CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Entries by Chris Bray
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Eating People
"In the America where things are made, the recession has been a depression. According to a new Northeastern University study, one in every six blue-collar industrial jobs have disappeared since 2007, matching the drop in overall employment in the Great Depression. Last year, about 1.3 million factory jobs vanished."
USA Today, March 2
"Indeed, last year's wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year. This year the World's Billionaires have an average net worth of $3.5 billion, up $500 million in 12 months. The world has 1,011 10-figure titans, up from 793 a year ago but still shy of the record 1,125 in 2008. Of those billionaires on last year's list, only 12% saw their fortunes decline."
Forbes, March 10
A question: What possible futures do these two paragraphs suggest to historians?
Friday, February 19, 2010
Baghdad Bob
"Many economists take a much calmer view of budget deficits than anything you’ll see on TV. Nor do investors seem unduly concerned: U.S. government bonds continue to find ready buyers, even at historically low interest rates."
-- Paul Krugman, "Fiscal Scare Tactics," NYT, Feb. 4, 2010
"Until recently, China has been the largest foreign official holder of US debt. That is why the latest release of Treasury International Capital (Tic) data, showing that China’s holdings of Treasuries fell by a record amount in December, has caused something of a stir. China’s holdings fell by $34.2bn to $755.4bn from the previous month, prompting renewed jitters that the country was diversifying from Treasuries over fears about their future value. China’s holdings have fallen from a peak of $801.5bn in May 2009."
-- The Financial Times, today.
Revealing the Hidden Transcript
States extract. Subjects regulate state extraction by their choices to resist or participate, flee or stand in place, fight or accommodate.
In Texas today, a software engineer named Joe Stack crashed an airplane into a building occupied by employees whose function is to extract revenue for the central state.
How can historians discuss this event?
In a public suicide letter, Stack's language seems deeply familiar, the grievance of tax rebels for hundreds of years in places all over the world. His argument is that state elites overreached, pushing their extractive mechanism too far into the life of an ordinary person and costing him his ability to subsist.
He even expresses the precise theme identified by James Scott as the center of the moral economy of the peasant: food security.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Save the Man, Kill the Indian
or, "Targeted Kindergartens"
Harriet Beecher Stowe, the New York Daily Tribune, April 1, 1876:
"We have tried fighting and killing the Indians, and gained little by it. We have tried feeding them as paupers in their savage state, and the result has been dishonest contractors, and invitation and provocation to war. Suppose we try education? Suppose we respond to the desire of these young men, and give them, for two or three years, teaching and training in some such institution as the Amherst State Agricultural School...Might not the money now constantly spent on armies, forts and frontiers be better invested in educating young men who shall return and teach their people to live like civilized human beings?"
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times, February 9, 2010:
"So here is my new rule of thumb: For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build 50 new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls. If we stick to something close to that ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens, we have a chance to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground."
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Most Worstest Thing in Forever
Actual quote:
"Washington insiders say they can't ever recall a period in American public life as full of anger and polarization as now."
Uh, yeah. When has America ever been polarized before?
And so here we go again. Blogging at the Most Reliable Source of Internet Comedy™, Jeremy Rifkin warns that American public life has suddenly and without precedent turned uncivil. Why, there are even people on the radio who have "fanned the flames of hatred with occasional outrageous personal attacks on public figures and advocates of policy agendas with which they disagree."
Nothing like this has ever happened before, of course, and so the president has been forced to issue "an unprecedented plea for civility in public discourse."
I'm taking up a collection -- send me a check, c/o the UCLA History Department, so we can send our nation's capital a book.
How hard would you have to work to believe this stuff? And is it uncivil of me to want to scream out loud at the people who write it?
Monday, January 25, 2010
There's Other Evidence...
...but it's just so totally old
Blaring headlines and silly stories announce a stunning new finding from the Gallup Poll: the first year of Barack Obama's presidency is the most polarizing ever.
In the always magnificently awful Huffington Post, for an almost too-easy example, Sam Stein says the poll shows that Obama has "the most polarized approval ratings ever recorded during a president's first year in office."
Gallup doesn't help, tagging their report on the poll with a subhead explaining that Obama's numbers are worse than for "any prior first-year president."
Friday, January 22, 2010
And Now We're Going to Rub It in Your Face
The University of California has announced $3.1 million in bonuses for executives at its public sector medical centers. The CEO of the UC Davis Medical Center will receive "a $167,986 payment on top of her base salary of $584,300."
Also announced: the promotion of a UC Berkeley vice-chancellor to a post at the system's central office, with a base salary of $375,000 a year. His job? To raise money for the university system. Because it's broke.
But hold on a second, because UC President Mark Yudof explained to the Board of Regents yesterday that the bonuses aren't what they are: "They're not bonuses, they are incentive pay to get certain behavior."
Because how could you expect the CEO of a university hospital to be motivated to show up and do her job if you expected her to struggle by on just her $584,300 salary?
Fire. Mark. Yudof. Now.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Self-Satirizing Institutions
UC Berkeley needs to cut $150 million from their budget...so they hired a consultant for $3 million to tell them what to cut. Now they have to cut $153 million, but never mind -- the funny part is that the chancellor told the New York Times that he had to hire consultants to figure out his budget, because he has no expertise in organizational matters. He doesn't know anything about running an institution, understand -- he just, you know, runs an institution. I never understand how people like this manage to not feel embarrassed by themselves.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Baked
Improper focus on Internet-based procrastination caused me to miss news of another bake-off at the American Antiquarian Society. In this episode, three very old recipes produce apple pies with flavors that range from "perfumy and off-putting" to "vile...gross...disgusting."
One day, I will teach a class on the history of ordinary life in the early United States. And we will bake. Is there a better way to make the past tangible?
Monday, October 19, 2009
Substances That Float to the Top
These are bizarre times at the University of California -- but before I can talk about them, you should take a moment to watch UC President and lumbering land mammal Mark Yudof shrug and sigh his way through an interview with the New York Times. Why did he go to work in the field of education? Well, you know, he just, I don't know, sort of, um, I guess that, like, I really wanted to work for a law firm, but, I don't know, whatever. (Shrugs, sighs.)
With leadership like this, how can we fail?
Here are three facts about the UC system to put together for a clear picture of the problem:
First, libraries on my campus, UCLA, are sharply reducing their operating hours. Night Powell, the hugely popular all-night study hall at the College Library, is scheduled to close. Saturday library hours are gone entirely, campus-wide, except for libraries at the professional schools (which are closed to, or have sharply limited access for, most students). If you want to study, use a research database, or check out a book, UCLA is not the place for you. We have other spending priorities.
Like our metastasizing executive paychecks:
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Past is One Tough Cookie
The history Intertubes are breaking out in baked goods, this week, and it's a wonderful window onto the past.
At Past is Present, the new staff blog at the American Antiquarian Society, librarians and fellows have a bake-off, testing a twentieth-century poundcake recipe against a poundcake recipe from a nineteenth-century cookbook.
But there's a practical challenge: the ingredients themselves have changed. Grainy white twentieth-century sugar is nothing like the damp chunks of loaf sugar that bakers used in the early United States. Click on the bake-off link in the paragraph above to learn about the unpleasant way that earlier bakers overcame the roughness of their ingredients -- and to see the results of the taste test.
Meanwhile, at Hurst Street, a historian reports that a student brought her class a batch of cookies from dad. But dad is the pastry chef at Colonial Williamsburg -- which strikes me as the greatest job in the history of the world -- and these ginger cookies were made from a colonial-era recipe.
Read both posts for some great, quick insight into the history of daily life. And both offer lessons you can eat.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Daniel Shays is Crazy
In May, 2004, the president of the Heritage Foundation gave the commencement address at Hillsdale College. He used the occasion to decry a sudden explosion of incivility in American political life, noting that a prominent liberal had written a whole entire book about Rush Limbaugh being a big fat idiot. Not only that, but there were a bunch of websites that stooped so low as to attack the High Holy President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of America (PBUH):
"Further down the food chain, lesser lights take up smaller hammers, but they commit even more degrading incivilities. The Internet, with its easy access and worldwide reach, is a breeding ground for Web sites with names like Bushbodycount.com [and] Toostupidtobepresident.com."
With George Bush as president, conservatives were perpetually horrified by the terrible incivility of the day. A new senator declined to shake the hand of the commander-in-chief; Cindy Sheehan impolitely asked if her son had died for a reason. The horror.
The argument about incivility was a narrative of power, an attempt to wall off the public sphere. Those making the "civility" argument aimed, in effect, to create a free-speech zone in which dissent could be contained and suffocated.
