While We Were Sleeping.

Life is full of surprises.

I’m reliably informed that there are people in Washington and other western capitals who were “surprised” by the ineffectiveness of the recent US/Israeli campaign against Iran, and by the effective surrender of the US as demonstrated in the very one-sided Memorandum of Understanding agreed last week. I put “surprised”in quotation marks, because it’s a word I will come back to several times, and it’s a kind of leitmotif for western policy and western misunderstanding over the last couple of generations. It’s not unique to the West, to be fair, but the West has been the most powerful politico-military actor of modern times, and we’ll concentrate on the West for the most part.

In fact, governments experience surprises all the time, in the sense that things happen which were not expected, or things happen that were thought possible but very unlikely, or things that were thought inevitable don’t happen at all. This is sufficiently common in international politics, and sufficiently serious in its implications, that I thought it might be useful to devote an essay to the question of Why such surprises happen: a subject which hardly anyone takes an interest in, since politically it’s usually enough just to condemn you opponents for being naive, ignorant or stupid, demand an enquiry and the job is done.

So here, I’m first going to discuss what “surprise” means in different contexts, then I’ll look at the mechanics of why international politics is so often so full of “surprises,” and finally at the mechanisms and weaknesses that help surprises to happen.

**********************

These essays will always be free, but you can continue to support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and to other sites that you frequent. If you would like to take out a paid subscription I won’t stand in your way, (indeed, I’d be very honoured ) but I can’t promise anything in return except a warm feeling of virtue. A special thanks to those who have taken out paid subscriptions recently. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thanks to all of those who have recently contributed.

*********************************

But let’s stay with the Iran example for a moment. We’ll see, in fact, that it’s a classic example of surprise-at-failure, which is one of the different types of surprise I will discuss. Here, the actual fact of the outbreak of the conflict was scarcely surprising: US leaders had been threatening to attack Iran for at least a decade. Even the date chosen to begin the attack fell within the window of what was expected, and what could be discerned from troop and air movements. The method employed—air attack—was predictable. And finally, it was no surprise at all that Israel would join in, since their hostile intentions towards Iran had been publicly displayed for a long time. Nobody, least of all the Iranians, was therefore surprised, which was itself not an ideal situation for the US to be in, when attacking someone’s country.

Surprise-at-failure (and I’ll give other examples) occurred because the overall strategic situation was read wrongly by those who made the decisions. Now it seems that not even the most unbalanced actors in Washington thought that the US could mount a massive ground invasion with air support, and fight its way to Tehran across the country. Some, at least, had obviously looked at a map. Rather (and probably because the land option was not feasible) all faith had to be placed in an air campaign, but that campaign could only succeed if the state itself was very fragile, and if the main state targets could be reliably hit, and if the Iranian people, once the state was weakened, would rise up and destroy it. Thus, the wished-for political outcome generated a series of consecutive necessary false assumptions about the likely effectiveness of bombing and the fragility of the Iranian state which had to be true, otherwise the objective would need to be abandoned. Therefore the assumptions were true. Except of course they weren’t.

This kind of backwards logic is typical when “surprises” occur, and surprise-at-failure often also features a poor understanding of one’s own capabilities and those of the enemy, and the relationship between them. Now here, the US appreciation of the weakness of Iran’s conventional defences was broadly correct: its conventional equipment was elderly and not in good shape, and a certain amount of it was indeed destroyed by bombing. But the surprise came because the capability of the Iranian military was not properly understood, and the objectives of the Iranian state were wrongly evaluated. Unlike the US, the Iranians were not surprised, either by the attack itself, or the methods employed. This was what they had expected and, since the objective was survival and then retaliation, they had developed a capability to pursue it. The Americans were surprised at this, although there is no logical reason why they should have been. In turn, and insofar as they could actually define any objectives, they greatly overestimated their ability to achieve them, and so were surprised when they could not.

