Saturday 8 December 2012

Thomas Ricks Talks at Pritzker Military Library: Iraq

Pritzker Military Library | Thomas Ricks: Fiasco 2006
Pritzker Military Library | Thomas Ricks: The Gamble 2009

Two incredibly illuminating talks by writer/journalist Thomas Ricks on his books Fiasco and The Gamble about the Iraq war. Q&A in the second half. I'm still digesting this.

Wednesday 21 November 2012

Military Ethics & Leadership - Tom Ricks




Question: Why on earth did the phone-in have to divide people by their politics? Being a Brit, this is completely alien to me and would never have been done in the UK. It sets the tone of the whole discussion and invites division and encourages the extremists on both sides of the polarised coin. Both caller no.3 and 4, demonstrate this. Bad, bad CSpan. Ethics has nothing to do with your politics, or should not.

Saturday 10 November 2012

Honoring the Warrior, Not the War

The Sutras of Abu Ghraib by Aidan Delgado I still think of Veterans Day as Armistice Day, its original name, commemorating the end of World War I. The nations that founded the holiday did so to celebrate the end of what they believed was the "war to end all wars" and thus to symbolize the end of war itself. In America, Veterans Day is now associated with honoring US war dead and remembering the sacrifices of veterans in all our conflicts. This is good and very much in keeping with the original spirit of the holiday; for remembering the terrible cost of war is the best way for us to appreciate the peace we now enjoy. For me, Veterans Day embodies two moods at once: somber reflection on the sacrifices of soldiers and gratitude for the blessing of peace.

Yet these days, Veterans Day often makes me sad. It seems that this holiday in particular almost can't help becoming politicized, particularly in the midst of a controversial war. This is a holiday about celebrating the end of war; I don't want to see it become something like a "Support the Troops" bumper-sticker. I want people to look at all the tremendous sacrifices made by veterans and draw the right lesson from them: that war is terrible and we must do everything we can to prevent it. In honoring the warrior, we should take care not to honor war in itself. Remember that beneath the memorials to individual soldiers, the laurels for their courage, there is a subtle message to the younger generation: you should grow up and become soldiers too. I don't think that's the message that should be sent on Veteran's Day. This should be a holiday about remembering the price of peace, for no soldier joins to perpetuate war. All veterans served and fought in the expectation of eventually regaining the peace, and enjoying a measure of it themselves. If we want to truly thank veterans, then we should not only honor them as individuals but honor the thing they fought and died for: the return to a peaceful society. We should remember that Veterans Day was once Armistice Day.

Thursday 18 October 2012

Crosshair in the Crosshair


Like the arrow or the circle, the crosshair focuses our attention and prepares us for a message. Unlike the arrow or the circle, both of which focus our attention but without yet suggesting why, the crosshair tells us exactly why: what's in the crosshair is in mortal danger. Even those of us who have never looked through a gun scope know from movies and magazines exactly what the crosshair is and what it means. It means someone's got a gun. Someone's aiming that gun. And someone else is gonna get shot.

Printers' registration mark
A commonly used registration mark.

Aiming a crosshair at an object, even Photoshopping a crosshair over a picture of someone's face, puts that object in jeopardy. When the crosshair slides across the landscape until it locks onto the victim, the crosshair tells us from whose perspective we are looking. We are looking from the shooter's perspective. We too are in the position of power. We too can pull the trigger.

By itself, the crosshair is just a tool, a type of reticle. Not unique to gun scopes, the crosshair is used in layout software, in cameras, telescopes and microscopes. The crosshair appears in goggles and scanners, in surgical lasers and land-surveying equipment. Yes, the shooter can disable, destroy or take out the target. But the shooter can also focus a lens, guide a laser and measure a distance.

The crosshair is a tool that guides our vision, but the arrow and the circle also guide our vision. The arrow might reveal and reward. The circle might accept and embrace. The crosshair, however, dominates the object, sneaks up and subdues the object in a precise two-dimensional location. There you are. And you don't even know I see you. The crosshair transforms the independent nature of the object into the conditional, dependent nature of the target, without that target ever knowing about its own transformation in the eye of the viewer. Its transformation occurs on the viewer's side of the crosshair, and so the viewer too is changed. The crosshair changes the viewer from spectator to participant. So now that we see it, what do we do next? Has the crosshair transformed us into snipers or scientists, photographers or trophy-hunters, creators or killers?

Collage of crosshair-related images in media
Pop, pop culture: The crosshair appears in the artwork for movies, books, music and first-person-shooter video games like Halo and Call of Duty.

Shoot It. Sell It. Sex It. Slam It.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a cross hair, or crosshair, as one of "two fine strands of wire crossed in the focus of the eyepiece of an optical instrument and used as a calibration or sighting reference." The word itself is metaphorical. The filaments that cross are not strands of hair but strands of wire, although the roots (sorry) of the word reach back to the earliest versions of the tool in which actual hair was used.

Literal uses of the crosshair signify a real tool being used, like a gun, camera or laser. In the artwork for The Bourne Identity (2002), the crosshair zeroes in on Jason Bourne (Matt Damon)—he's the prey. For the sequel The Bourne Supremacy (2004), the crosshair appears in the rifle scope wielded by Jason Bourne—now he's the hunter. (So much depends upon what side of the sights you're on.) Crosshair is the name of a comic book (soon to be a movie) about an assassin. The crosshair as a name or symbol is used literally to denote actual gun scopes in the branding for Crosshair Safaris and Crosshair Consulting hunting outfitters. The crosshair logo for stem-cell researchers Cell Targeting Inc. suggests microscopes; the one for 4 Seasons Pest Control, an exterminator's spray nozzle; the logo for Crosshair Exploration and Mining Corporation, an explorer's viewpoint. First-person-shooter video games use the gun-scope crosshair, and several websites provide software that enables players to design their own crosshair icons.

Collage of logos using crosshair imagery
Stay on target: The crosshair, as logo and brand, is as popular with target shooters as it is with target marketers.

Figurative uses of the word and symbol in branding include Crosshair Oakley sunglasses, Crosshair Studios, Crosshair Golf, Tactical Financial, Crosshairs Trader, Snitch Killer Apparel and the Asus Crosshair motherboard. None of these uses refer to actual tools relying on crosshair scopes. Instead, they seek to co-opt a mood evoked by the crosshair: lethality, accuracy, technological precision, militaristic bravado. The most abstract crosshair logo is used by Dr. Reg Edward for his targeted, regional anesthesia.

One of the more ubiquitous uses of the crosshair is in the logo for the rap group Public Enemy, targeting a silhouetted stand-in for the band. It's a complicated, artistic use of the crosshair as a symbol, because it puts the viewer in the position of the government, targeting the artists, while the viewer knows this particular use is controlled by the band itself. Public Enemy directs the crosshair at itself in an attempt to win sympathy from the viewer: the implicit message being that what the band has to say is so important that they may be killed for saying it. This use of the crosshair works well in context because Public Enemy does indeed take on urgent, anti-establishment political issues. Using the crosshair would amount to self-aggrandizing parody, however, if, say, Public Enemy were a boy band singing about a cafeteria romance thwarted by an evil lunch lady.

The crosshair falters when used by marketing companies. Even though its use by companies such as Crosshair Marketing Services and Crosshairs Communication (there are many examples) is figurative (no one's using or selling a real scope), the crosshair derives from the literalization of the metaphor expressed by the phrase "target marketing." The use of the word target takes advantage of its associations with weapons. We are meant to think of marketing in a more serious, technical way. The metaphor falls flat, though, when marketing companies incorporate into their brands literal symbols like targets and missiles and the crosshair. The metaphor becomes literal, and we groan. We groan, too, at the machismo of trying to drape the world of the cubicle in the camouflage of the battlefield, especially when, taking the literal logos at their symbolic word, we might reasonably wonder why marketers are targeting consumers in the crosshair of a rifle scope.

Collage of apparel and other products using the crosshair symbol
Fire! sale: The crosshair plays well on products from caps to cufflinks.

In the branding for marketing companies, the crosshair means "See it. Sell it." But the crosshair means "See it. Sex it" when used on the cover for the Spanish book Sex Code (2007), a guide for seducing women. There the crosshair targets a woman's silhouette, specifically her hips. The woman appears to float, as if she leapt like a deer. Meanwhile, a guy in a suit stands coolly, hands in pockets. The crosshair quickly draws us into a world of slippery idioms: we are hunting bucks, blasting bad guys and bagging babes.

I find the crosshair is more successful when used figuratively, but the crosshair is busiest elsewhere: it seems to work 24/7 as an editorial and political symbol, referencing the sights on a gun scope. It's like the James Brown of op-ed clichés: the hardest-working symbol in the business. Slapped on anyone and anything, the crosshair is the lazy person's critique, meaning: there is no critique, just a crude graphic gesture meant to shock the viewer. See it. Slam it.