The argument about uncivil behavior is still a narrative of power. Today, it's wielded by different hands. It still has the same purpose.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Policing the Boundaries of Dissent
Take a moment. Compare this to this.
Now:
Saturday, September 12, 2009
"A Thing They Never Dreamed Of"
In May of 1817, the day before an election, the Federalist governor of Rhode Island visited his hometown of Newport. A single awkward moment during his arrival would lead to a military trial for a local Republican -- on the charge of insulting the captain general of the state military. The event speaks nicely to Paul Eaton's toweringly stupid claim that Rep. Joe Wilson breached military etiquette by insulting his commander in chief.
As the day neared for the arrival of Governor William Jones, a committee of citizens had prepared a reception, borrowing a band from the U.S. Army to greet him at the dock.
But the greeting went bad: Robert Bennie Cranston, the increasingly prominent Newport local who showed up to act as dockside master of ceremonies, called out a series of Rhode Island favorites that the federal band didn't know how to play. In desperation, and with the governor's packet ship nearing the docks, Cranston called out for the musicians to play some military thing that they would definitely know. He fumbled -- and ordered them to play "the retreat."
And so the Federalist governor looked out over the docks as he arrived, and saw a military drummer beating a retreat -- with a prominent local Republican at the front of the band. Refusing explanations, Jones chose to take it as a deliberate insult.
Friday, September 11, 2009
And Every Knee Shall Bend
Later tonight Tomorrow I'll have a long post putting this one into historical context. But here's a start, until a certain tiny young lady goes to bed:
At the reliably inane Huffington Post, Paul Eaton accuses Rep. Joe Wilson of a breach of military discipline for insulting his commander in chief. Eaton, who publicly criticized the secretary of defense after retiring as a military officer, hangs this argument on the fact that Wilson is a retired military officer, and therefore should adopt a deferential posture toward those in his chain of command.
Better yet, a long stream of Huffington Post commenters race to agree, and to expand on the point. Look at this brutally stupid comment, for example:
Monday, July 27, 2009
"If a Police Officer Tells You to Do Something and You Don't Do It, You're Actually Resisting"
Great video, and perfect timing: At a conservative protest against Democratic health care reform measures, a Baton Rouge police officer repeatedly forbids protestors to speak to other people on a public sidewalk. When they complain, a security guard approaches (starting around 2:09 in the video) and speaks the sentence that I've used as the headline for this post.
I look forward to hearing from the people who argued here that Henry Louis Gates deserved to be handcuffed on his own porch and thrown in jail for failing to respect a police officer. Clearly you have to agree that a police officer may silence conservative protest, since all Americans are obligated to respect police authority without question.
Second favorite moment is at 3:43, when a man in the crowd shouts at the police officer that conservative protestors "oughta be in jail" for publicly disagreeing with ACORN activists. He's absolutely correct, of course -- they're disrespecting a police officer who told them to be silent.
Authority fetishists, here's the ghost of Christmas future. You can help to build a police state, but you're gonna have to live in it.
Elsewhere...
Saturday, July 25, 2009
We Have a Winner
Best comment yet on the controversy that followed the decision of Henry Louis Gates to enter his own home, prompting an urgent response from armed agents of the state:
In their conversation, Sgt. Crowley complained to Obama that the press have been coming onto his lawn. Yes, isn’t it annoying when people come uninvited onto your property?I'll be laughing for the rest of the day.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Whither the Great American Unicorn?
The Huffington Post has become a historian's leading source of comedy gold. Yesterday brought the Yale lit professor David Bromwich, who wrote infinity-billion words while trying to figure out how the United States became so violent:
We have begun to talk casually about our wars, and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration.
During the war with the Northern Confederacy and the Quasi-War with France and the Creek War and the three Seminole Wars and the official War of 1812 with Great Britain and the off-book war with Spain over East Florida during that war and the Blackhawk War and the Texas Revolution and the war with Mexico and William Walker's four invasions of Nicaragua and the long local war in Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War and the Plains Wars and the violent annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War and the counterinsurgency in the Philippines and if you don't stop me I'll keep going, Americans thought war itself was an aberration.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
And by the Way
In 2007, the University of California paid UC Berkeley Police Chief Victoria Harrison a $2.1 million lump sum in retirement benefits, plus another half a million dollars in deferred compensation to be paid out over the next several years. Then they promptly hired her back to the same job at a salary just under $200,000 a year.
But you can't cut our funding, man -- how then are we to educate the youth?
Not All Classrooms
Here in the University of California, we're caterwauling about state budget cuts that will destroy our ability to educate students, as though every penny of state funding goes to the classroom. But our campuses are a great deal like cities, with city problems and city solutions.
My campus, UCLA, is expected to come up with $40 million in budget cuts. If you think that money can only come out of the classroom, take a look at this laugh-out-loud funny recruiting flyer for the UCLA Police Department. Our annual Clery Report shows plainly that the UCLA campus is a low-crime environment (for a community with a daytime population around 40,000), while the UCLA PD's 62 sworn officers earn a starting salary that clocks in just over $65,000. But keep going, because it gets better:
Benefits:So that's a three-day workweek minus three weeks paid vacation and another 25 days off with pay for campus police who respond to fairly few serious crimes. But keep going, and take a look at this UCLA website with more detailed information on campus police pay and benefits:
• 3% at 50
• 3/12 and 4/10 work schedules
• Three weeks paid vacation
• 13 paid holidays
• 12 sick days a year
• POST certificate pay: Intermediate $175/month, Advanced $275/monthSo, sure: Clearly we pour every penny into the classroom, and there's no other place on campus to cut costs.
• Specialty pay incentives for Field Training Officers ($250/month), Detectives ($175/month), Lead Officers ($175/month), and Traffic Collision Investigators ($175/month)
• $725 annual paid uniform allowance after one year
• Numerous special event overtime opportunities
• University of California Safety Retirement plan (3% at age 50, maximum of 100%-highest 3 years), currently fully paid by employer
And I could go on:
Thursday, July 2, 2009
For a Mystic Chimera, It Sure Gets Around
In the first volume of his biography of Andrew Jackson, Robert Remini neatly captures the strangeness of state sovereignty. It happens in a single quiet paragraph that describes the ceremony on the morning of July 17, 1821, in which Spain relinquished its claim to the Floridas. Jackson handed the Spanish governor "the instruments of his authority to take possession of the territory," and Governor José Callava responded by giving Jackson control of his keys and his archives. Then, finally, having surrendered the symbols of power, Callava "released the inhabitants of West Florida from their allegiance to Spain." The paragraph ends with members of the Spanish crowd -- suddenly finding themselves members of an American crowd -- bursting into tears.
(The next paragraph opens with a letter from Rachel Jackson to a friend, reporting that she is watching the entire city of Pensacola "sit solitary and mourn.")
I was brought back to that paragraph last week by one of those Christopher Hitchens columns that gets stuck in the lower intestine and won't go away. It's the one in which he dismisses the idea of treading carefully to avoid giving Iranians the idea that the United States is intervening in their own business. "There is nothing at all that any Western country can do," he assures us, "to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's internal affairs." But better yet, Hitchens adds, Iranians can't really complain about our intervention in their business, since they already do it to us:
Monday, June 22, 2009
Unstated
In a post last week at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Robert Farley discussed events in Iran in the context of state violence and resistance to the state. "The modern nation state is an extremely efficient killing machine," he wrote. "We know this from our Tilly; the nation-state replaced its competitors, such as empires and city-states, because it could develop and support institutions of internal and external domination."
But the events of the last week suggest to me nearly the opposite of what Charles Tilly tells us. Reporting as an eyewitness, Roger Cohen recently wrote in the New York Times that at least some state actors are declining or resisting orders to direct violence against their fellow Iranians. Elsewhere, former Special Forces officer and DIA official Pat Lang wondered, two days ago, where regular Iranian army troops would come down in a conflict between the Iranian people and the Iranian state. It's not at all clear that the officers of the Iranian state have been able to direct all of the relevant state institutions to simply inflict violence on people in the streets. Some state institutions are apparently pulling away from the state.
It is, in other words, not at all clear that the government is an extremely efficient killing machine, possessing a clear monopoly on violence. In a magnificent turn of events, the efficient killing machine has even been forced to run away from crowds of citizens.
