The chairman of the Joint Chiefs on how to win arguments, and also on W.B.Yeats

I was struck by Gen. Martin Dempsey’s observation of what prevails in policy and planning discussions: "when I go into a meeting to discuss policy, discuss strategy, discuss operations, plans, whatever it happens to be, he who has the best context generally prevails in the argument, not necessarily who’s got the best facts. There’s a difference. It’s who has the best context in which those facts exist."

I think Dempsey is right, and the implication is that the way to successfully develop policy is to develop a framework or even a narrative. In other words, you say, "you all know about X, Y and Z. Here is what I think those facts mean, how they are connected."

In the same speech, delivered recently at Duke University, he also made a comment on the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats that actually is related: "he was probably one of those poets unique in that he changed; he allowed himself to change and to reflect about that change as he moved through his life. Now, he did some really bizarre stuff at the end of his life but, that said, he was always a man who could understand his time and himself, and he understood in that regard the context in which he was living." Dempsey didn’t offer an example of Yeats understanding his time, but for starters, I’d recommend "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," one of my favorite poems ever, and one of the first I ever memorized. Next, read "Easter 1916."  

Yeats also wrote these lines that I kept thinking of back in 2003, as the Iraq war began:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The last two lines kept ringing in my head as I watched pundits on TV back then.