And the crosshair is used both ways. Recall the dual use in the artwork for the Bourne movies—the crosshair marks the hunter and hunted, prompting the viewer to identify with either, depending on context—and the sympathetic use by Public Enemy, in which the crosshair is a graphic strategy to gain sympathy. Used politically and editorially, the crosshair can attack someone who deserves it and elicit sympathy for someone who does not. (See how many books and articles are entitled "[Blankety Blank] in the Crosshair.") The user defines the context and plays to the prejudice of an audience. A baby in the crosshair illustrates a pro-life, anti-abortion article. The flag of Israel in the crosshair illustrates an article by a writer worried that Jews will be targeted by anti-Semitic forces. The crosshair represents an ideological viewpoint and implicates the viewer in that viewpoint. The crosshair is used so often in political imagery and op-ed illustration because the crosshair is so brutal an expression of an unyielding political or ideological allegiance. We are a god, or we are guilty. We judge righteously, or we have made a grave error. The crosshair divides us.

Collage of editorial and political uses of the crosshair symbol
Sniping and griping: The crosshair serves editorial and political propagandists with its divisive power.

See It. Don't Slay It.

People are free to incorporate the crosshair into their graphic imagery nearly any way they want, thanks to the First Amendment (unless they directly incite violence), and I have no reservations about designers using the crosshair in figurative ways—the ways designers use the skull, for example, or images of pistols and daggers and the hangman's noose—on album covers and baseball caps and logos and skateboards. But as a viewer, I recoil from the crosshair as a graphic editorial tool.

Sure, I've played as a sniper in Call of Duty, but it's only a game reality. I win or lose with nothing but my own mood at stake. The graphic use of the crosshair is only a graphic reality, one of the page or website or whatever frame the crosshair is bisecting or quadrisecting—that is, when we look at crosshair imagery, we're not really using the crosshair in a rifle scope to aim a real bullet into a real forehead. But I resent being put into that position. As a viewer, I can ignore the lapel button or the website banner or the magazine illustration, but the designer or illustrator should worry that the crosshair might convey an unintended message. I see that crosshair, and, reflexively, I distrust the person who put it there.

As propaganda, the crosshair is a symbol of presumption, not persuasion. The crosshair narrows the world into a single viewpoint, into the x/y axes of lethal intent, and I refuse that Cartesian carnage. The crosshair can devolve into a tool of fanatic ideology, promoting a worldview so narrow that it contains nothing else but the object of derision. Someone who layers a crosshair over something or someone is basically shoving a scope in the viewer's eye and trying to say, "There is no outside world. There is only an object on the other side of the crosshair. See it. Shoot it."

Using the crosshair this way marks the end of thinking, not the beginning. The crosshair is the sentence, not the consideration. It's death, not deliberation, and so there's nothing to talk about. In this way, the crosshair backfires.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

One Fate, Two Fates, Red States, Blue States


By Phil Patton September 24, 2004

One fate, two fates, red states, blue states—have red and blue replaced red white and blue as our national colors?

We refer to the red states and the blue states so regularly now that the association seems long established. But only the 2000 presidential election established the linkage of blue with Democrats and red with Republicans. In earlier years, the television networks and magazine maps had reversed the association. In 1984 rival networks associated red with Democrats and blue with Republicans. The Reagan sweep of that year was called "Lake Reagan" in one context.

In many ways the link goes against tradition. Red has long stood for the left and one has to suspect that the first usage of it to represent Republicans was inspired by an effort to seem non prejudicial.

The end of the cold war made red baiting and pinko artifacts of a time past; the critical mark of the change may have come when the old red baiter, Richard Nixon, visited "Red" China.

On the other hand, blue was the color of the Union army uniforms, by contrast to gray, and has a historical link to the party of Lincoln. But in the Revolutionary war blue was the color of the Continental army uniform: red that of the British, of course.

Wrapping the candidate in the flag is the hoariest cliché of bumper stickers and posters. Post 9/11, with every politician in the land sporting a flag lapel pin, even clothing seemed to aspire to flagdom: red tie, white shirt, blue suit became common.

The colors of the flag are more than ever the staples of campaign graphics. (And despite Nader in 2000, who today could imagine that Jimmy Carter in 1976 adopted green, a hue that these days is as likely to evoke Islam as environmentalism?) But this year's campaign graphics seem to have lost the traditional white of the trio. John Kerry's stickers show a hopeful sea of Democratic blue, with flailing strip/stripes of red and a single tiny white star. They recall the Bank of America's recent abbreviated flag logo.

It is as if in all the flag waving of the last few years the white in the red, white and blue had vanished. The blue-red opposition has come to stand for a wider sense of political and cultural polarization—between cultures, incomes and classes. Has white vanished out of fear of suggesting surrender? Does it mean all hope of truce or compromise has vanished?

Red and blue joins red and green—stop and go—and even Stendhal's red and black as a basic binary.

Each color has its associations. Blue is cool and dispassionate, red heated. But it is neither the red or blue alone where the meaning lies, it is in the combination.

It is a pairing with overtones of alarm. Light bars atop police cars strobe warnings in red and blue. Not long ago activists protesting gang violence in Irvington, New Jersey marched with mock coffins, alternately covered with red and blue representing the Bloods and Crips gangs.

Is our division into red and blue a new national emblem in itself, like Swedish blue and yellow? Usually it takes three colors to make a national color scheme: French tricolore, German black red and yellow, Jamaican green yellow black. Red and blue meet white in the Russian flag. Red and blue were the colors of Paris joined with the white of the King of France in the tricolor.

Any melding of blue and red suggests an impossible purple—the color of royalty, rich as the vain dream of national union hoped for by nation builders who bring shabby deposed kings back to conflicted nations—an early scenario for Afghanistan. But purple has also occasionally been used to indicate "toss up" states on this year's electoral map: the overtones of bruise are appropriate.

At best, red and blue might inspire a contemplative Rothko glow, a study of a wider and more profound opposition. The pairing was seen differently by the great blues singer Robert Johnson, who in his song "Love in Vain" considered a departing rail car and the loss it meant, rolling out of the station "with two lights on behind. The blue light was my blues and the red light was my mind."

Source

Sunday 7 October 2012

Original Sin

New York Times Essay
Sept 18, 2005

Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr
By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER Jr.

THE recent outburst of popular religiosity in the United States is a most dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. As Europe grows more secular, America grows more devout. George W. Bush is the most aggressively religious president Americans have ever had. American conservatives applaud his "faith-based" presidency, an office heretofore regarded as secular. The religious right has become a potent force in national politics. Evangelicals now outnumber mainline Protestants and crowd megachurches. Billy Graham attracts supplicants by the thousand in Sodom and Gomorrah, a k a New York City. The Supreme Court broods over the placement of the Ten Commandments. Evangelicals take over the Air Force Academy, a government institution maintained by taxpayers' dollars; the academy's former superintendent says it will be six years before religious tolerance is restored. Mel Gibson's movie "Passion of the Christ" draws nearly $400 million at the domestic box office.
 
In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears - Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be that most "people of faith" belong to the religious right, and Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal. But left evangelicals as well as their conservative brethren hardly ever invoke his name. Jim Wallis's best-selling "God's Politics," for example, is a liberal tract, but the author mentions Niebuhr only twice, and only in passing.
 
Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German-born minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America. He was trained for the ministry at the Synod's Eden Theological Seminary and at the Yale Divinity School. In the 1920's he took a church in industrial Detroit, the scene of bitter labor-capital conflict. Niebuhr's sympathies lay with the unions, and he joined Norman Thomas's Socialist Party. Meanwhile, New York's Union Theological Seminary, impressed by the power of his preaching and his writing, recruited him in 1928 for its faculty. There he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1971.

Why, in an age of religiosity, has Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious discourse? Maybe issues have taken more urgent forms since Niebuhr's death - terrorism, torture, abortion, same-sex marriage, Genesis versus Darwin, embryonic stem-cell research. But maybe Niebuhr has fallen out of fashion because 9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence. Lamentations about "the end of innocence" became favorite clichés at the time.

Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of a background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are insufferable in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics).

Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insights of Augustine and Calvin to moral and political issues. He poured out his thoughts in a stream of powerful books, articles and sermons. His major theological work was his two-volume "Nature and Destiny of Man" (1941, 1943). The evolution of his political thought can be traced in three influential books: "Moral Man and Immoral Society" (1932); "The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense" (1944); "The Irony of American History" (1952).

In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used "man" not to exculpate women but as shorthand for "human being.")
 