Absent this efficient monopoly on violence, the Iranian state has turned to a set of violent actors who don't draw government paychecks.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Sudden Whackjob Syndrome
Three years ago, a Muslim student at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill drove an SUV into a crowd of pedestrians, injuring nine people. Leading a silly chorus, Daniel Pipes pronounced the incident an example of "Sudden Jihad Syndrome," repeating his post-9/11 warning: "Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers."
Every act of violence by any Muslim became part of a pattern of massive (totalitarian!) brutality; add a Muslim, and yesterday's shoving match over the last Xbox in the Wal-Mart became today's sudden explosion of terrorism.
Last week, the journalist Bonnie Erbe pulled her own Daniel Pipes routine, in a blog post at the U.S. News and World Report titled, "Round Up Hate-Promoters Now, Before Any More Holocaust Museum Attacks." (The post concludes with a call to action that mirrors the headline: "Isn't it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?") (Via Radley Balko; see also.)
Erbe's call to round up right-wing extremists before they have a chance to do anything echoes an important piece of history examined recently in Robert H. Churchill's remarkable book, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement (and less recently by Leo Ribuffo):
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Great Moments in Prognostication
And to think that this is just over a year old.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
You Must Do What We Will Not
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has issued a public message to the Chinese government as we near the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre (emphasis added):
"A China that has made enormous progress economically, and that is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership, should examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal."
This same week, with only three "no" votes, the United States Senate passed the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009. That measure, inserted into an appropriations bill from the House, would "block release of...photographs that depict the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody."
If they're quick on their feet, the Chinese foreign ministry will just print up a copy of the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act and send it to the State Department, folded inside a copy of Clinton's message.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Convicted, Condemned, Commanding
John Fries, a Pennsylvania militia captain sentenced to death as a traitor after freeing tax resisters from federal captivity in 1799, survived his death sentence when President John Adams decided to pardon him. But his treason conviction did have a serious consequence: Fries lost his position as a militia captain. Removing him from that office, the militiamen of Montgomery County instead elected him [added later: in 1800] to the rank of lieutenant colonel. So, you know, militia officers had to be very careful not to commit any capital crimes in the early republic, because it might get them promoted.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
"Another Proof of the Expediency of Arming"
The Louisville Gazette (Georgia), Feb. 5, 1799, pg. 4:
Boston, December 28Not a government officer in sight.
American Naval Success
A letter has been received from capt. Seward, of the armed ship Camillus, of this port, belonging to Mr. Eben Parson, informing, that on his outward passage he was attacked by two French privateers, which, after an action he beat off -- and rescued from them a Portuguese vessel, which they had taken. His men stood to their guns with perfect resolution, and exercised them in the most active manner. This is another proof of the expediency of arming. Several benefits result from the issue of this engagement, which all honest Americans must exult in. A valuable ship, cargo, and a number of brave fellows are preserved to their country -- and piracy disappointed of its prey.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Vast Majesty of Naval Warfare and Stuff
When I read earlier this week that Somalian pirates had failed in an attempt to board and take over an Italian cruise ship, I assumed that the unnamed "private Israeli security forces" on board were some heavy duty mercenary dudes, armed to the teeth. They apparently weren't. Later news reports say that those still-unidentified Israelis fought off their pirate attackers...with pistols. At sea. Pop, pop.
The reports further suggest that no one was shot, but rather that the private security personnel merely fired in the general direction of the pirates, or maybe in the air. They made some loud noises, and the pirates went away.
Clearly, only powerful nation-states can summon the armed power to play in this game, and anyone suggesting private solutions is craaaaazy.
Josh Marshall, April 15:
Monday, April 27, 2009
Vacant Storefronts
In her wonderful book Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, Susan Strasser describes the slow end of the soap peddler, who walked urban neighborhoods with a cart and traded at both ends of the soap-making process: buying household cooking fat, and then selling it back as bars of soap. The horse-drawn soap cart began to fade away after the Civil War.
"Like so many other industries," Strasser wrote, "soapmaking expanded and centralized after the war. Commercial soap production doubled between 1870 and 1890, with fewer companies." Big soap manufacturers bought their fat from meatpackers, not from households. Bulk won.
And so earlier forms of household production were largely replaced by localized commercial production, which was then largely replaced by big industry.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
And the Evidence Grows
AP, with emphasis added, April 26: "An Italian cruise ship with 1,500 people on board fended off a pirate attack far off the coast of Somalia when its Israeli private security forces exchanged fire with the bandits."
Josh Marshall, April 15: "Actually, [Ron] Paul manages to say something even stupider -- which is that rather than having a powerful Navy, which keeps the oceans safe and provides a vast support to global commerce, we should leave it to the individual companies and ship owners to keep their shipping safe."
Prior posts:
Friday, April 24, 2009
Pirates and Private Violence
...a brief update
CENTCOM commander David Petraeus told a House committee today that Somalian pirates are active in an area too large to be adequately patrolled by state navies. He suggested instead that private shipping companies supplement state-managed security with their own armed protection.
ADDED LATER:
So let's take another look at that Josh Marshall post about Ron Paul from last week: "Actually, Paul manages to say something even stupider -- which is that rather than having a powerful Navy, which keeps the oceans safe and provides a vast support to global commerce, we should leave it to the individual companies and ship owners to keep their shipping safe."
Surveillance Schooling
Almost twenty years ago, a New York City teacher named John Taylor Gatto published a bitter denunciation of public schools. As a teacher, Gatto wrote, he taught his students seven things that were never identified in the curriculum. The seventh lesson was that students could not expect to develop a private self in any significant way, since "each is under constant surveillance" by school officials.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Private Violence Against Pirates: Already Happening
Here (with emphasis added) is an article from the November/December 2008 edition of the Journal of International Peace Operations, a magazine for mercenaries:
One such private security company that has teamed up with a brokerage firm to offer security services designed to lower insurance rates in the Gulf of Aden is London based Hart Security. Mike Maloney, an insurance broker involved in the deal confirmed that Hart’s ability to place an armed security team on board a client’s vessel had convinced a number of underwriters to offer preferred rates to ship owners that took advantage of this service. Yet Hart is far from the only British private security company offering anti-piracy services in the Gulf of Aden. London based Maritime & Underwater Security Consultants claimed they are running anti-piracy escorts off of Somalia and a spokesperson for the South Korean shipping firm Hanjin confirmed that they had hired ArmorGroup to provide security for one of their vessels transiting between the Suez and the port of Mombassa.ADDED LATER: Also see the April 20 edition of Blackwater/Xe's Tactical Weekly.
Last week, Blackwater Worldwide also announced an anti-piracy service for ships transiting the Gulf of Aden. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have taken a slightly more proactive approach to the piracy problem. Tom Ridenour, the director of maritime security services for the private security company Blackwater Worldwide, said that while putting a security team on board a client’s vessel may be part of the solution, this technique should also be supplemented with broader defensive security measures. “Ideally, an on-board security team would also be supplemented with a mobile private security force placed on small and fast interceptor vessels that could impose itself between the client's ship and the attacking pirates before they could pose a threat to the crew." The fact that Blackwater announced that their McArthur is ready to deploy—a refitted and modified 183 foot ship that comes equipped with precisely this kind of interceptor rigid inflatable boats as well as a helicopter—speaks to the kind of ‘standoff’ security concept this security firm plans to offer potential clients.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Time Never Passes
...it simply amasses
Guess the date, then click on "Read More":
"The cry of hard times & scarcity of money, which is heard in every part of our country, is not without cause...The Banks, in loaning so profusely, have acted most unwisely, and along with their debtors, must now expiate, by privation and retrenchment, for their ill-timed liberality. Nothing but a combination of Industry and Economy, with reasonable forbearance by creditors, can save from ruin thousands, who till lately basked in the sunshine of prosperity, and have rushed heedlessly into debt."
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Cash and Carry
A recurring complaint from the American political right is that academic historians are "liberal." I agree with the term, but not at all with the substance of it. Many of the liberal historians trained in American universities have an instinctive faith in state institutions. That faith leads them to adopt a triumphalist view of American history as a march of progress: Americans have done bad stuff, but the government usually gets in right in the end. Liberal historians are "liberal" in the sense that they aren't radical -- they basically buy the product, and they think it works just fine.