Surprise-at-failure therefore includes a number of factors, and often doesn’t have much to do with the immediate success or otherwise of military operations. It’s most commonly because the final objectives themselves are unattainable, and the opposition performs better than expected. The classic case is probably Operation Barbarossa in 1941, where the initial military campaign was technically very successful, but where the final objectives were unattainable for essentially logistic reasons, and Soviet troops, though surrounded and cut off, fought sufficiently well to inflict surprisingly high casualties on the attackers. The German planners had simply assumed that the Soviet state would collapse in a matter of months if not weeks, and all that remained would be to drive to Moscow. They were surprised that this did not happen, and also that the Red Army was both larger and better-equipped than they had thought, but it was too late by then, as the logistic problems started to bite. In the case of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the strategic objectives, insofar as they were ever formulated, consisted of little else but handwaving generalities about democracy and freedom. The rapid descent of the country into civil war was a complete surprise, and the subsequent instability, the rise of the Islamic State and now the effective expulsion of the US from the country were all surprises to Washington subsequently.

One fundamental reason for surprise is a lack of interest or capability in finding out what the situation actually is: we can call it surprise-by-indifference, and surprise-by-ignorance where the possibility doesn’t exist in the first place. In the case of Barbarossa, the mighty Wehrmacht staff machine did not even bother to do a proper study of the Red Army: it massively underestimated the number of Divisions it could field, for example. But then if all it takes is a few week’s operations to bring the whole of the Soviet state down, it really doesn’t matter how many Divisions they have, or what their industrial capacity is.

A comparable example is the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, where it seems clear that the Junta gave no serious thought at all to possible British reaction. They had no firm plans for what to do with the Islands once the political benefits of taking them had worn off, and they seem to have given no thought to what the British themselves might do. As hard-line militarists they were ignorant and contemptuous of civilian politicians, and they did not realise that a British government that failed to at least try to recover the Islands would fall from power (as indeed Thatcher came quite close to doing.) They had not studied the British capacity for power projection, since they did not think it was relevant, nor did they seem to know of the British base at Ascension Island, which was essential to the whole British operation.

The same is true with political judgements. There is little sign that those who planned Iraq 2,0 in 2003 ever really thought that understanding the internal political situation, if only that there was a Sunni-Shia divide, was actually important. The Iraqi people were under the heel of Saddam and they would rise up and greet the occupiers. The idea that various identity groups might use the destruction of the state apparatus for their own purpose, and that this could bring the country down in flames, did not occur to people who were simply not interested in such things, and so could not be bothered to find out. Indeed, whilst in general western governments have been happy to support and encourage where they can the downfall of whoever is the villain du jour (Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad …) they have systematically given little-or-no thought to how to handle the resulting political situation, and are invariably surprised as a result by what happens.

A version of this is surprise-by-complacency, when you believe you understand the current situation and the likely developments, and so further research is unnecessary. The longer a situation goes on, the more you get used to it. The classic case, studied to death by now, is the failure of the West, and especially the US, to anticipate the fall of the Shah of Iran and the installation of a theocratic regime in Tehran in 1978/79. Some conclusions are generally accepted: the US and other Embassies had few Farsi speakers and interacted almost exclusively with westernised middle-class groups who supported the Shah, and they seldom if ever met ordinary people. Likewise, for fear of upsetting such an important ally, western nations were nervous about contacting opposition figures, and relied on the Shah’s secret police for most of their information. But there’s more to it than that. The Islamic Revolution took place at a time of high secularism in the West, where religion was largely reduced to a social phenomenon and a curiosity from the past. This situation was assumed to be universally true: the idea of religious movements with political agendas seemed bizarre, and so when western leaders looked around for referents for Khomeini, they thought of Martin Luther King, and even Gandhi. Khomeini was sent back to Tehran to bring peace and reconciliation to the country. No wonder they were surprised at what happened.

There are also genuine surprises that result from ignorance and the practical impossibility of finding out what you need to know. One classic example is Pearl Harbour in 1941, where the US Navy was convinced that the Japanese did not have the technical capacity to mount a surprise attack over such a long distance. They assumed that the Japanese had retained their original plan of a meeting-engagement, Jutland-style, somewhere in the Pacific. One reason for this was that the berths at Pearl Harbour were very shallow, and it was not believed that the Japanese had torpedoes that could arm themselves in just a few metres of water (the US did not.) In fact, it was only a few months before the operation that the Japanese Navy developed a fuse capable of arming itself so quickly. Without torpedoes, the attack on Pearl Harbour would have looked much less promising, and it’s not even clear that, in the complicated military politics of the time, Yamamoto’s Southern Strategy would have been adopted at all. But there was no way for the US to know this. For that reason, the commanders protected the base against what they estimated to be the most likely threat: saboteurs infiltrated by submarines; which is why the aircraft were neatly lined up in rows so they could be guarded more easily.