The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation. We had been brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human perfectibility. This was less a liberal delusion than an expression of an all-American DNA. Andrew Carnegie had articulated the national faith when, after acclaiming the rise of man from lower to higher forms, he declared: "Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection." In 1939, Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, the dean of American political scientists, wrote in "The New Democracy and the New Despotism": "There is a constant trend in human affairs toward the perfectibility of mankind. This was plainly stated at the time of the French Revolution and has been reasserted ever since that time, and with increasing plausibility." Human ignorance and unjust institutions remained the only obstacles to a more perfect world. If proper education of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, such obstacles would be removed. For the heart of man was O.K. The idea of original sin was a historical, indeed a hysterical, curiosity that should have evaporated with Jonathan Edwards's Calvinism.

Still, Niebuhr's concept of original sin solved certain problems for my generation. The 20th century was, as Isaiah Berlin said, "the most terrible century in Western history." The belief in human perfectibility had not prepared us for Hitler and Stalin. The death camps and the gulags proved that men were capable of infinite depravity. The heart of man is obviously not O.K. Niebuhr's analysis of human nature and history came as a vast illumination. His argument had the double merit of accounting for Hitler and Stalin and for the necessity of standing up to them. Niebuhr himself had been a pacifist, but he was a realist and resigned from the antiwar Socialist Party in 1940.
 
Many of us understood original sin as a metaphor. Niebuhr's distinction between taking the Bible seriously and taking it literally invited symbolic interpretation and made it easy for seculars to join the club. Morton White, the philosopher, spoke satirically of Atheists for Niebuhr. (Luis Buñuel, the Spanish film director, was asked about his religious views. "I'm an atheist," he replied. "Thank God.") "About the concept of 'original sin,' " Niebuhr wrote in 1960, "I now realize that I made a mistake in emphasizing it so much, though I still believe that it might be rescued from its primitive corruptions. But it is a red rag to most moderns. I find that even my realistic friends are inclined to be offended by it, though our interpretations of the human situation are identical."

The Second World War left America the most powerful nation in the world, and the cold war created a new model of international tension. Niebuhr was never more involved in politics. He helped found Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal organization opposed to the two Joes, Stalin and McCarthy. He was tireless (until strokes slowed him up) in cautioning Americans not to succumb to the self-righteous delusions of innocence and infallibility. "From the earliest days of its history to the present moment," Niebuhr wrote in 1952, "there is a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America. We never dreamed that we would have as much political power as we possess today; nor for that matter did we anticipate that the most powerful nation on earth would suffer such an ironic refutation of its dreams of mastering history." For messianism - carrying on one man's theory of God's work - threatened to abolish the unfathomable distance between the Almighty and human sinners.

Niebuhr would have rejoiced at Mr. Dooley's definition of a fanatic. According to the Irish bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne, a fanatic "does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th' facts iv th' case." There is no greater human presumption than to read the mind of the Almighty, and no more dangerous individual than the one who has convinced himself that he is executing the Almighty's will. "A democracy," Niebuhr said, "cannot of course engage in an explicit preventive war," and he lamented the "inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play the role of God to history."

Original sin, by tainting all human perceptions, is the enemy of absolutes. Mortal man's apprehension of truth is fitful, shadowy and imperfect; he sees through the glass darkly. Against absolutism Niebuhr insisted on the "relativity of all human perspectives," as well as on the sinfulness of those who claimed divine sanction for their opinions. He declared himself "in broad agreement with the relativist position in the matter of freedom, as upon every other social and political right or principle." In pointing to the dangers of what Justice Robert H. Jackson called "compulsory godliness," Niebuhr argued that "religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values." Religion, he warned, could be a source of error as well as wisdom and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not a sense of infallibility, but a sense of humility. Indeed, "the worst corruption is a corrupt religion."

One imagines a meeting between two men - say, for example, the president of the United States and the last pope - who have private lines to the Almighty but discover fundamental disagreements over the message each receives. Thus Bush is the fervent champion of the war against Iraq; John Paul II stoutly opposed the war. Bush is the fervent champion of capital punishment; John Paul II stoutly opposed capital punishment. How do these two absolutists reconcile contradictory and incompatible communications from the Almighty?
The Civil War, that savage, fraternal conflict, was the great national trauma, and Lincoln was for Reinhold Niebuhr the model statesman. Of all American presidents, Lincoln had the most acute religious insight. Though not enrolled in any denomination, he brooded over the infinite mystery of the Almighty. To claim knowledge of the divine will and purpose was for Lincoln the unpardonable sin.

He summed up his religious sense in his second inaugural, delivered in the fifth year of the Civil War. Both warring halves of the Union, he said, read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. Each invoked God's aid against the other. Let us judge not that we be not judged. Let us fight on with "firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." But let us never forget, Lincoln reminded the nation in memorable words, "The Almighty has His own purposes."

Thurlow Weed, the cynical and highly intelligent boss of New York, sent Lincoln congratulations on the inaugural address. "I believe it is not immediately popular," Lincoln replied. "Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it."

"The combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues," Niebuhr commented on Lincoln's second inaugural, "with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment must be regarded as almost a perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free society on the one hand while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle."

Like all God-fearing men, Americans are never safe "against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire." This is vanity. To be effective in the world, we need "a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us" and "a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy's demonry and our vanities." None of the insights of religious faith contradict "our purpose and duty of preserving our civilization. They are, in fact, prerequisites for saving it."

The last lines of "The Irony of American History," written in 1952, resound more than a half-century later. "If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is the author, most recently, of "War and the American Presidency."

Monday 1 October 2012

Brothers & Sisters of War

Please don’t kill yourselves. Don’t do it. The suicide rate for Afghan/Iraq war veterans is multiple times the numbers that die in the war, now about twenty-four a day. Time heals. Give yourself time. Avoid impulsiveness. Impulsiveness gives no time. Get the guns out of the house. If you have a noose ready, get rid of it. A stash of pills, get rid of them. A stripped electric line? Get rid of the readiness. When you hear that train a comin', it ain’t your train. Stay off the tracks. No bridge has your name on it. No bridge. When you are suicidal, you are distraught. Distraught does not make for clear thinking. Impulsiveness compounds the problem, leads to mistakes. Mistakes may be worse than death.

You need time, more time, much more time, maybe a lifetime. Post-traumatic stress speeds things up. You need to slow down. One of the best ways to give yourself more time is to give your time away. Start with your family. Little children can really slow you down. Their presence to the moment, their curiosity, their imagination, their playfulness can all rub off on you if you slow down with them. Learn to identify ten trees in your neighborhood with your children and their friends. Learn the names of ten birds, ten insects. Then learn ten more of each. Pick some wild grapes and make jelly. Gather some hickory nuts and make cookies. Learn the natural world with them.

Men, learn to cook. Learn to feed yourself and your family. Your children would love to work with you in the kitchen. It will strengthen your marriage. Nurture her. Learn good nutrition. Bake bread. It’s great fun punching down the dough. Sit with your family at the table. Just for the fun of it, chew each mouthful 25 times. Slow down. Feed friends and neighbors. It’s healing. Go to the Farmers Market. Visit their farms. Grow something. Grow herbs and some flowers. Your children would love to grow something with you. Grow it and eat it. I learned how to make a simple red pasta sauce in Vietnam. Do it from scratch. It’s simple and it builds confidence. Then do variations. Don’t eat standing up, out of the pot. Slow down.

Volunteer your time. Help a neighbor, cut grass, rake leaves, shovel snow. Help the elderly. Visit a shut-in. Helping others helps you. It can help get you out of yourself, and getting out of yourself helps. Self can be toxic. Being concerned about others helps. Self needs time to heal. The healing is up to you but taking care of others heals you. The trauma in post-traumatic stress begins with violence, war, and rape. Military sexual trauma — rape — currently affects one-third to one-half of all women. The trauma begins with horrible violence. Life wants to live. It is as simple as that. Life wants to live. Violence can pervert that very simple truth. It can twist it, create doubt, create ambivalence. There can be only two responses to violence. One is to return the violence. The other is to return love. Love is a long, slow, hard, painful path. No one coming out of war or rape is prepared to be loving but P.T.S. is a sign that you can love. P.T.S. is a sign of the love in you.

Post-traumatic stress is not a “disorder." It is a natural response to what you have been through. It is a response to a terribly unnatural and unhealthy trauma. It is a sign that deep inside you understand that life wants to live. That is the starting point for your new life, the post-trauma life. It is a gift and a blessing if you let it be.

By Everett Cox, Vietnam veteran.

Veterans Suicide Prevention Hotline 1-800-273-8255

Source

Thursday 27 September 2012

Eisenhower's Farewell Address Forum: Civil-Military Relations

Cato Institute

More than a talk about Eisenhower and the industrial military complex, but illuminating commentary and questions about todays relationship between the military, general public and the civilians in charge.