If you want to watch this worldview in action, you can't do any better than to read Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, an ongoing advertisement for a whiggish narrative of American history. Marshall provides a wonderful example this week with his post on Ron Paul's suggestion that the United States fight pirates by issuing letters of marque and reprisal. Marshall finds this suggestion almost too silly to contemplate:
Friday, March 27, 2009
Los Angeles: Now with Some Culture-Type Stuff
(for a limited time only)
If you're in Los Angeles, or passing through town before April 16, don't miss -- I mean, do not miss -- the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's fiercely exoteric Art of Two Germanies exhibit. Like Maria Tatar's scholarship on post-WWI German art, or Annabel Jane Wharton's wonderful book on the architecture of Cold War-era Hilton hotels, the exhibit examines art history in the context of political history. Galleries are organized around chronological themes; the entryway sign for one room of works from the 1960s and 1970s, for example, reads, "Holocaust Memory and the Auschwitz Trial" -- and there's nothing in the room about the Auschwitz trial. But you'll very quickly see how much it's all about, you know, Holocaust memory and the Auschwitz trial.
In a very telling choice, the path to the building that houses the exhibit is lined with photographs of political events, in the order they happened. The theme is social and political engagement, and the problem of being a participant in the stories we try to tell about our lives. Remember that as you look at the box full of trash that Joseph Beuys swept off the street. It is, I'm not making this up, really cool.
If "Art of Two Germanies" is a reminder of the ways that art historians and political historians can speak to one another, it's also just a pleasure to look at. Almost everything is interesting; at least a dozen pieces in this very large exhibit are as remarkable as anything you'll see in a museum. I spent some time finding images online, and planned to post links to show a few of the most remarkable pieces -- but the digital images don't do the job. You have to go stand in front of the things.
But plan a full day, and keep looking. It's a good time to go to LACMA:
Friday, February 13, 2009
Military Historians: A Call to Action
In the February 8 edition of the Washington Post, Thomas Ricks wrote openly -- and approvingly -- about the wonderful spectacle of gross military insubordination. General Ray Odierno, Ricks enthuses, "launched a guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq, conducting his own strategic review and bypassing his superiors to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military." Ricks pronounces this an "audacious" move, and writes that it led to the implementation of "a strategy rejected by the full chain of command above him."
But it gets better: On Meet the Press that same day, Ricks said that he thinks "we may see a confrontation between Obama and the generals by the end of this year." Why? Take a moment and stare at this quote:
No, they feel they have made huge sacrifices, that they have had friends die and sons bleed, and that they don't want to throw that all away on the--you know, because some guy said on the campaign trail, "We're going to get all these guys out."
"Some guy on the campaign trail." That would be the president of the United States he's referring to. The military doesn't feel like listening to him, so they're going to have a confrontation over it.
So I have a proposal for military historians, retired military personnel, and anyone else who wants to participate:
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
When Numbers Make Bad History
The Continental Army used Oneida allies to hunt down and kill deserters during the Revolution. After the Revolution, Henry Knox wrote to fellow members of the Society of the Cincinnati to ask if they would be willing to constitute that private club as a short-term army to repress Shaysite rebels, a question that irregular forces raised by Massachusetts managed to make moot. The U.S. Army used Creek allies to wage war on the Seminoles. Settler paramilitaries drew federal funds to pay for raids on Indian villages. State troops served under federal command, or alongside regular army forces, or alongside pirates hired to fight for the U.S., as in the Battle of New Orleans in 1814.
For decades, the United States found military force anywhere and everywhere, grabbing the capacity to deliver organized violence as the need arose.
Now: Take a look at this post at Lawyers, Guns and Money, and pay particular attention to the table of numbers. The U.S. had X percentage of population committed to the military, while European powers had Y percentage; therefore, early Americans were skeptical of military institutions and hesitant to use armed force, and "US military power was comparatively miniscule."
That's it. The numbers were smaller, so Americans declined to adopt armed power. But what does this comparison leave out?
Monday, November 17, 2008
"All Agree That we Must Keep a Peace Establishment"
Adding to my recent post on the topic, here's a glorious example of the degree to which, in the early republic, rhetorical opposition to the idea of a standing army didn't actually add up to opposition to the thing itself.
Speaking on Friday, February 2, 1816, in the House of Representatives, Richard Johnson of Kentucky warned that a standing army "would be, in time of peace, inconsistent with the Constitution and our free institutions." Looking to history and to contemporary Europe, Johnson offered examples of standing armies that had destroyed the freedom of their countrymen. "A standing army is dangerous to liberty," he argued; it had been so in ancient Rome, and the standing army "has been the most powerful instrument in the hands of power and usurpation" in the present day. "All the governments of Europe and all the tyrants of the day are supported by this means," he concluded.
Then, in nearly the same breath, Johnson gave it all back without appearing to notice:
Thursday, November 13, 2008
"Not so Large as to be Dangerous"
Last year, I suggested here that anti-standing army ideology had remarkably little real effect on the development of American military institutions. A year later, I'm far more confident that I was right.
In the decades following the Revolution, the statement of opposition to standing armies was frequently followed in the next breath by proposals to enlarge the standing army; the rhetorical purpose of such statements was to cloak the growth of state power in the garments of humble republican restraint: No man among us has ever loathed and despised a standing army as much as do I, gentlemen -- and so it gives me no pleasure, no pleasure indeed, to stand before this House and propose that we enlarge the peacetime establishment by 2,000 men.
The statesmen of the period recognized that anti-standing army rhetoric was just rhetoric. In January of 1816, debating the size of the postwar army, Henry Clay belittled opponents in the House of Representatives who expressed displeasure with the proposed peacetime force of 10,000 troops.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Counterinsurgency Comes Home
The U.S. Army has assigned an infantry brigade to domestic operations, according to the Army Times. The first two paragraphs of the linked story are just too perfect (emphasis added):
The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.In case there's any doubt at all about where we've arrived.
Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home
[...]
They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control...The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use "the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded," 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
The Doctrine of Absolute Shamelessness
Charles Krauthammer on Charlie Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin, September 13, 2008:
"There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine."
Charles Krauthammer in the Weekly Standard, December 9, 2002:
First paragraph: "When President Bush enunciated his radical new doctrine of preemption..."
Fifteenth paragraph: "...the Bush doctrine of preemption."
Against stiff competition, quite possibly the most obviously dishonorable pundit in the business.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
A Deceptively Pristine History, Part Two
In his 2005 book The New American Militarism, Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich noted that today's Congress has far fewer veterans than the Congress of a previous era. The baseline he chose for comparison? The Cold War, when Congress was flooded with veterans of World War II.
The decline of congressional military experience, Bacevich concluded, reflects a broader trend in American society (emphasis added throughout): "The reason for this dearth of veterans in Congress -- and in the other ranks of other national institutions -- is clear: since Vietnam, the American elite has largely excused itself from military service."
Bacevich goes on to note the "demise of the ancient American tradition of the citizen-soldier," a change he calls a "remarkable departure" from a long-held "common obligation to share in the responsibility for the country's defense."
(All of these quotes are from page 26.)
But American elites have long been likely to excuse themselves from military service, despite some significant exceptions. Like Bacevich's "New American Militarism" that isn't new, his American past in which elites and plebes commonly stood shoulder-to-shoulder to defend the republic represents a substantially simplified history.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
A Deceptively Pristine History
Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University professor and retired U.S. Army colonel, is a tremendously smart and accomplished scholar. Over the last several years, he has sustained a cogent critique of contemporary American militarism, and I've mostly agreed with his arguments about the politics of our own moment. But it seems to me that Bacevich has tended to build his arguments about our own troubling era on a fictionalized past. I'll give two examples, and tentatively suggest a possible explanation for Bacevich's uses of history.
First, from the transcript of a recent Bill Moyers interview with Bacevich: "There was a time, seventy, eighty, a hundred years ago, that we Americans sat here in the western hemisphere, and puzzled over why British imperialists went to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We viewed that sort of imperial adventurism with disdain."
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
A Return to Tradition
Back in May, I asked here why we were seeing so little violence associated with the growing political anger that divides the country.
Two months later in Tennessee, a 58 year-old man named Jim Adkisson entered a Unitarian church and shot nine people with a shotgun. A police report concluded that Adkisson shot members of the congregation "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."
Today, another white man in his 50s walked into the headquarters of the Arkansas Democratic Party and killed the state party chairman with a handgun. The motive for the Arkansas shooting has not yet been announced, but witnesses said the shooter sought out the state chairman. This was not the product of a stray bullet, or the random act of a street crazy.
Since 1992, Americans have seen remarkably little internal political violence. In that absence, we've come to think of this kind of violence as unusual. It's not. Here's my awful bet: We'll be seeing several more of these shootings before November -- as the McCain campaign gears up to take Mark Penn's advice for Hillary Clinton, and a presidential candidacy is repeatedly portrayed as an attack on American values and America's security.