But the problems of surprise-by-ignorance can justas well arise in the most mundane of situations: in UN operations, for example, it’s surprisingly normal for troop contingents and commanders to arrive in the country with little idea of what they are going to find. It doesn’t greatly matter, because for anyone of importance all that really concerns them is their reporting chain to New York and their national capital, and keeping their bosses happy. So for example, people who had been in the UN Mission in Haiti in the 1990s told me that most of the national contingents had no experience of peacekeeping, and no doctrine for it. But they did have experience of patrols designed to enforce security. So national contingents of troops (the Brazilians were often mentioned) would drive around villages in their armoured vehicles every evening, hoping to convince the residents that their security was being protected. But of course none of them spoke French and the villagers didn’t speak Portuguese, and the villagers could not explain that for them, the appearance of the military meant the threat of violence and arrest, so the effect of these patrols was to scare them and greatly reduce the effectiveness of the UN Mission.

Likewise, in the panic following the decision in 1992 by a number of European countries to contribute to the UNPROFOR mission in Bosnia, it became clear that hardly any of the nations sending troops had the remotest idea of what they would find there, and there was a desperate search for anyone with even the slightest knowledge or experience of the country. The Dutch, for example, simply assumed that Muslims in Bosnia would live in conditions resembling those of the home countries of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. So Dutch troops solemnly went through exercises dealing with traditional villages and women in burkhas. On arrival, of course, they found that the Muslims constituted much of the sophisticated urban elite, and you were likely to find a Muslim woman in a mini-skirt but almost certainly not in a burkha.

Finally (although there are other types of surprise) let’s discuss surprise-as-state-change which is where there is a sudden and unexpected discontinuity, often demonstrating that reality has all along been different from what we supposed it was: we just didn’t realise it. A classic example is the end of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989, which folded up like a set of wet paper bags, once it became clear that Moscow was not prepared to underwrite them. This was a complete surprise to western governments, because they had confused the general effectiveness of these regimes against small numbers of internal dissidents with the capability to control their countries without Soviet support. The second turned out to be lacking completely.

Indeed, state-change like this often reflects not the strength of the challenger but the weakness of the existing system, whose capabilities often prove to have been massively over-estimated. This is seen especially in the collapse of armies, often followed by the collapse of regimes. There are a number of fairly spectacular examples. One is the collapse of the FAM in Mali in January 2013 in the face of advances by Tuareg separatists and Jihadists: the deployment of French forces ultimately avoided the fall of Bamako. But its poor performance came as no surprise to experts on the region: it was poorly paid, trained and equipped, and thus poorly motivated to fight. As I have repeatedly pointed out, military power is not an objective standard, it is always relative, and the less-weak side generally wins. In this case, the separatists of Ansar Dine and the jihadist groups, although not objectively that powerful, were still more than a match for the Malian troops, no matter how surprising this was to governments in the region and the West.

The fact was that Mali had been apparently stable for some time (rock concerts in the desert, remember?) and it was only in 2012 that the situation in the North began to deteriorate badly. Hence the surprise. One can say the same about the flight the same year of the Congolese Army in the face of the rebel M23 movement organised by Rwanda. The weaknesses of the FARDC were well known by those on the ground, but in western capitals the defeat came as a surprise, because, after all, considerable amounts of money had been spent on them and significant resources devoted to training. The situation was only restored with the help of the UN.

In fact, the greater the western investment in militaries and regimes, then understandably the greater the surprise when they fall apart, and the greater the willingness to look for scapegoats and excuses. The fall of Raqqa in Syria later in the same year also came as a surprise, because the anti-Assad forces, at that stage mostly Sunni Islamist groups, took the town easily, and with relatively little resistance from the Syrian Army. More serious and even more surprising was the fall of Mosul in Iraq the following year to the newly organised Islamic State. Although the attackers were massively outnumbered (by some accounts 15-1) they captured the city in a few days, surprising the West, as much as the defenders by their tactics of suicide bombings, and wholesale executions by burning and crucifixion, intended to strike fear into the enemy. This was the more surprising after a decade of expensive training and equipping of the Iraqi Army, largely by the US. Ironically, the most important consequence of that programme turned out to be the massive amounts of US equipment captured, and the recruitment of some Sunni soldiers to the IS cause.