The Cato Institute held a forum in honor of the 50th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address in which he spoke to about the military-industrial complex. President Eisenhower's granddaughter Susan Eisenhower made opening remarks about the discovery of new materials related to the address and said that the issues raised in the speech are still relevant. Then a panel of former government officials talked about relations between the civilian sector and the military, and ways the relationship had changed since President Eisenhower's time. After their discussion panelists answered questions from audience members.

"The Wars Within: Thoughts on the State of Civil-Military Relations in 2011" was the first panel of the Cato Institute program on January 13, 2011, "The Military-Industrial Complex at 50: Assessing the Meaning and Impact of Eisenhower's Farewell Address." 


Speakers:

Eisenhower, Susan Chair Emeritus - Eisenhower Institute

Dunlap, Charles J. Jr. (Maj. Gen. RET.) Associate Director - Duke University, Center on Law, Ethics and National Security  

Korb, Lawrence J. Senior Fellow - Center for American Progress

Wilkerson, Lawrence B. (Col. RET.) Adjunct Proffessor - College of William & Mary, Govt. Dept. 

Preble, Christopher A. Director - Cato Institute, Foreign Policy Studies 

Tuesday 25 September 2012

Dispatches: Iraq's Secret War Files


I saw this program a while ago and have never forgotten it. Although I was initially quite skeptical because of the 'conspiracy-esque' title of the program, the work to bring all the data together to give us a very real picture on what was happening in Iraq at this time, could not be doubted. Facts and firgures can always be interpreted in different ways, but the human cost, again, can not be doubted.


Originally aired on 25 Oct 2010, Channel 4

Dispatches exposes the full and unreported horror of the Iraqi conflict and its aftermath. The programme reveals the true scale of civilian casualties, and allegations that after the scandal of Abu Ghraib, American soldiers continued to abuse prisoners; and that US forces did not systematically intervene in the torture and murder of detainees by the Iraqi security services.

The programme also features previously unreported material of insurgents being killed while trying to surrender.

Channel 4 is the only UK broadcaster to have been given access to nearly 400,000 secret military significant activities reports (SIGACTS) logged by the US military in Iraq between 2004 and 2009. These reports tell the story of the war and occupation which the US military did not want the world to know.

Initially, the Americans claimed that they were not recording casualty figures and President Bush stated that America would do its utmost to avoid civilian casualties. In the files, Dispatches found details of over 109,000 deaths; 66,000 of these were civilians; 176,000 civilians and others were reported as wounded.

Under rules of engagement, known as escalation of force, anyone approaching the US military was warned to slow down and stop. The analysis reveals more than 800 people were killed in escalation of force incidents: 681 (80%) of these were civilians; a further 2,200 were wounded. Thirteen coalition troops were killed during these incidents. Dispatches found 30 children had been killed when shots were fired near civilians by US troops at checkpoints.

Over a six-year period, the data records the imprisonment of 180,000 Iraqis: one in 50 of the adult male population. Dispatches found more than 300 reports alleging abuse by US forces on Iraqi prisoners after April 2004.

The Americans effectively ignored the torture and murder of many detainees by Iraqi security forces. Dispatches has found evidence of more than 1,300 individual cases of the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Iraqis in police stations and army bases: witnessed or reported on by American troops. Dispatches reveals that US troops were ordered not to investigate Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence.

The data shows that the Americans were aware of the horrific level of violence inflicted by Iraqi sectarian militias: over 32,500 murders; more than 10,000 shot in the head; nearly 450 decapitated; over 160 were children.

One of the reasons given for the invasion of Iraq was the suggestion of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The US told the UN Security Council in 2003 that Iraq 'harboured' the terrorist network. However, in the leaked data there are only seven reports mentioning Al Qaeda in 2004, and none of these refer to Al Qaeda killing anyone. By 2008, there are 8,208 reports mentioning Al Qaeda attributing to it the deaths of 45 coalition soldiers, 486 members of the Iraqi Security Services and 1,291 civilians.

Sunday 23 September 2012

Senate Commitee Hearing: Soldiers Stories from the Afghan War

April 2009

Veterans of combat operations in Afghanistan testified about their experiences and offered advice from the perspective of soldiers and junior officers in the field. Most said that U.S. forces had done an insufficient job of reaching out to local villagers and presenting a viable alternative to cooperation with anti-Western fundamentalists. They were divided, however, on the usefulness of the Obama administrations plans to increase U.S. military presence in the region.

Saturday 1 September 2012

Ethics with Brian Orend: Justice & Responsibility After War


Brian Orend, Director of International Studies, Professor of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, Canada.

Talk at US Naval War College

Saturday 11 August 2012

The Sophisticated Guerrilla

Samuel B. Griffith USMC Brigadier General (ret.)

Introduction to Mao Tse-Tungs On Guerrilla Warfare

THE NATURE OF
REVOLUTIONARY GUERRILLA WAR

P. 7
It is often said that guerrilla warfare is primitive. This generalization is dangerously misleading and true only in the technological sense. If one considers the picture as a whole, a paradox is immediately apparent, and the primitive form is understood to be in fact more sophisticated than nuclear war or atomic war or war as it was waged by conventional armies, navies, and air forces. Guerrilla war is not dependent for success on the efficient operation of complex mechanical devices, highly organized logistical systems, or the accuracy of electronic computers. It can be conducted in any terrain, in any climate, in any weather; in swamps, in mountains, in farmed fields. Its basic element is man, and man is more complex than any of his machines. He is endowed with intelligence, emotions, and will. Guerrilla warfare is therefore suffused with, and reflects, man's admirable qualities as well as his less pleasant ones. While it is not always humane, it is human, which is more than can be said for the strategy of extinction.
Source:
DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A: Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited
DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY
Hadquarters United States Marine Corps
Washington, DC

Tuesday 26 June 2012

Charlie Speaks

As usual I can't recall how I came to find this. It's from a blog that hasn't, since 2007, been added to or updated. I hope Charlie is still with us.

The Observation Post - Observations of a Marine infantry officer and participant in the Global War On Terror. 

Thursday, August 24, 2006

President Bush pessimistic about Iraq?

Bush Shows Pessimism on Iraq

For three years, the president tried to reassure Americans that more progress was being made in Iraq than they realized. But with Iraq either in civil war or on the brink of it, Bush dropped the unseen-progress argument in favor of the contention that things could be even worse.

Obviously I am limited to what I can say on this subject, being a professional Marine officer, but this article screams out for some commentary. 3 and a half years ago, I believed whole-heartedly that we were doing the right thing in ousting Saddam Hussein, and I still do.

Hindsight being 20/20, now I would say that we should not have made the alleged weapons of mass destruction the linchpin of our case against Saddam, but I never believed that was the administration's primary motivation. I still believe that the policy-makers latched on to that issue because it was the easiest to sell to the American public. After all, I believe most of us thought that the hardest thing about the war would not be fighting it, but getting the American public to support it.

Most of the Marines I talked to in February and March 2003 expected a somewhat difficult fight followed by a quick and easy occupation. I differed from many of them in that I thought the occupation would be longer, but I never thought a full-fledged insurgency would break out. There was a general sense of optimism, that we would steamroll the Iraqis just like we did in 1991. However, when I was trained to be a platoon commander, I was told to plan not only for what I believed to be the enemy's most likely course of action, but also his most dangerous course of action. I believe we either planned for the wrong most dangerous course of action, or ignored it outright. Once the war became an all-out insurgency, it should have been obvious to everyone that it would continue for several years. Counter-insurgency campaigns are never short or easy, and anyone who expected this to be over by now was misguided at best and delusional at worst.

One of the most frustrating things to me has been the talk of immediate withdrawal. If we withdraw and the Iraqi government fails or is taken over by anti-American fundamentalists, then our enemies will all know that they can beat us by using insurgent tactics and outlasting us. Whether you wanted this war or not, it has happened and we must deal with it and continue to fight until we have achieved our goal of a completely self-sustaining Iraqi government.

I will tell you that in just the short time I have been here, this Iraqi Army battalion has made significant progress in securing the nearby villages. Their performance leaves plenty to be desired, but the civilians who live near the COP have said on numerous occasions that they feel much safer around their homes than they did just 4-5 months ago. Progress is being made here, and it will continue to be as long as we are allowed to do our jobs.

There are some echoes of another Marines words from Iraq at this time - Maj. Ben Connable who I've posted about here: Perceptions from the Ground

And some skepticism (no, downright mis-trust) on Connable here: Digging a little deeper

Monday 25 June 2012

A few interviews: Andrew Bacevich

Andrew Bacevich on Changing Our Military Mindset from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
 

Podcast interview with Tom Enggelhardt (TomDispatch.com) discussing Bacevichs book Washington Rules: Americas Path to Permenant War, 2010. Listen Here

Podcast inerview with Richard Fidler, ABC Local Australia, 2008. Listen Here

Friday 22 June 2012

READY FOR WHAT AND MODERNIZED AGAINST WHOM?

A prescient warning? Unfortunately unheeded...

