle, "a state of being responsible."
Mark Riebling
If movement conservatism is less about hating the state than about fighting Godless modernism, this might explain why conservatives have always found actual or cultural wars to fight, but have never got around to shrinking or controlling the growth of government (though centrists like Eisenhower and Clinton did).
Mark Riebling
The Framers did not pioneer the concept of man as a personally responsible agent. That notion, arguably the greatest of all Western ideas, dates to line 32 of Homer's Odyssey, where Zeus asks people to stop blaming their bad choices on the gods.
Mark Riebling
He was the outlier of a new type: the first twentieth-century personality to be famous for being famous. If he toured Africa with 17 pieces of matched luggage, or got hit by a car crossing Fifth Avenue in New York, he wrote about it. His life became a forerunner of reality TV; in today's terms, he did everything to seek celebrity but release a sex tape. A great question of Churchill biography, therefore, is how this Paris Hilton of British politics became the second coming of King Arthur.
Mark Riebling
It would be futile to deny that the Nazis built a vast mass of evil on a vast mass of prejudice. It would be equally futile to deny that strong prejudices against the Jews existed among Christians during the centuries before the Shoah. Since, moreover, the childhood of the European nations was passed under the tutelage of the clergy, we should not be surprised that these prejudices were, in part, ecclesiastically inculcated.
Mark Riebling
Goldhagen does not say it, but one has the sense that he would affix, to every Christian Bible, the warning label: "This text contains hate speech."
Mark Riebling
The history of the CIA brims with inquiries that cowed our spies and ruined their careers.
Mark Riebling
Globalization is a trend with many gurus; not all have been wise. Some, writing during the economic euphoria of the Clinton years, predicted that global trade would translate into global peace. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, Thomas Friedman even dismissed terrorists like Ramzi Youssef, architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as ineffectual "Yahoos" who were not the wave of the future. We know now that the Ramzi Youssefs of the world are not ineffectual; that they will threaten us for decades to come; and that they will seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction and use them against us.
Mark Riebling
France showed as a nation less strength than Churchill showed as a man. (Mark Riebling)
Ever since 1953, when Russell Kirk produced its intellectual coat of arms, conservatism has been "what Edmund Burke wrote." This is the equivalent of Arthur Danto's institutional theory of art-art is whatever the art world says it is. But it's also a cop-out. Instead of analyzing conservatism in an Aristotelian way, instead of asking how we use the term in real life, we just describe Burke. In the process, don't we risk fleeing into what Tanenhaus calls an "alternative universe"? If conservatives are "glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America," as Tanenhaus says, why is the solution to be more like a man who wore a powdered wig? Liberals have problems of their own, but, to their credit, they don't sit around debating whether Hillary Clinton or John Edwards is the "real Rousseauian."
Mark Riebling
Many good writers, from Montaigne to Mencken, have been impolitic, colicky, or sassy.
Mark Riebling
Congress imposed a warrant requirement in 1978 which JFK didn't use when he went after the Klan. He put the Klan out of business, but he didn't do it with -- by going through the courts. He did it by burglarizing Klan offices. I think we need to use hardcore tactics against a hardcore threat.
Mark Riebling
Following the pattern set by Julius Caesar in The Gallic War, Churchill wrote books to vindicate policy; but he may also have made policy with an eye toward writing books. If so, the implications are alarming. Did Churchill conceive bold operations, such as the disastrous 1915 Dardanelles offensive, because these would make exciting episodes in the text of his life? A. J. Balfour once joked that Winston had written an enormous book about himself and called it The World Crisis. Was there more truth in that joke than we have so far known?
Mark Riebling