Which is to say that these militaries, and thus the control of regimes over their territory, turned out to be much weaker than expected when confronted with a half-way serious enemy. The same happened later in Afghanistan, in spite of the decades-long US and NATO efforts to create and sustain a modern western-style advanced military force. Nobody who had seen the Afghan National Army at first hand, I think, would have been surprised that they collapsed after the US withdrawal, although even the greatest cynics probably didn’t anticipate the actual speed both of the collapse and the end of the regime. I think I’ve made the point sufficiently, but let me just add that the surprise felt in the West at the fall of the Assad regime in Syria 2024 fits completely into this model. The Syrian Army had degenerated substantially after the defeat of the IS in 2018, the Assad regime had made no attempt to reach out to the opposition, the Russians were preoccupied with Ukraine, Hezbollah had withdrawn from Syria … all it took was a minimally organised and motivated opposition and the regime would fall. It was very much a question of when, and should not have been a surprise.

That’s enough surprises for the moment. But the interesting question, since most of these examples (and others I will cite later) were in principle foreseeable, is why they nonetheless came as a surprise. Here, there’s an important conceptual point to consider first. For convenience, we talk, as I have done, of “governments” or “the West” being “surprised.” But we can’t really treat institutions or governments like that. What we mean in most cases is that decision-makers in national capitals, and sometimes Embassy staff, were (mostly) surprised by what happened. As individuals they may have anticipated the possibility or something similar, they may have heard rumours only to discount them, or have them discounted by greater experts, or for that matter they may have hoped (or feared) an entirely different eventuality which did not in fact happen. But this is seldom stressed, because even professional historians, let alone amateurs and pundits, are tempted to find and follow threads in events which led to the consequences we know, even when people at the time thought very differently about things. Indeed, if you can be bothered to look at original sources and books written from them (I know!) the picture that emerges is often very different to that in the history books, because the emphasis at the time was very much elsewhere.

For example, the story of the international dimension of the Spanish Civil War largely excludes some issues that were seen as very important at the time. The British in particular feared that, with German and Italian support for Franco, the crisis could develop into a general European war pitting those two nations against Britain and France. They therefore devoted a lot of time and effort to the cause of “non-intervention” which in the end was wasted, and even counter-productive in that it dissuaded the French from giving open support to the Republicans. But it was what seemed important at the time, even if it isn’t mentioned much today. Likewise, after the fall of the Shah, few western nations considered an Islamic government as the most likely outcome. Worried meetings were held all over the western world about the possibility of a military coup, since military coups were common at the time, or a Communist takeover, since many saw the fall of the Shah as a KGB destabilisation operation. Thus, the surprise at Khomeini’s accession to power was even greater.

This in turn has a lot to do with the reality of how politics and government operate, especially in a crisis. In this sense, politics is a bit like Morris Dancing or Neurosurgery: if you haven’t experienced it, or seen it up close, verbal descriptions won’t get you very far. This is why the reaction of outsiders coming into government, no matter how eminent they may be, is often one of stupefied panic, at the speed, complexity and sometimes sheer apparent irrationality of what they see. Outsiders, seeing apparent chaos, struggle and compete to impose some externally-generated logical pattern on it. But it would actually be unfair to describe politics as chaos: most of the time anyway. Even apparent chaos— like the British government’s Brexit experience—follows a certain twisted logic of its own, if you understand the issues involved, which may not be the ones most talked about. (Brexit was about saving the Conservative Party from disintegration at any price, and stuff the rest of you.)

The biggest problem in understanding how politics works today is that policy-making, let alone policy execution, has been progressively replaced in the last couple of generations by what I call Policy Management. That is to say, that these days virtually all the time and attention goes on procedure, and hardly anything is left for substance. It was always like this to some degree, as you can see from the kind of historical material I mentioned above, but recently, serious thinking about issues, much less attempts to anticipate them, has almost vanished under successive layers of management.