By Jeffrey Record 1995

Strategic Studies Institute

United States Army War College
 
Excerpt:

....p.10

Bacevich, contend that the United States will seek to avoid direct involvement in unconventional conflicts, and if unable to avoid involvement, will inevitably perform poorly. In his view the culprit is a Pentagon still so petrified by the prospect of another Vietnam that it has deliberately blocked attempts to prepare effectively for unconventional conflict—and this, says Bacevich, at a time when the age of conventional military practice is drawing to a close.

I tend to believe that we are entering an era in which the predominant form of conflict will be smaller and less conventional wars waged mostly within recognized national borders. State disintegration in much of Africa, the collapse of the Soviet empire, the potential decomposition of Russia itself, and the likely spread of politically radical Islam—all portend a host of politically and militarily messy conflicts. They also portend a continuation of strong pressures to participate in operations other than war, especially in peace, humanitarian relief, and nation-building operations.

But whether I am right or wrong, I think most would agree with the proposition that a military establishment dedicated almost exclusively to preparation for conventional combat, and strongly averse to dealing with violent challenges that cannot be effectively dealt with by conventional means, is a military establishment that is not ready for unconventional conflict. Our own military performance in this century reveals a clear correlation between the type of combat we faced and how successful we were. Almost all of our military victories were gained against conventionally armed states that in the end failed to match either the quàlity or quantity of U.S. (and allied) manpower, materiel, and raw firepower. Wilhemine Germany, imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Baathist Iraq were simply overwhelmed.

In contrast, our military failures and humiliations for the most part have been at the hands of opponents having little or nothing in the way or sea and air power, or even ground force other than light infantry. Most of them could not hope to prevail over U.S. forces conventionally. But they did prevail because they employed a combination of unconventional strategy and tactics and had a greater willingness to fight and die. U.S. military power was stymied by Philipppine insurrectos, stalemated in Korea, defeated in Vietnam, and embarrassed in Lebanon and Somalia by opponents who succeeded in denying to U.S. forces the kind of targets most vulnerable to overwhelming firepower, while at the same time demonstrating superior political stamina in terms of enduring combat’s duration and cost.

To be sure, there were factors on our side other than our military conventionality that contributed to these failures, including excessive micromanagement of military operations from above, an absence of interests worth the price of the fight, and an underestimation of enemy political will and fighting prowess. But the fact remains that military forces designed primarily for one type of warfare are inherently ill-suited for other kinds of warfare. Race horses perform poorly at rodeos and behind plows.

Of the Pentagon’s commitment to conventional military orthodoxy and aversion to the unconventional, Andrew Bacevich has written:
Adversaries as different as Mohammed Farah Aideed and Radovan Karadzic have all too readily grasped the opportunities implicit in this fact. No doubt they respect the American military establishment for its formidable strengths. They are also shrewd enough to circumvent those strengths and to exploit the vulnerabilities inherent in the rigid American adherence to professional conventions regarding the use of force. As long as U.S. military policies are held hostage to such conventions, those vulnerabilities will persist. The abiding theme of twentieth century military history is that the changing character of modern war long ago turned the flank of conventional military practice, limiting its application to an ever narrowing spectrum of contingencies.
Far more of a challenge than Iraq presented 4 years ago will be forthcoming from Iran, which in its continuing campaígn against American power and influence in Southwest Asia has relied not on direct conventional military challenges, but rather on more successful, indirect, unconventional instruments such as terrorism, hostage-taking, and subversion. Add to these ingredients weapons of mass destruction and a keen attention to surreptitiously exploiting U.S. conventional military weaknesses, such as mining Gulf waters, and you have what Andrew Krepinevich has called a “Streetfighter State.” Such a state relies on unconventional acts of violence, and is prepared to wage a protracted struggle. Iran, and nations like it, are willing to absorb what the United States would consider a disproportionate amount of punishment to achieve its goals. The Streetfighter State exploits American social weaknesses, such as impatience and aversion to casualties, while at the same time denying U.S. firepower decisive targets or at least easily attackable ones. It’s not that the U.S. military is preparing for the wrong war. It’s just that there is more than one war—any single “right” war—to prepare for in the post-Cold War world. Stuffing money into the defense budget readiness accounts prepares us for conventional warfare but not for much else, and that “much else” may come to dominate the international military environment.

Krepinevich has written:
It would seem that, rather than maintaining a force structure for two ‘last wars,’ the Defense Department might consider expending some additional resources, especially intellectual capital, examining how the United States military might explore innovative operational concepts that help it cope with the Streetfighter State. Such conceptual innovation need not break the budget . . . [D)uring the 1920s and 1930s the U.S. military successfully engineered a number of conceptual, or ‘intellectual,’ breakthroughs in response to dramatic changes in the geopolitical and military technical environment. The military services did it through a mixture of good fortune and farsighted leaders, both military and civilian, who were sufficiently adaptive and innovative to nurture the ‘intellectual breakthroughs’ that led to the rise of carrier aviation, strategic aerial bombardment, and modern amphibious assault operations. They accomplished this sea change while military budgets were extremely tight. Wargaming and prototyping were emphasized, as opposed to full-scale production of systems. In essence, the services benefitted from a relatively small force structure, which allowed them to move more quickly into the new form of warfare once it was identified and the nation found itself confronted with great power rivals.

Thursday 21 June 2012

The American Way of War

By Jeffrey Record 2006

Cato Institute

Exceprt:
...
The American Way of War

Much has been written about America’s strategic culture and way of war, beginning with historian Russell F.  Weigley’s seminal 1973 book, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy. Both strategy and policy derive from a variety of factors, including national political culture, geography, historical military experience, and comparative strategic advantages and preferences. Particular factors shaping America’s strategic culture include geographic isolation from Europe, success in subjugating a vast continental wilderness, hemispheric domination, an ideology of democratic expansionism and national  exceptionalism, and a persistent isolationist impulse. Those and other factors, argues the highly respected British strategist Colin S. Gray in an exceptionally insightful 2005 essay, have produced a strategic culture—more specifically, an “American way of war”— that has 12 specific characteristics:

1. Apolitical: “Americans are wont to regard war and peace as sharply distinctive conditions. The U.S. military has a long history of waging war for the goal of victory, paying scant regard to the consequences of the course of its operations for the character of the peace that will follow.”

2. Astrategic: “Strategy is, or should be, the bridge that connects military power with policy. When Americans wage war as a largely autonomous activity, leaving worry about peace and its politics to some later day, the strategy bridge has broken down.”

3. Ahistorical: “America is a future-oriented, still somewhat ‘new’ country, one that has a founding ideology of faith in, and hope for, and commitment to, human betterment. It is only to be expected, therefore, that Americans should be less than highly respectful of what they might otherwise allow history to teach them.”

4. Problem-Solving, Optimistic: “The American way in war is not easily discouraged or deflected once it is exercised with serious intent to succeed. . . . The problem- solving faith, the penchant for the ‘engineering fix,’ has the inevitable consequence of leading U.S. policy, including its use of armed force, to attempt the impossible.”

5. Culturally Ignorant: Americans are not inclined “to be respectful of the beliefs, habits, and behaviors of  other cultures . . . the American way of war has suffered from the self-inflicted damage caused by a failure to understand the enemy of the day.”

6. Technologically Dependent: “America is the land of technological marvels and of extraordinary technology dependency. . . . American soldiers say that the human beings matter most, but in practice the American way of war, past, present, and prospectively future, is quintessentially and uniquely technologically dependent.”

7. Firepower Focused: “It has long been the American way in warfare to send metal in harm’s way in place of vulnerable flesh. . . . Needless to say, perhaps, a devotion to firepower, while highly desirable in itself,  cannot help but encourage the U.S. armed forces to rely on it even when other modes of military behavior would be more suitable. In irregular conflicts in particular, . . . resorting to firepower solutions readily becomes self-defeating.”

8. Large-Scale: “Poor societies are obliged to wage war frugally. They have no choice other than to attempt to fight smarter than rich enemies. The United States has been blessed with wealth in all its forms. Inevitably, the U.S. armed forces, once mobilized and equipped, have fought a rich person’s war. They could hardly do otherwise.”

9. Profoundly Regular: “Few, if any, armies have been equally competent in the conduct of regular and irregular warfare. . . . As institutions, however, the U.S. armed forces have not been friendly either to irregular warfare or to those in its ranks who were would-be practitioners and advocates of what was regarded as the sideshow of insurgency. American soldiers . . . have always been prepared nearly exclusively for ‘real war,’ which is to say combat against a tolerably symmetrical, regular enemy.”

10. Impatient: “Americans have approached warfare as a regrettable occasional evil that has to be concluded as decisively and rapidly as possible.”