If you turn up American anger, you're likely to get a reminder of its history.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Great Memories
A good week to remember this one:
But as a practical matter, in very few Islamic countries do the governments have sufficient authority to resist demands for the punishment of apostates at the hands of religious authorities....-- Edward Luttwak, "President Apostate?" New York Times, May 12, 2008.
Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.
At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards.
A shame Barack Obama will never be able to visit the Middle East without being killed.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Senator Apostate Clings Bravely to Life
In a recent post, Manan Ahmed noted the presence of an aggressively stupid op-ed piece in the New York Times. (Stupid op-ed pieces in the New York Times are like peaches on a peach tree, but never mind.) In that essay, Edward Luttwack warned that Barack Obama would be seen throughout the Muslim world as an apostate, which would complicate his ability to conduct foreign policy. Most serious claim, with emphasis added:
With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings...So Barack Obama couldn't even travel to Muslim countries, ladies and gentlemen, because the Muslims would have to saw his head off, and governments in the Islamic world couldn't host his visit or protect him.
Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.
At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards."
So here's a list (scroll down) of the imperiled Muslim apostate Senator Barack Obama's foreign visits. Click on the link and see for yourself where he's managed to travel in the last couple of years.
Martin Luther King Would Have Totally Favored the White Power Agenda
Best Martin Luther King canard ever.
Over the last couple of weeks, a series of (usually anonymous) angry letters have appeared in the pages of the Claremont Courier, a twice-weekly community newspaper published in a small California college town. The letters describe a disturbing incident of racial animosity in 42nd Street Bagels, a shop in the Claremont Village. Witnesses wrote in to the newspaper to say that they'd seen an elderly white man walk in -- wearing a "David Duke for President" t-shirt -- and push past an elderly black woman, slamming his coffee cup on the counter and demanding to be served ahead of the black customer.
Eventually, everyone wrote in, almost all unnamed: The black woman, the white man in the David Duke shirt, the owners of the bagel store, witnesses, another co-owner of the bagel store.
The most fascinating letter by far was the one from the elderly white man who had started the whole mess:
Thursday, May 8, 2008
A Short Break from Tradition
A common feature of American life has vanished, and vanished pretty close to completely. But I doubt very much that it’s a permanent absence.
Rick Perlstein’s much-celebrated new book, Nixonland, opens with violence. Making the point clear, it opens with violence twice: The preface quotes the young Pennsylvania anti-war activist Linda Hager Morse testifying during the Chicago Seven trial on her decision to train with the M1 rifle in order to be prepared for violent revolution; then, moving back in time, the first chapter begins with the Watts riots in 1965.
In both instances, political and economic frustration led to violence, or at least to a serious willingness to consider the use of violence. And the feeling flowed in both directions. Perlstein quotes a Chicago ad salesman who believed that activists like those on trial in Chicago were ruining the promise of America. “I’m getting to feel like I’d actually enjoy going out and shooting some of these people,” the salesman told a reporter from Time magazine. “I’m just so goddamned mad.”
Touch down nearly anywhere in American history, and you’ll find significant political, economic, and racial violence.
Friday, November 23, 2007
History That Isn't
We all know that the army in the early republic was vanishingly small in peacetime, because anti-standing-army sentiment prevailed in the post-revolutionary United States. Military history has long reflected this assumption.
Here's the historian and retired Army officer James Ripley Jacobs, in his 1947 book The Beginning of the U.S. Army, 1783-1812, explaining that the central government paid little attention to the development of an American army under either the Articles of Confederation or the new Constitution:
Monday, November 12, 2007
Shifting Baselines
So apparently the war in Iraq is over, and that country is at peace. Violence has dropped off sharply...in the last three months. American commanders say the drop-off means that Iraqis are renouncing violence and realizing that they've "had enough."
No. This is not hard. Start with the AP story I linked to above: "Associated Press figures show a sharp drop in the number of U.S. and Iraqi deaths across the country in the past few months. The number of Iraqis who met violent deaths dropped from at least 1,023 in September to at least 905 in October, according to an AP count."
Then go to the Iraq Index page at the Brookings website and look at a few reports from prior years.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Putting the "Act" in the Military Commissions
Morris Davis, an Air Force colonel and the longtime chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, has resigned. He nows says that political appointees in the Bush administration called him on several different occasions and asked that he file charges against detainees at politically useful moments:
"According to Davis, for more than a year Pentagon officials have sought to influence his decisions about 'who we will charge, what we will charge, what evidence we will try to introduce, and how we will conduct a prosecution.' For example, speaking last week to the Wall Street Journal, he explained that in September 2006, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England discussed with him the 'strategic political value' in charging some of the prisoners before the midterm elections."
Whole story here. If we had an opposition party or a functioning Justice Department, this might lead to some serious consequences for some folks.
Friday, November 2, 2007
The Uncomplicated Past and the Troubled Present
Last week, the pseudonymous blogger at Who Is IOZ? posted -- let's say gleefully posted -- an excerpt from a liberal blogger's founder-referencing cri de coeur: "The Founders of this nation of ours knew that tyrants and greedy SOBs were always going to exist, but they counted on us -- the American public -- to stand with one voice and say 'enough!' when the tipping point had occurred and the wrongs became so excessive that they demanded being pulled back from the brink."
Not so much, no. "One might go back," IOZ suggests, "and actually read Articles I and II to see just how Presidents and Senators were selected."
But an even more remarkable example of the tendency to compare our degraded state of political affairs to the glorious purity of the past can be found in the discussion, in the last year or so, of military discontent over the war in Iraq.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Hair Trigger
Two videos: A pushy minister tries to enter a Senate hearing with an anti-war button pinned to his coat, is swarmed by half a dozen police officers, taken to the floor, and arrested. An obnoxious student tries to question Sen. John Kerry at a public forum, is swarmed by half a dozen police officers, taken to the floor, and arrested.
Are our public officials so delicate that they need to be protected, with this kind of force, from impolite behavior? Why are the police wired so tight, so these days? (Senator, can you explain why you -- DON'T MOVE, YOU'RE UNDER ARREST!) The bubble of force surrounding our politicians is becoming absurd.
And man, do they love that taser.
ADDED LATER: Here's another video of the Florida arrest from a different angle and with a different starting and ending point. Pretty clearly the kid is an incredible idiot, but I'd say the same for the officer who tells him he was "inciting a riot." And note how the whole thing begins: Kerry saying "That's all right, let me answer his question," while the police decide that it's their job to regulate questions asked in public.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
You Buy a Pump Because You Expect a Flood
I'd sure like to know the whole story behind this remarkable job listing (edited here for formatting, and minus extraneous information) on the website of the Serco corporation, a contractor that does substantial business with the U.S. military:
NEW! 67 Temp Positions: Personal Effects Specialist
Job Description
Participates as temporary full-time member (Personal Effects Specialist, or Photographer, or Administrative Speciaialist) on a Serco, Inc. team of 96 contract employees working on-site in a fast-paced operational/warehouse environment for the US Army Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center at the Joint Personal Effects Depot (JPED). Receives, inventories, sorts, cleans, photographs, packages, and ships to family members (next of kin) all personal effects belonging to military service members and others, including defense contractors, who are killed or severely injured worldwide, especially incident to military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Performs other relevant administrative and logistics duties as assigned which may include data entry (Defense Casualty Information Processing System) and reports and correspondence management functions, as necessary.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Wise Words
"The Vietnam experience left the military leadership feeling that they should advise against involvement in counterinsurgencies unless specific, perhaps unlikely, circumstances obtain -- i.e. domestic public support, the promise of a quick campaign, and freedom to employ whatever force is necessary to achieve rapid victory. In light of such criteria, committing U.S. units to counterinsurgencies appears to be a very problematic proposition, difficult to conclude before domestic support erodes and costly enough to threaten the well-being of all America's military forces (and hence the country's national security), not just those involved in the actual counterinsurgency."
David Howell Petraeus, The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A study of military influence and the use of force in the post-Vietnam era. PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 1987. Page 305.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Caviar and Mountain Oysters
“What is it about Bush,” the always reliable Victor Davis Hanson asks, “that evokes such furor?” You’ll never guess what he comes up with for an answer:
”Let's start with the hard left, whether in Hollywood or the blogosphere, or among the academic elite. They hate George Bush. To them, his tax cuts, alliance with the religious right, opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq foster the image of an illiberal imperial America. His strut and mangling of words are more salt in their wounds.”
Ahh, the academic elite who hate the war.