A practical example: imagine that you are the Head of the Russia/Ukraine Department of a medium-sized Foreign Ministry. It might be expected that you and your staff spend your working days thinking about the present and future situation, what might happen and what to do. In fact, such trivia are often overlooked. When you come in in the morning you will be greeted with extracts from the world’s media, reports of statements by foreign governments, and urgent communications from your government and others, as well as international organisations. There may even be something about the military situation on the ground. Skimming through that pile of material, you begin your day: meetings, video-conferences, briefings, preparation of meetings at NATO and the EU, bilateral tomorrow with Germany, lunch with the Political Counsellor of a close ally wonder what he wants, messages to agree and send to half a dozen destinations. The Minister wants advice on this and that, can you come to the G7 meeting in Washington next week, there’s an informal meeting of close allies in Paris in two days time, there’s a debate in Parliament at the end of the week and a lot of preparation is required, the Minister is making several media appearances in the next few days, there are several bilateral visits you need to prepare for, of course the Council of Ministers discusses the subject every week, and there’s a real challenge building up from the Finance Ministry about how much this is all costing. And naturally, many other parts of the Ministry, and other Ministries, have an interest in the problem and need to be kept in the picture.

With luck, at the end of the day, when things start to calm down slightly, you may have a chance to look through the non-critical material: routine messages from Posts, intelligence assessments, records of international meetings, correspondence that doesn’t involve you personally, even a selection of articles from the online media if you have the time. You need to draft a record of the lunchtime conversation, because it suggested a worrying political crisis in that country’s government. With luck you manage some of this, unless there’s an urgent telephone call from Washington. Perhaps on the train home, half-asleep reading a particularly inane and uninformed article, you find yourself thinking How did we get here? And how can we get out of it?

One of the many things you didn’t have time to read is a tweet from a famously excitable journalist claiming to have been told that a group of nationalist militants has got hold of anti-aircraft missiles and they are intending to shoot down Zelensky’s plane. Anyway, nothing comes of it until a month later when rifle shots are fired at the plane from the airport perimeter, though nothing is hit. The journalist writes a major article about how his warnings were ignored and wonders why your government seems to have done nothing. Were they really taken by surprise, or were they they part of a conspiracy? Telling people that a dozen such rumours circulate every day seems to have no effect.

Procedural issues take priority because they are immediate, and everybody can understand them. Everybody can therefore have an opinion. So I sat in many stuffy rooms in 1991-92 at meetings debating what, if anything Europe should be doing about the crisis in the Former Yugoslavia. Yet the debate, you may be surprised to hear, hardly touched on the situation in the country at all. It was mostly an outgrowth of the negotiations on the Political Union treaty, as well as the future of NATO and greater cooperation on European defence. The situation in the country was irrelevant, except for the way in which it was viewed by the media and European politicians: what mattered was that Europe should be seen to be “doing something,” even if no-one could identify a plausible military task with the forces we had available. For months, we went round and round the same dilemma: We must do Something/Like what?/Never mind, Something. When a UN mission was agreed for Bosnia there was enormous pressure on European nations to send forces. The French, from Mitterrand downwards, were worried they might lose the 1992 referendum on the Political Union if European forces were not sent. More generally, governments worried about the whole Union idea being discredited if Europe couldn’t deal with a crisis on its own doorstep. The actual underlying situation, as well as what to do in the future, were not discussed at all, and Europe spent much time reacting to surprising developments. In the end, European forces were sent to Bosnia, even by the sceptical British, and around a hundred died there, effectively for nothing.

It follows that “surprise” is almost always not total, in the sense that, of all the conceivable possibilities, someone, somewhere will probably have identified a scenario reasonably close to what actually happens. But in the blizzard of official and unofficial data that governments receive all the time, it is often a matter of luck whether something resembling the future is actually identified, and, as we shall see, there is often not much you can do about it. The only way to deal with the problem of information saturation is by structured analysis of each piece of information, but this takes far more time than most government people have. What’s the source? Is it reliable? Has it been reliable in the past? Is there collateral for it? Does it sound logical and reasonable? Is it what I want to hear, rather than what is necessarily true? And so on. These sorts of questions—part of the training of intelligence analysts and for related disciplines— are just not feasible at scale. (If you read a news site with lots of links every day you have some idea of the problem.)