11. Logistically Excellent: “Americans at war have been exceptionally able logisticians. With a continental-size interior and an effectively insular geographic location, such ability has been mandatory if the country was to wage war at all, let alone wage it effectively. . . . A large logistical footprint . . . requires a great deal of guarding, helps isolate American troops from local people and their culture, and generally tends to grow.”

12. Sensitivity to Casualties: “In common with the Roman Empire, the American guardian of world order is much averse to suffering a high rate of military casualties. . . . Both superstates had and have armies that are small, too small in the opinion of many, relative to their responsibilities. Moreover, well-trained professional soldiers, volunteers all, are expensive to raise, train, and retain, and are difficult to replace.” American society, it is said, “has become so sensitive to casualties that the domestic context for U.S. military action is no longer tolerant of bloody adventures in muscular imperial governance.”

Monday 11 June 2012

The Future Of The World Rests On America

‘Americans misperceive the world and their role in determining its evolution’
 
Andrew J. Bacevich

Boston Review Jan/Feb 2010

This article is a response to Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

Nir Rosen is rightly skeptical of the counterinsurgency campaign the United States seems hellbent on pursuing in Afghanistan. Yet the problems highlighted by U.S. military action in that unfortunate country go much further: Americans misperceive the world and their own role in determining its evolution.

The bedrock assumption to which all of official Washington adheres, liberal Democrats no less than conservative Republicans, is that the United States itself constitutes the axis around which history turns. We define the future. Our actions determine its course. The world needs, expects, and yearns for America to lead, thereby ensuring the ultimate triumph of liberty. For the United States to shrink from its responsibility to lead is, at the very least, to put at risk the precarious stability to which humanity clings and in all likelihood would open the door to unspeakable catastrophe. Alternatives to American leadership simply do not exist.

Reject these propositions and your chances of working in the White House, securing a cushy billet at some Washington think tank, or landing an invitation to pontificate on one of the Sunday-morning talk shows are reduced to just about zero.

This self-image, combining grandeur with insufferable smugness, both energizes and perverts U.S. foreign policy. It inspires American policymakers to undertake breathtakingly bold initiatives such as the Marshall Plan—Harry Truman setting out to rebuild a Europe laid prostrate by war. Yet it also inspires the likes of George W. Bush to pursue his Freedom Agenda—an expressed intent to transform the entire Islamic world, providing a rationale for open-ended “global war.”

The conviction that the United States is history’s prime mover also blinds Washington to forces that may well exercise a far greater impact on the course of events than do the actions of the United States itself.

During the Cold War, for example, U.S. policymakers viewed events through the lens of bipolarity. The world, they insisted, broke neatly into two camps divided by an iron curtain. In the 1950s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared that neutrality was immoral and impermissible. Governments had to choose: you either sided with the free world (led, of course, by the United States) or you aligned yourself with the communists.

This oversimplified with-us-or-against-us mentality made it difficult, if not impossible, for Dulles and other U.S. leaders to comprehend the eruption of third-world nationalism triggered by and feeding off of the collapse of the old European empires after World War II. In Washington “non-aligned” became a synonym for “fellow traveler.” Faced with expressions of self-determination that did not fit neatly into the prevailing East-West paradigm, U.S. officials assumed the worst and acted to enforce conformity to Western—i.e., American—requirements. This misperception—that self-professed nationalists in places such as Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam were actually agents of the Kremlin—produced a penchant for U.S. intervention, both overt and covert, that yielded disastrous consequences, many of them still dogging us today.

Had U.S. officials accurately gauged the wellsprings of postcolonial nationalism, the United States might have demonstrated greater self-restraint when faced with third-world recalcitrance. The insistence that Egypt’s Nasser or Cuba’s Castro toe some line dictated from Washington turned out to be neither necessary nor productive.

Yet appreciating the new nationalism might also have offered Washington an insight into the profound internal weakness of the multinational, multiethnic Soviet Empire. Poles, Afghans, and Chinese had no interest in taking their marching orders from Moscow. Nor, as events would show, did Ukrainians, Georgians, and Kazakhs. The post-1945 Soviet Empire was as obsolete as the empires of Great Britain and France. Its collapse was a bit longer in coming, but was equally foreordained.

A similar misperception afflicts U.S. policy today. In the wake of 9/11, a with-us-or-against-us mentality once again swept Washington. “Terrorism” assumed the place of communism as the great evil that the United States was called upon to extirpate. This effort triggered a revival of interventionism, pursued heedless of cost and regardless of consequences, whether practical or moral.

The tens of thousands of U.S. troops shipped to Afghanistan matter less than the hundreds of billions of American dollars shipped each year to China.

In the Pentagon, they call this the Long War. With his decision to escalate the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama—effectively abandoning his promise to “change the way Washington works”—has signaled his administration’s commitment to the Long War.

Yet, as with the Cold War, the Long War rests on a false premise. To divide the world into two camps today makes no more sense than it did in Dulles’s time. Rather than creating clarity, indulging in this sort of oversimplification sows confusion and encourages miscalculation. It allows Americans to avert their eyes from the gathering forces—largely beyond the control of the United States—that are actually reshaping the international order. Sending U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan sustains the pretense that we ourselves, exercising the prerogatives of global leadership, are somehow shaping that order.

Violent anti-Western jihadism—a cause that has about as much prospect of conquering the planet as Soviet-style communism—is not going to define the 21st century. Far more likely to do so is the transfer of power—first economic, then political—from the West to the East, from the Atlantic basin to the heartland of Asia. In that regard, the tens of thousands of U.S. troops shipped to Afghanistan matter less than the hundreds of billions of American dollars shipped each year to China.

Complicating this transfer of power and creating conditions from which a new era of violent conflict may emerge is the challenge of dealing with the detritus created during the age of Western dominance now ending: weapons of mass destruction; vast disparities of wealth; the depletion of essential natural resources; massive and potentially irreversible environmental devastation; and a culture ravaged by the pursuit of “freedom” defined in terms of conspicuous consumption and unbridled individual autonomy.

The Long War that President Bush began and that President Obama has now made his own provides an excuse for Americans to avoid confronting these larger matters. A policy of avoidance will not make the problems go away, of course. It will merely advance the day of reckoning that awaits.

Sunday 3 June 2012

Afghanistan: a war we cannot win

The threat posed by al-Qaeda is exaggerated; the West's vision of a rebuilt Afghanistan ultimately flawed, says former soldier, diplomat and academic Rory Stewart

London Review of Books (originally titled: The Irresistable Illusion) / The Telegraph

July 2009

By Rory Stewart

We are accustomed to seeing Afghans through bars, or smeared windows, or the sight of a rifle: turbaned men carrying rockets, praying in unison, or lying in pools of blood; boys squabbling in an empty swimming-pool; women in burn wards, or begging in burqas. Kabul is a South Asian city of millions. Bollywood music blares out in its crowded spice markets and flower gardens, but it seems that images conveying colour and humour are reserved for Rajasthan.

Barack Obama, in a recent speech, set out our fears. The Afghan government
is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people. The economy is undercut by a booming narcotics trade that encourages criminality and funds the insurgency … If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can … For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralysed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people – especially women and girls. The return in force of al-Qaida terrorists who would accompany the core Taliban leadership would cast Afghanistan under the shadow of perpetual violence.
When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It conjures nightmares of ‘failed states’ and ‘global extremism’, offers the remedies of ‘state-building’ and ‘counter-insurgency’, and promises a final dream of ‘legitimate, accountable governance’. The path is broad enough to include Scandinavian humanitarians and American special forces; general enough to be applied to Botswana as easily as to Afghanistan; sinuous and sophisticated enough to draw in policymakers; suggestive enough of crude moral imperatives to attract the Daily Mail; and almost too abstract to be defined or refuted. It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy. It conceals the conflicts between our interests: between giving aid to Afghans and killing terrorists. It assumes that Afghanistan is predictable. It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions. None of the experts in 1988 predicted that the Russian-backed President Najibullah would survive for two and a half years after the Soviet withdrawal. And no one predicted at the beginning of 1994 that the famous commanders of the jihad, Hekmatyar and Masud, then fighting a civil war in the centre of Kabul, could be swept aside by an unknown group of madrassah students called the Taliban. Or that the Taliban would, in a few months, conquer 90 per cent of the country, eliminate much corruption, restore security on the roads and host al-Qaida.

It is tempting to assume that economic growth will not make Afghanistan into Obama’s terrorist haven or Brown’s strong democracy but rather into something more like its wealthier neighbours. Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan were at various points under the same Muslim empires. There are Persian, Turkmen, Uzbek and Tajik populations in Afghanistan, and the Afghan Pushtun are only arbitrarily divided by the Durand Line from their Pakistani kinsmen. The economies are linked and millions of Afghans have studied and worked in Iran or Pakistan. There are more reasons for Afghanistan to develop into a country like one of its neighbours than for it to collapse into Somalian civil war or solidify into Malaysian democracy. But Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan present a bewildering variety of states: an Islamist theocracy, a surreal mock-tribal autocracy, a repressive secular dictatorship, a country trembling on the edge of civil war, a military dictatorship cum democracy. And it will be many years before Afghanistan’s economy or its institutions draw level with those of its neighbours.