It gets a little funnier every day, watching people who think they’re sticking it to the academic elites by offering their unwavering support for a surge designed by Frederick Kagan (PhD, Yale) and executed by David Petraeus (PhD, Princeton) to the loud cheers of William Kristol (PhD, Harvard). All, natch, as part of a war run at various points by Robert Gates (PhD, Georgetown), Eric Edelman (PhD, Yale), Stephen Cambone (PhD, Claremont), Condoleezza Rice (PhD, Denver), and the Georgetown professor Douglas Feith, who as simple folk – aw, shucks! – just got himself a plain ol’ juris doctorate.
Friday, August 24, 2007
His Dissertation Warned Against Failed Occupations ... So What Happened?
[Mr. Bray is a graduate student in history at UCLA. His blog may be viewed here. ]
Eric Edelman is the Douglas Feith replacement at the Department of Defense who recently told Hillary Clinton that she had, by asking in a private letter if the military was making plans for an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, helped the enemy. Better yet, Edelman is also the author of a 1981 Yale University dissertation about Allied actions in Italy during and after WWII. That dissertation criticizes U.S. policymakers for -- wait for it! -- incrementalist waffling, an absence of clear and consistent policy goals, and a failure to plan for the aftermath of the invasion. It makes perfect sense that this is the top military policy guy in an administration that now cites Alden Pyle as a role model. Someone obviously cranked the irony knob up to eleven when the rest of us weren't looking, and the fabric of space and time has not yet adjusted.
A rich vein of that irony runs through the whole document, and do feel free to swap the word "Italy" for "Iraq" (and reverse the British and American positions) throughout. I'll hit the highpoints from Edelman's narrative without worrying about the whole long story, which -- never having written 400+ pages about it -- I don't claim to know.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Bleeding Past Empty
How much pain?
As subprime mortgages crater, here's one of the likely -- and as-yet-undiscussed -- consequences: Deficiency judgments, and perhaps a massive wave of them.
Here's how it works: Buying a $500,000 house, you put $50,000 down and take out an interest-only housing loan for $450,000. Then you can't make your house payments, two or three years later, and the bank forecloses. But the foreclosure is part of an enormous set of regional and national foreclosures, dumping houses on the market while mortgage lenders are cutting back sharply on new home loans. Far fewer buyers are chasing far more homes, so housing prices fall sharply; the bank sells your $500,000 house for $375,000.
You're out of a home -- and you're still carrying $75,000 in interest-bearing debt.
Where have we seen this dynamic before? Here's one noteworthy example:
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Slow-Motion Revolution
Rounding the corner toward Newburgh.
Explaining his veto of the bill funding the war in Iraq and setting deadlines for its end, our president said this week that "members of the House and the Senate passed a bill that substitutes the opinions of politicians for the judgment of our military commanders."
In the new American system of government, we now learn, the elected representatives of the people are supposed to defer to the professional military. This is apparently what the founders had in mind, and explains why they gave Congress the power to raise and fund armies and "provide for the common defense." Somehow from that constitutional beginning we now arrive at an argument that Congress is meant to leave all decisions about the common defense to the sole judgment of military commanders; otherwise our elected representatives are substituting their opinion for that of the military, which is meant to be in charge. The nerve of the legislature, trying to impose their "opinions" on the nation.
Like it says it Federalist 26:
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Interregnum
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I have a curious feeling of being stuck between historical moments. I mean this in more than one sense, or I locate the interregnum in more than one place. Or whatever I mean to say, and if you can figure it out please do call or write to let me know. Two points:
Friday, December 29, 2006
Happy C.D. Alston Day
December 29, 2005:
Insurgents in Iraq are showing little capacity to keep up numerous and persistent attacks, a senior U.S. general in Baghdad says.Of course, shrewdness of this kind is usually rewarded with another star.At a briefing December 29, Air Force Brigadier General C.D. Alston said there are three reasons for the diminishing capability of the insurgents to keep up attacks. The ability of insurgents to wage sustained combat is a key indicator closely watched by U.S. military forces to determine the enemy's effectiveness.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
An Accountability Moment
A modest proposal for other bloggers, if anyone feels like playing along: On Dec. 29, highlight the one-year anniversary of this confident pronouncement from a high-ranking U.S. military spokesman in Iraq that (as the government summary I link to characterized his remarks at the time), "Insurgents in Iraq are showing little capacity to keep up numerous and persistent attacks."
Better yet, from the same Dec. 29, 2005 government faux-news story: "Because of this improvement among Iraqi security forces, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said during recent appearances in Iraq that the United States would reduce the number of combat troops there by approximately 7,000 in 2006."
Why remind people what our military leaders were saying a year ago?
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Towering Shamelessness
Christopher Hitchens in Slate, Dec. 18, 2006:
"Many people write as if the sectarian warfare in Iraq was caused by coalition intervention. But it is surely obvious that the struggle for mastery has been going on for some time and was only masked by the apparently iron unity imposed under Baathist rule. That rule was itself the dictatorship of a tribal Tikriti minority of the Sunni minority and constituted a veneer over the divisions beneath, as well as an incitement to their perpetuation. The Kurds had already withdrawn themselves from this divide-and-rule system by the time the coalition forces arrived, while Shiite grievances against the state were decades old and had been hugely intensified by Saddam's cruelty."
Christopher Hitchens in Slate, Jan. 16, 2006:
"Of course, most reporters then returned to their insulting (and insultingly easy) task of demarcating and segregating all Iraqi opinion as if it had to fall into one of three groups...Now we read (in the Jan. 12 New York Times) of members of the Sunni "Islamic Army" directly confronting al-Qaida's gangsters on the streets of Taji, a town to the north of Baghdad, with appreciable casualties on both sides...Interviewed for the Times piece was Abu Marwa, a militia activist from a town farther south, who described setting a trap for two Syrian al-Qaida members—and killing both of them—after their group had tortured and killed one of his Shiite relatives...The significance of this, and of numerous other similar accounts, is three-fold. First, it means that the regular media caricature of Iraqi society is not even a parody. It is very common indeed to find mixed and intermarried families, and these loyalties and allegiances outweigh anything that can be mustered by a Jordanian jailbird who has bet everything on trying to ignite a sectarian war."
Friday, April 14, 2006
A Whole Pile of Nutshells
In the spirit of Manan Ahmed's recent posting on the war in Iraq, I offer this excerpt from George Packer's long article in the April 10 New Yorker:
From Tal Afar, I flew by helicopter to an airfield a few miles north of Tikrit, called Forward Operating Base Speicher. The headquarters of the 101st Airborne Division, Speicher is an "enduring FOB" -- one of a handful of gigantic bases around Iraq to which American forces are being pulled back, as smaller bases are handed over to the Iraqi Army. Speicher has an area of twenty-four miles and the appearance of a small, flat, modular Midwestern city; there is a bus system, a cavernous dining hall that serves four flavors of Baskin-Robbins ice cream, a couple of gyms, and several movie theaters. At least nine thousand soldiers live there, and many of them seemed to leave the base rarely or not at all: they talked about "going out," as if the psychological barrier between them and Iraq had become daunting. After three months on the base, an Army lawyer working on the Iraqi justice system still hadn't visited the Tikrit courts. A civil-affairs major who had been in Iraq since May needed to consult a handbook when I asked him the names of the local tribes...
Much of the activity at an enduring FOB simply involves self-supply. These vast military oases raise the spectre of American permanence in Iraq, but to me, they more acutely suggested American irrelevance.
I've noted before the curious determination of American military forces to make sure there's plenty of ice cream and big screen televisions in the war zone, and I've tried to describe the slipshod nature of our actual, you know, military effort.
Speaking of nutshells: At my own FOB in northern Kuwait, we just got soft serve ice cream machines in the dining facilities, at long last supplementing the six flavors of Baskin-Robbins and the freezer full of assorted ice cream bars. Fascinating to think that someone, somewhere sat in an office, looked at our FOB, and thought: Not enough ice cream, yet.
So to those who wonder about the effect of a near-term American abandonment of the war in Iraq, I offer the suggestion that the American military mostly never made it into the war in the first place. There's a whole lot of motion; there's not much action. It's hard to imagine the eventual success of an effort that so far appears to be focused on getting Baskin-Robbins to the war zone, while the long-present civil affairs officers have to look in the handbook to see who lives in their area of operations. We are watching 160,000 people try to pretend that they're somewhere else, fighting from a growing distance. And for Iraqis the implications of that tactical distance are awfully serious. The increasing (and, I suspect, irreversible) irrelevance of the American military in Iraq is incalculably dangerous for everyone involved.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Those Obscure Historians
Via Jim Henley at Unqualified Offerings:
At the Media Research Center, L. Brent Bozell III shrewdly notes that critics of the war in Iraq are citing the work of "an obscure professor named Martin Van Creveld."