There are lots of reasons why “governments” (as discussed above) are “surprised,” in the senses discussed above. Sometimes, the reasons for this “surprise” are banal in the extreme. Thus, in 1982 the initial British response to reports of an Argentinian invasion of the Falklands was incredulity. What on earth could have led the junta in Buenos Aires to undertake such a lunatic adventure? The better informed knew, indeed, that for some time the British had been trying to organise a negotiated handover of the Islands to Argentina, but this was problematic because of the unpleasant nature of the Argentine government. (Many of those who opposed the war also fiercely opposed the Argentinian junta, which left them in a somewhat awkward position.)

Iran, once again, is an interesting example of several of the intellectual weaknesses that cause “surprises.” Essentially, the desire to destroy the country and punish it for surviving since the humiliations of 1979 has been so strong in Washington, that it has blinded everyone to the reality. So much has hostility to Iran and the need for its consequent destruction become an article of faith, that no case, however rational and well-founded, could have been mounted against it. Unquestioned hostility to Iran, and an unquestioned faith in the capacity of the US military, meant that on the one hand there was no need to waste time and effort collecting and analysing information, and on the other that the outcome of a conflict could be predicted in advance. No dissident information—the closing of Hormuz, the protection of Iranian military assets—could be taken seriously because it would undermine the conclusions that had already been reached.

There are also structural explanations. Information about a potential “surprise” does not arrive with a note attached saying how reliable it is. Indeed, what’s striking in history is not how many disruptive pieces of new information have been ignored, but how may have been taken seriously, and later proved to be wrong. (Most of what western governments thought about the Russian Revolution, for example.) How would you evaluate rumours that a military coup was being planned in Israel to remove Netanyahu? This could have enormous consequences if true, but could also lead to catastrophic problems if it were treated as true and shown to be false. But all you have is a diplomatic source reporting essentially gossip. Even if you are convinced, can you convince your boss, and your boss’s boss? Can you ask the Political Director, already dealing with half-a-dozen massively complex subjects, to put aside time to think about this? Why is this rumour more credible than a dozen others, also circulating? How could you convince other nations? And what, in practical terms, could you do? If the rumour turns out to be true then the warnings will be resuscitated, and you will be blamed for “doing nothing.” If you do something and the rumours turn out to be false, you will be presented as the victims of a Russian disinformation operation. Indeed, here is the basic distinction between actually doing politics and analysing, commenting on, criticising, making policy recommendations and so forth. Real decisions have to be taken with real consequences, in the knowledge that they may well be wrong, which encourages a certain conservatism not found elsewhere. (“We must abandon a military response to the problems in the Sahel and deal with the underlying problems.” “OK, give me three measures that can be implemented by the end of the year that will resolve these problems.” “Er, that’s not our job. We’re only here to criticise.”)

Among many other causes of “surprises,” the conceptual blindness which has been mentioned throughout this essay is perhaps the most important. In order to anticipate something, you must believe it is possible. Forty years ago, the end of Communism was literally unthinkable for most people, and even those who thought differently were generally right for the wrong reasons. Foreseeing an Islamist takeover in Iran required an understanding of Political Islam and the role of religion in politics which few people had or wanted to develop. Indeed, our plodding, materialist, reductive conception of politics has turned out to be basically useless at anticipating real events in the world, ranging from the barbarities of the Islamic State and their mass-casualty attacks in Europe, to the move towards “nationalism” in parts of Eastern Europe, and even to how countries like China, Russia and Iran actually think. (The opposite is also true: the imminent end of the House of Saud has been confidently predicted for fifty years now.) More think-tanks and Ph D programmes won’t help if they just produce a punditocracy which understands everything except that which is actually important.

All that said, we also need to remember that almost nothing in history is deterministic. Almost every episode discussed this week could have turned out differently, certainly in detail, and quite possibly in its main lines. History, as I’ve pointed out many times, is terrifyingly contingent, and what seems obvious now was not always obvious then: nor, indeed, was it inevitable. In some cases, it’s perhaps excusable to be surprised.

**********************************

That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.