Pakistan, which is often portrayed as a ‘failed state’, has not only the nuclear bomb and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence but also the Friday Times and the National College of Arts. Progressive views are no longer confined to the wealthy Lahore elite: a mass commercial satellite television station championed a campaign to overturn the hudud ordinances, which conflated adultery and rape; 1500 women were released from jail as a result. There is no equivalent in Afghanistan of the Pakistani lawyers’ movement, which reinstated the chief justice after his dismissal by Musharraf.

Friday 1 June 2012

U.S. Civil-Military Relations in the 21st Century

Following my post on the gap between the military and civilian society, heres the second half of a lecture given at the University of Berkeley by Nathaniel Fick - marine veteran and CEO of CNAS (Center for a New American Security). He touches on a lot of issues which I'm still digesting. I'm not so naive to think that this guy is some sort of authority on Afghanistan, the military or US foreign policy. He points this out himself, which in my book gives him some merit.


Wednesday 30 May 2012

Afghanistan: The Great Game - A Personal View by Rory Stewart

I just caught this today on BBC2. I don't know Rory Stewart, but I will certainly be looking out for him now. A refreshing look at the 10 year 'war' - the old adage 'history repeating itself' not so much describing the Afghans, but the sheer arrogance of the invading forces - whoever it may be - British, Russian or American.

Part 1

Part 2

Wednesday 16 May 2012

The Widening Gap Between Military and Society

This may have been written 15 years ago but it seems as revelant today as it was in 1997. Hence the previous article post.

U.S. military personnel of all ranks are feeling increasingly alienated from their own country, and are becoming both more conservative and more politically active than ever before. Do they see America clearly?


The Atlantic July 1997

By Thomas E. Ricks

After following a platoon of Marine recruits through eleven weeks of boot-camp training on Parris Island in the spring of 1995, I was stunned to see, when they went home for postgraduation leave, how alienated they felt from their old lives. At various times each of these new Marines seemed to experience a moment of private loathing for public America. They were repulsed by the physical unfitness of civilians, by the uncouth behavior they witnessed, and by what they saw as pervasive selfishness and consumerism. Many found themselves avoiding old friends, and some experienced difficulty even in communicating with their families.

One typical member of Platoon 3086, Craig Hoover, reported that the Amtrak ride home to Kensington, Maryland, was "horrible." The train was "filled with smoke," he said. "People were drinking and their kids were running around aimlessly. You felt like smacking around some people." (An article I published in The Wall Street Journal in July, 1995, mentioned many of the recruits quoted here.) Hoover also found the train ride a sad contrast to the relative racial harmony of Parris Island. "It felt kind of segregated by race and class—a poor white car, a poor black car, a middle-class white car, a middle-class black car." Even McDonald's—which had become a fantasy-like symbol to the recruits as they ate military rations, particularly during a week of training in the woods-proved to be a letdown. "You look around and notice that a lot of the civilians are overweight, and a little sloppy," Hoover said.

Jonathan Prish, a former white supremacist, went with old friends to a bar in Mobile, Alabama. "We played pool and drank," he reported, in a typical comment. "It seemed like everyone there was losers. All they want to do is get smashed. They're self-destructive. They're not trying. They're just goofing around."

In the wealthy Washington suburb of Potomac, Maryland, Eric Didier felt the same way. "There are some friends I've stayed away from," he said. "They're not going anywhere, and I don't want to be around them. We don't have any common ground." Though they are in their early twenties, he said, "they're not doing anything, living at home, not working, not studying."

In Pittsburgh, Patrick Bayton went to a Saturday-night party where he saw two old friends as "losers." "Everything feels different," he said. "I can't stand half my friends no more." Frank DeMarco attended a street fair in Bayonne, New Jersey. "It was crowded. Trash everywhere. People were drinking, getting into fights. People with obnoxious attitudes, no politeness whatsoever." But, he said, "I didn't let it get to me. I just said, 'This is the way civilian life is: nasty.'"

Yet the member of Platoon 3086 perhaps most at odds with his former environment was Daniel Keane, whose background was probably the most privileged. The son of a Merrill Lynch & Co. executive, Keane seemed almost in pain when I interviewed him in the living room of his parents' house, in Summit, New Jersey. When he first got home from Parris Island, he said about being with his family, "I didn't know how to act. They said, 'What do you want to do?' I'd say, 'I don't know.' I didn't know how to carry on a conversation."

He found his old peer group even more difficult. "All my friends are home from college now, drinking, acting stupid and loud," the eighteen-year-old Marine said. He was particularly disappointed when two old friends refused to postpone smoking marijuana for a few minutes, until he was away from them. "They were getting ready to smoke their weed. I said, 'Could you just hang on for a minute? Can't you wait till you get to the party instead of smoking in the car?' They said, 'Then we'd have to give it out.'" So, he recalled, they lit up in front of their Marine friend. "I was pretty disappointed in them doing that. It made me want to be at SOI [the Marines' School of Infantry]."

Like many other members of 3086, Keane felt as if he had joined a cult or religion. "People don't understand," he told me, "and I'm not going to waste my breath trying to explain when the only thing that really impresses them is how much beer you can chug down in thirty seconds."

THE GAP

I think the Marines of Platoon 3086 were experiencing in a very personal way the widening gap between today's military and civilian America. To be sure, their reaction was exaggerated by the boot-camp experience, during which the Marine Corps especially among the services tries to sever a recruit's ties to his or her previous life. But because of the nature of American society today, the re-entry shock upon leaving recruit training appears to be greater now than it was in the past. Asked to explain this difference, retired Marine Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor said, "When I got out of boot camp, in 1946, society was different. It was more disciplined, and most Americans trusted the government. Most males had some military experience. It was an entirely different society—one that thought more about its responsibilities than its rights."

Similarly, Sergeant Major James Moore, now retired but at that time the senior sergeant on Parris Island, commented, "It is difficult to go back into a society of 'What's in it for me?' when a Marine has been taught the opposite for so long. When I look at society today, I see a group of young people without direction because of the lack of teaching of moral values at home and in school. We see that when we get them in recruit training. The recruits are smarter today—they run rings around what we were able to do, on average. Their problems are moral problems: lying, cheating, and stealing, and the very fact of being committed. We find that to get young people to dedicate themselves to a cause is difficult sometimes."

The idea of a gap between the military and civilian America is hardly new. For much of the nation's history, Samuel Huntington wrote in The Soldier and the State (1957), the U.S. military has had "the outlook of an estranged minority." A decade ago the journalist Arthur Hadley called this strained civilian-military relationship "The Great Divorce." In The Straw Giant: Triumph and Failure—America's Armed Forces (1986) he defined this as "the less-than-amicable separation of the military from the financial, business, political, and intellectual elites of this country, particularly from the last two."

The fact that most Americans pay attention to the military only when they see news of a sexual-abuse scandal, such as the one at Aberdeen Proving Ground, underscores that separation. As far as media coverage is concerned, the U.S. military has fallen to the level of a mid-sized Asian nation that breaks onto the front page with a large disaster but gets just a few paragraphs for bus plunges and plane crashes. The estrangement appears to be more complete now than it was in the past, for, I think, two overarching reasons. First, more than twenty years after the end of conscription the ignorance of American elites about the military has deepened. Second, with the end of the Cold War the United States has entered into historically unexplored territory. If the Cold War is indeed considered to have been a kind of war, then for the first time in American history the nation is maintaining a large military establishment during peacetime, with 1.5 million people on active duty and millions more serving in reserve and supporting civilian roles in the Defense Department and the defense industry.

Several trends already under way in civilian society and in the post-Cold War military threaten to widen the gap in the coming years, further isolating and alienating the military. In his 1974 prologue to the revised edition of The Professional Soldier, Morris Janowitz concluded confidently that there would not be "a return to earlier forms of a highly self-contained and socially distinct military force; the requirements of technology of education and of political support make that impossible." But the conditions that shaped the military of which Janowitz wrote no longer obtain. It now appears not only possible but likely that over the next twenty years the U.S. military will revert to a kind of garrison status, largely self-contained and increasingly distinct as a society and subculture. "Today," says retired Admiral Stanley Arthur, who commanded U.S. naval forces during the Gulf War, "the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve. More and more, enlisted [men and women] as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve. This is not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy."

An Army Apart: The Widening Military-Civilian Gap

Mark Thompson

battleland.blogs.time.com

10 November 2011
November 2011 Cover

 The U.S. military and American society are drifting apart. It’s tough inside the civilian world to discern the drift. But troops in all the military services sense it, smell it — and talk about it. So do their superiors. We have a professional military of volunteers that has been stoically at war for more than a decade. But as the wars have droned on, the troops waging them are increasingly an Army apart.