Adding to the fun, Bozell reveals the origin of a quote from Creveld to have been a "Jewish newspaper."
The tragicomedy grows a little more, you know, tragically comic with each passing day.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
I Caught You Saying What You Said
Operation Stormer Swarmer, the big military campaign in Iraq this week that did nothing and meant nothing, was clearly a media stunt, and a very cheap one at that. But it's painful to watch the news media try to figure out why the joke was a joke. Here's the BBC solemnly picking its way through the wreckage:
So how and why did this latest apparently routine combing operation, yielding a few arms caches and netting some low-grade suspects, manage to win stop-press coverage around the world?
The use of the phrase "the largest air assault operation" was clearly crucial, raising visions of a massive bombing campaign.
Military readers are, at this moment, laughing at loud. In the paragraphs that follow, the Beeb graciously allows that, yes, the term "air assault" doesn't actually have anything at all to do with bombing, and is in fact simply the term that the military uses to describe the insertion of infantry into combat by helicopter. The section heading for that discussion is, hilariously: "Question of semantics?"
Friday, March 17, 2006
Quotidian Realities are Outrageous
In a recent review of a documentary on the war in Iraq, a popular historian whose name shall not be spoken (because I'm tired of saying it through clenched teeth) attacked the filmmaker for advancing the outrageously false and left-wing notion that American wars have often had to do with economic interests. A shocking claim, I know. Take a moment to catch your breath. He Who Writes Poorly accuses director Eugene Jarecki of giving screen time to scholars who claim that often in our history "our military was blasting away at elected governments in out-of-the-way places to make profits."
But Jarecki's film gets even worse than this. "There is not a word about three successful elections in Iraq, or American efforts to depose dictators and leave democracies in Grenada, Panama," -- you're never going to get through this if you keep laughing out loud like that -- "and the Balkans, much less the American effort to promote reform in Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. The removal of the Taliban and the new democracy in Afghanistan are never mentioned."
The United States wages war only to depose dictators and leave democracies, spreading freedom across the globe with every warm-hearted step. The American military would never stoop so low as to serve national interests, you see. Its egalitarian heart forbids even a whisper of economic questions in the ranks.
I have limited time and energy for He Who Writes Poorly, especially since this "historian" appears to have never heard of Alfred Thayer Mahan (or the little war we fought with Mexico), but I'll offer just this one thing in response. Here is the 2005 "posture statement" of the U.S. military commander in Europe, Gen. James Jones, offered as a written statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee a year ago. Let's briefly excerpt the document to show what sort of liberationist agenda guides Gen. Jones as he allocates force throughout his theater of command:
Saturday, March 11, 2006
The Ominous Machinations of Barney Fife
Miguel Tinker-Salas, a professor of Latin American history at Pomona College, was visited this week by a pair of government investigators who "interrogated" him -- more about that characterization in a moment -- about his contacts with officials of the Venezuelan government. The men identified themselves as detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department who work with a joint anti-terrorism task force run by the FBI.
Best part? The detectives showed up during the professor's office hours, asking students in the hallway what Tinker-Salas was teaching them inside the classroom. Tinker-Salas, it probably goes without saying, is critical of the Bush administration's policies and public statements regarding Venezuela. The historian "figured in a Christian Science Monitor story last month dealing with whether Iran and Venezuela could forge a political counterweight to U.S. power," the Los Angeles Times notes.
Pomona College President David Oxtoby registered complaints with the Sheriff's Department and the FBI, and told reporters that the college was consulting with lawyers to see what other steps it could take to protest. The Times quoted Oxtoby as saying he was "extremely concerned about the chilling effect this kind of intrusive government interest could have on free scholarly and political discourse."
Thursday, March 9, 2006
Train and Equip What, Exactly?
Buried in this Washington Post story on the possible manipulation of the death toll from the frequent execution-style killings (groups of men with hands bound and either gunshots to the back of the head or strangulation bruising on the throat) in Iraq is this very interesting observation, with emphasis added:
"The widely differing tolls reflect acute political sensitivity at a time when Iraq's three-year-old conflict is undergoing a fundamental shift: Execution-style killings of the kind frequently blamed on police or Shiite militias allied with the government appear to be killing more Iraqis than bombings of government and civilian targets by Sunni Arab insurgents."
This on the same day that news stories are describing the kiddnapping of fifty private security employees by unidentified men wearing the uniforms -- possible stolen, possibly not -- of the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry police.
The stated policy of the U.S. government in Iraq is to train and equip Iraqis to fight for themselves, preparing soldiers and police for independent counterinsurgency efforts: "As they stand up, we'll stand down." This effort has looked to me, and to others, like the U.S. effort to stand up a South Vietnamese army that could resist incorporation into North Vietnam.
But the frequency with which the bound bodies of Sunni men are turning up with torture and execution-style wounds, and the frequency with which Sunni men are being kidnapped or "arrested" (never to be seen again) by Shiites in government uniforms, suggest another possibility: It seems to me that we may be training and equipping not a new ARVN, but rather a new Interhamwe.
And what then?
"It all sounds so familiar"
Retired Lt. Gen. William Odom lays out a detailed comparison of the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
Saturday, March 4, 2006
On Staying the Course
Two studies just placed online by the U.S. Army's awkwardly named Combating Terrorism Center suggest strategies by which the United States can defeat Islamist terrorist organizations. Neither paper suggests staying the course. One study, Stealing Al-Qa'ida's Playbook, argues that "direct engagement with the United States has been good for the jihadi movement," and offers this warning about horses and barn doors: "The United States should avoid direct, large-scale military action in the Middle East."
PDF files of the studies are available at the CTC website. Here is Stealing Al-Qa'ida's Playbook, and here is Harmony and Disharmony:
Exploiting Al-Qa'ida's Organizational Vulnerabilities. The first is far shorter, and takes about fifteen minutes to read.
Monday, February 27, 2006
"I Don't Want to Get in the Middle of That."
A story in the Monday Stars and Stripes describes U.S. soldiers keeping their distance as Sunni and Shiite militias engaged in a Saturday night firefight in Mahmudiyah, Iraq. Most interesting is the description of militia members concealing weapons from U.S. soldiers while on their way to the fight, alongside a description of a militia "operating openly in Mahmudiyah in recent weeks."
The often-cited argument for a continued American presence in Iraq is that the country will descend into civil war if we leave. That argument misses the very real possibility that the civil war can happen -- and, in fact, is now happening -- without an American departure. If 26 million people decide to enter into a civil war, 130,000 outside troops are not going to stop them.
The whole story is short, and well worth the couple of minutes it would take to read.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
"Unlawful and Unworthy of the Military Services"
Courtesy of the New Yorker, here is an extraordinary 2004 memorandum from then-General Counsel to the U.S. Navy Alberto Mora on the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo. Well worth the time to read every word.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Trust
In November, the United States Army announced that it would no longer order soldiers from the Individual Ready Reserve to active duty. As the Washington Post reported:
Army to Halt Call-Ups of Inactive Soldiers
The Army has suspended plans to expand an unwieldy, 16-month-old program to call up inactive soldiers for military duty, after thousands have requested delays or exemptions or failed to show up. Despite intense pressure to fill manpower gaps, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey said the Army has no plans for any further call-up of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) beyond the current level of about 6,500 soldiers.
Today, noting a projected shortage of 3,500 captains and majors by 2007, the Post reports something a little different:
In another sign of the pressing demand for officers, the Army is recalling hundreds of officers who had returned to civilian life but who are still subject to call-up, sparking protests from some who have already served in Iraq and now face more than a year of extended war-zone duty... In addition to speeding promotions and rolling out incentives to entice officers to stay, the Army is also using involuntary 545-day call-ups to compel inactive officers to leave civilian life for duty in Iraq. Since last fall, the Army has ordered hundreds of officers from the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) to report to U.S. bases to prepare for Iraq deployments, according to interviews with more than a dozen officers and Army officials with knowledge of the call-ups. The IRR is a pool of about 111,000 trained soldiers who have left active-duty or reserve units but remain subject to call-up for a specified period. The latest call-ups have targeted scores of officers who graduated from military academies or other universities in 1998, including at least 60 West Point graduates, who are less than four months away from finishing up their eight-year obligation in the IRR pool. Many are being called to serve as civil affairs officers -- a key shortage area for the Army -- but lack experience in that field. Most have already served in Iraq, Afghanistan or both, and many have requested congressional inquiries into the Army's call-up decisions, which they consider unfair.
