Free Strategy by Lawrence Freedman Page A

noted that “in every important respect the situation is that of a corporation trying to formulate a new policy after taking a terrific beating from its chief competitor and being driven out of the market it had previously depended on.” 14 Satan, who knew what he wanted, nonetheless followed good practice and opened proceedings by asking for proposals.
    Moloch was the first to step forward, recommending “open war.” His appeal was based on emotion and drive, aggression and fatalism, while contemptuous of attempts to use wiles: “Let us rather choose/ arm’d with hell flames and fury, all at once/ O’er Heaven’s high towers to force resistless way.” He could not, he admitted, promise victory, but at least a form of revenge.
    Compared with Moloch’s unsubtle aggression, Belial offered more realism, but the effect was defeatist: “ignoble ease and peaceful sloth.” He doubted they could achieve even revenge. “The tow’rs of heaven are filled/ With armed watch, that renders all access/ Impregnable.” He made a fundamental point about the impossibility of both “force and guile” that his fellow devils seemed ready to ignore. God saw “all things at one view” and so saw and derided the devil’s council even while it was in progress. Belial’s alternative was therefore to wait until God relented. “This is now/ Our doom, which if we can sustain and bear,/ Our supreme foe in time may much remit/ His anger.”
    Mammon ridiculed both of the previous options. He had little taste for war or expectations of God’s forgiveness: “With what eyes could we/ Standin his presence humble, and receive/ Strict laws imposed, to celebrate his throne/ With warbled hymns, and to his Godhead sing/ Force hallelujahs, while he lordly sits/ Our envied Sov’reign.” His idea was to develop the possibilities of hell: “This desert soil/ Wants not her hidden lustre, gems and gold: Nor want we skill or art, from whence to raise/ Magnificence: and what can heav’n show more?” So he urged the fallen angels “to found this nether empire, which might rise/ By policy and long process of time/ In emulation opposite to heav’n.” As he had helped construct Pandemonium, Mammon’s ideas had some credibility. For the first time the audience saw something they liked. Mammon “scarce had finished when such murmur filled/ The assembly, as when hollow rocks retain/ The sound of blustering winds.”
    But like any clever chairman, Satan had worked out his preferred outcome before the debate had begun. Everything had been structured to produce the desired conclusion. His second-in-command, Beelzebub, “Pleaded his devilish counsel, first devised/ By Satan and in part prospered.” First, he undermined Mammon by warning that God would not allow hell to become equivalent to heaven. Beelzebub proposed taking an initiative but not the direct strategy of Moloch. Satan spoke of a “place/ (If ancient and prophetic fame in heaven/ err not) another world, the happy seat/ Of some new race called Man.” This new race was supposedly equal to angels, perhaps created to fill the gap left by the exiled rebels. This was a way of getting at God without the futility of a direct assault. Perhaps men might be tricked into joining the rebellion. As a strategist Satan had identified one possible explanation for the defeat in heaven. It was simply a lack of numbers. There were twice as many loyal angels as rebels. Instead of trying to reverse the outcome of battle through a direct assault, which would be futile, why not trick men into joining the rebellion? After Satan praised Beelzebub’s plan, it was adopted. Having come up with the strategy, Satan set off to implement it. First he needed good intelligence. “Thither let us bend all our thoughts, to learn/ What creatures there inhabit. Of what mould/ Or substance, how endued,