This is the topic of my cover story in the dead-tree edition of Time out today – Veterans’ Day eve. It’s an important story, one that needs to be widely told. But because TIME keeps its print edition off the web for awhile, what follows is sort of a director’s cut of what’s in the magazine.

(READ: Rehabilitating America’s Wounded Warriors — An Inside Look)

The civilian-military gap has taken on an edge recently, driven by the lack of sacrifice — either in blood or treasure — demanded of the rest of us compared to what the troops are giving. Army Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry recently earned the Medal of Honor for saving Ranger buddies from certain death in Afghanistan. He grabbed a live grenade and tossed it away as it blew up. It cost him his right hand. It happened on his seventh combat tour (he has since pulled an eighth). A roadside bomb killed Sgt. 1st Class Kristoffer Domeij, husband and father of two, in Afghanistan Oct. 22. He was on his 14th combat deployment.

“There’s no challenge for the 99% of the American people who are not involved in the military,” says Army veteran Ron Capps, who served as an intelligence analyst in Afghanistan. “They don’t lose when soldiers die overseas, they’re not being forced to pay, for the wars, and there’s no sense among the vast population of what we’re engaged in.”

Military leaders know the gap is widening, which leads to important questions: is this a bad thing? If it is, should we care? And if we should care, what can be done to reverse it? “I have this deep existential angst about a military organization within a democratic society that’s as isolated from the rest of that society as our military is becoming,” says Michael Desch, a political scientist and military expert at Notre Dame. “The gap can make civilian control of the military harder to achieve.”

That may be a reach, but senior officers sense the parting. “I have been struck in my travels at the lack of what I would call in-depth understanding of what we’ve been through,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Time before he retired last month after 43 years in uniform. It’s almost like the American Foreign Legion. “We come from fewer and fewer places — we’ve BRAC’ed our way out of significant portions of the country,” Mullen said, referring to the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission process that has shuttered hundreds of military posts across wide swaths of the nation. “Long term, if the military drifts away from its people in this country, that is a catastrophic outcome we as a country can’t tolerate.”

(PHOTOS: America’s Other 1% — The Army Apart)

More evidence of the military’s growing separateness: it is becoming a family trade. Mullen has had two children on active duty. His successor, Army General Martin Dempsey, has had three. General Ray Odierno, the new Army chief of staff, has a son who lost his left arm to an RPG in Iraq in 2004. Of course, there are other ways of looking at it. “It is truly inspiring to see the same commitment to serve this nation passing to a new generation of leaders who will follow in the footsteps of their fathers,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said as Mullen handed off the baton to Dempsey Sept. 30. Fair enough. But what about the rest of us?
Call it the law of unintended consequences.

Former defense secretary Robert Gates raised the topic last month at the U.S. Military Academy. “In the absence of a draft that reaches deeply into the ranks of the citizenry, service in the military — matter how laudable — has become something for other people to do,” the former defense secretary told the West Point cadets three months after leaving office.

The U.S. never had a standing peacetime army until after World War II, and until 1973 it was filled with conscripts. The nation has been fighting its longest war on the backs of the smallest slice of its population in more than 200 years. “Not since the peacetime years between World War I and World War II,” a Pew study noted last month, “has a smaller share of Americans served in the armed forces.”

We used to call them “soldiers,” and that was good enough when they were one of us. But now civilians call them “warriors” or “war-fighters,” as if the label proudly and honorable worn by their fathers and grandfathers is somehow inadequate. “There is a small subset of our population that is bearing the burdens of service in uniform for all,” then-Army general Dave Petraeus told Time before shucking his Army uniform to run the CIA. “But it is also important indeed that all citizens be acquainted with what it is that our men and women in uniform do for our country.”

But that’s not happening. Steven Blum, a retired three-star Army general who ran the National Guard from 2003 to 2008, fears the wars have become “a constant background noise, because so few of U.S. citizens really are engaged in this conflict.” Except for hometown reservists heading off to war, he warned a congressional committee last month that the U.S. military could “become viewed by the American people as a foreign legion, or a mercenary unit.”

(PHOTOS: Returning Soldiers’ Tattoos — Battle Scars)

Neither the U.S. military nor civilian society is to blame for the drift. In fact, fundamental changes in each have made it inevitable. Only 1.5 million of the 240 million Americans over 18 – about half of 1% — are in uniform today. Without a draft or a good civilian economy, they tend to stay in uniform longer, further isolating them from the American mainstream. During the Vietnam War, fewer than 20% of Army grunts had more than four years in uniform; today it’s more than half.

The military is no longer – if it ever were — a last resort for poor young Americans with no other options; nearly all are high-school graduates and most come from the working and middle classes. Yet it is self-selecting, and increasingly well paid. Average cash compensation per troop is $57,400, and the annual total personnel-related cost per troop, including health care, is more than twice that: $121,600, according to a recent accounting by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Part of the problem – surprise! – is Pentagon penny-pinching. Trying to save money, the Defense Department has been shutting bases down across much of the nation for the past generation, and concentrating them in military-friendly southern states. “Where [troops come from] gets more and more away from the general population,” ex-Guard chief Blum said. “What they do behind those gates is pretty much, `Who cares?’ to the general population, unless they make their living off of what goes on in there.”
Even as the military has changed dramatically over the past generation, so has the country in which it is rooted. Without any skin in the game, Americans are detached from the conflicts and those waging them, with the exception of Memorial Days and the magnetic yellow ribbons that cling to the rump of their SUVs. There are no advertisements tied into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as there were in World War II. Even Vietnam, an unpopular war, generated songs (“And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?”) because we all, more or less, had a stake. Today, every man and woman wearing the uniform of the U.S. military is a volunteer, we tell ourselves (although hireling might be a more apt word).

Following the debacle that was Vietnam, creating the all-volunteer force seemed brilliant: delinking the military from an inconstant public gave the President a stronger hand in sending forces into harm’s way, especially given Congress’ cravenness when it came to being spattered with GI-positive blood. But it also carries with it a risk: that it will too often been seen as a convenient hammer to deal with vexing international problems. “A standing army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the liberties of the people,” Samuel Adams of the American Revolution (and beer fame) warned. “Soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a body distinct from the rest of the citizens…Such a power should be watched with a jealous eye.”

(WATCH: Reunion and Recovery After an Iraq Injury)

The makeup of today’s force misses the heart of American might: the common bond between the U.S. military, and the citizens who supply and fund it, is the fulcrum that leverages U.S. power. Divorced from society, the military runs the risk of becoming little more than rent-a-cops with bigger weapons. And, in fact, as the U.S. pursued two wars post-9/11, it became clear quickly that it could only wage them if it hired costly contractors to do most everything except pull triggers in the war zones (although they did some of that, too). The CIA increasingly is killing purported terrorists with drone-launched Hellfire missiles around the world, with no public acknowledgement or accountability.

Shifts in how the U.S. wages its wars are always subtle. But as the military and society drift further apart, the three-way debate — with Congress representing the body politic – has withered. Instead, it has turned into a tug-of-war between the White House and the Pentagon. Without the ballast provided by a substantial public investment in how military force is used, it becomes easier for both sides to game the system envisioned by the Founding Fathers: forcing the public to act as an industrial-strength flywheel on military excursions.

So what’s the solution? What about a return to the draft? The public doesn’t like the idea. In last month’s Pew poll, 68% of veterans and 74% of the public oppose its return (interestingly, 82% of post-9/11 veterans feel that way, but only 61% of Vietnam-era vets do). The military agrees. Asked by Time what steps the Pentagon is considering to trim its budget, Marine General James Cartwright, until recently the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listed personnel as a big target. “We have to look at everything,” he said three weeks before he retired, including “the dirty word, `draft.’”

But if this growing gap is something we need to fix before it becomes a chasm, there are several things the nation needs to do. The first is to stop fighting war on the cheap, both fiscally and politically. Borrowing money to wage war is a false economy (wars tend not to age well; imagine how you’d feel if you were paying for Vietnam today).

Politically, Americans should insist their elected representatives stop passing the buck. They don’t want to make the tough calls when it comes to budget cuts, so they appoint a super-committee to do the dirty work. They don’t want to target military bases for closing following the Cold War, so they commanded special outside panels to do it.

Most importantly, they’ve subcontracted out making war to the President, despite Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives only Congress the right “to declare war.” The latest slip down this slippery slope: on Oct. 14, the White House simply informed Congress, by letter, that it is sending 100 U.S. troops to aid in the central African war against the Lord’s Resistance Army.
War is the most extraordinary enterprise in which the national government engages. It’s long past time the public to engage in it, as well.