If you read the story, by the way, you'll notice that Capt. Melinda Thein received her active duty notification on Christmas Eve.
Monday, February 6, 2006
"Freedom" and the Jyllands Posten
Grading undergraduate papers at UCLA, I was always amazed by the chasm between performance and expectation. The student who was supposed to turn in a well-argued five-page evaluation on the course reading, and who instead handed in five pages of blockquoted Wikipedia entries in random order? Shocked -- shocked! -- by his F. He threatened to appeal to the professor, to give me a bad evaluation, to...to...to... He was so spectacularly beside himself he could barely think of all the horrible things he was going to do to me. Raised in a culture of entitlement, students simply expect good grades for doing close to nothing.
Similarly, I was always struck by the absence of ROTC candidates among the members of the campus Republican club who held pro-war rallies by the student union. The liberals are dumb, man, and America has to be defended -- by, uh, somebody else. We are all entitled to safety, which somebody else should provide, 'cause that military stuff seems, like, way harsh and stuff. But don't get me wrong, I'm totally pro-military and stuff. Just not for, like, me.
And so now we have the Jyllands Posten, which published cartoons showing Arab men with hooked noses and beady eyes, and depicted Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. Because, hey man, freedom of the press. And the Muslims, who are all intolerant and stuff, got mad. Because they're against freedom and stuff, and why do consequences follow our decisions about what to publish?
To be clear: Violence in this context is idiotic, and violence against diplomatic sites is beyond intolerable. And I'm well aware of the pathology of Islamic extremism, and of the viciousness of anti-Jewish rhetoric in the Middle East.
But it does seem to me that the Jyllands Posten "controversy" is ultimately very much a product of the culture of entitlement: We have the freedom to publish whatever we want; you have the freedom to sit there and take it. How dare these people hold up signs with ugly messages merely because we depicted Mohammed as a pig? Totally anti-freedom, man. These Muslims are nuts.
Friday, February 3, 2006
That Infinitely Plastic Hansonian Reality
On January 6, as I've noted here before, the unfailingly hilarious Victor Davis Hanson wrote a Letter to Europe decrying the decision of that sissified continent to cave in to the Islamofascists. Europe, he wrote to the Europeans, had "dismantled your armed forces...in your faith that war has become obsolete." But Hanson also allowed that it might not be too late. "Even in this era of crisis, we cling to the notion that in the eleventh hour you, Europe, will yet reawake, rediscover your heritage, and join with us in defending the idea of the West from this latest illiberal scourge of Islamic fascism."
Well, great news. Apparently his letter worked. As Hanson argued in a January 30 column -- same month! -- the crybaby peacenik weenies are wrong that the War on Terror is failing. Why? Because, among other things, "Europe is suddenly galvanizing against Islamic fascism. (France even mentions the unmentionable of targeting terrorist patrons with nuclear weapons.)"
Thank goodness he wrote that letter, yeah? In just 24 days, Victor Davis Hanson managed to galvanize an entire continent that had concluded that war was obsolete and dismantled its armed forces. Amazingly, less than a month after having dismantled their armed forces, France is now ready to use nuclear weapons against terrorists!
And people say nuclear weapons can't be built really quickly. The implications for Iran are clear. I just hope Victor Davis Hanson doesn't send Iran another one of his magic letters!
Thursday, January 26, 2006
The Historian as Soldier: Shadows and Fog (3)
Chris Bray is a member of the HNN blog Cliopatria, currently on extended leave from graduate school at UCLA to serve in Kuwait with the US Army. This blog entry is one in a series recording his reflections on his experiences. Click here to read the introduction to this series. Click here to read part one. Click here to read part two.
Measuring Success and Failure in Iraq
The February 24, 1865 edition of the Augusta County, Virginia Vindicator poured out vitriol over the defeatists who claimed that Confederate armies were doing poorly in their war against the North. Warning that the "croakers" were causing more damage to the Confederacy than the enemy could, the newspaper argued that victory was just a matter of continued firmness in its pursuit: "Our military condition is really better now than it has been at various periods in the past...The spirit of our soldiers is unshaken...They only ask the people to be firm. The women are ready to make every sacrifice -- the very children show fight. The concentration of our troops is inevitable -- the success of our arms certain, if we will only put ourselves (we mean those of us out of the army) under the lead of our women."
Six weeks later, facing reality, Lee surrendered at Appomattox.
Societies that go to war don't like to consider the possibility that the costs they've paid have failed to purchase success. More particularly, neither do soldiers, who pay the highest costs of all. In a letter to the Stars and Stripes this month, an American sergeant in Iraq wrote that the military's overseas newspaper should not have published a cartoon mocking aspects of the ongoing war there. "I find it offensive," he wrote, "to read a comic strip that tries to make our sacrifice seem as though it is all for nothing...Comics like this do not, in any way, help young soldiers see that what they do is making a difference in the world... No one joins the military with no faith in their country or country’s leadership, and it should not be negatively projected, especially by those who are not in the current situation servicemembers find themselves in, i.e., deployed to Iraq. Don’t say we are out here giving our lives for nothing."
Monday, January 23, 2006
A Handful of Desperate Rejectionists
The number of attacks against coalition troops, Iraqi security forces and civilians increased 29% last year, and insurgents are increasingly targeting Iraqis, the U.S. military says. Insurgents launched 34,131 attacks last year, up from 26,496 the year before, according to U.S. military figures released Sunday. Insurgents are widening their attacks to include the expanding Iraqi forces engaged in the fighting, said Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, a coalition spokesman. He added, "It tells me the coalition and the Iraqi forces have been very aggressive in taking the fight to the enemy."
Thirty. Four. Thousand. Attacks. Which proves that we're winning. More on this as soon as I have the chance.
Tanks vs. Letters
In a recent post, I noted a situation described by John Robb on his blog, Global Guerillas: Insurgents have successfully shut down oil industry operations in southern Iraq by sending threatening letters to industry employees. For the cost of some stamps, insurgents caused serious economic disruption in Iraq -- and serious harm, therefore, to the U.S. military's security and stabilization operations, or SASO.
Here's a new example of the same dynamic. Doctors and other professionals are fleeing Iraq because of, yes, anonymous threatening letters. Iraqis who can't get basic medical care will quite reasonably regard their country as unstable, and blame the occupying power. With a few stamps, insurgents have again seriously challenged the legitimacy of the American occupation.
The Washington Post reports: "Iraq's top professionals -- doctors, lawyers, professors -- and businessmen have been targeted by shadowy political groups for kidnapping and ransom, as well as murder, some of them say. So many have fled the country that Iraq is in danger of losing the core of skilled people it needs most just as it is trying to build a newly independent society."
How would a military occupation go about fighting this sort of trend with airstrikes and armored columns? And what are the other military options? How on earth does an occupying army reverse the flight of cardiologists and pediatricians?
Another example of why I think the war is going very, very badly because of the application of tools that have sharply limited utility for the job at hand.
More posts coming soon in the "Shadows and Fog" series. I've been semi-busy, semi-depressed about being trapped in the desert with nothing to do, and otherwise distracted.
Friday, January 20, 2006
"Conservative" and "Radical" in the Academy
The problem in a nutshell:
Compare this and this.
Then compare this and this.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
When the Attack Dog is Blind
Andrew Jones is either very sloppy, or a willing liar. Maybe both.
This point is apparently unclear. In a comment about another post, KC Johnson writes this: "A good part of the reasoning in the UCLAprofs site is unconvincing. But as far as I can tell, there's nothing untrue said about any of these professors."
Not so. There's untruth all over the place. Professors Joan Waugh and Naomi Lamoreaux are prominently pictured on the site's banner, and listed among those who've signed "radical" petitions. The single petition listed for both is a letter arguing against preemptive war, which puts Waugh and Lamoreaux in the radical company of Pat Buchanan and American Conservative magazine. No other arguments are given for their "radicalism"; their signatures on this single petition are enough to place their faces at the top of the page, labeled as radical and attacked -- the purpose of UCLA Profs -- for politicizing the university. I have worked for Joan Waugh, and taken graduate seminars with both Joan Waugh and Naomi Lamoreaux. Neither discussed their politics in the classroom. Look at their published scholarship:
Lamoreaux is a historian of American ecomomic enterprise -- who won awards, a couple of years ago, for a paper that challenged a particular reading of early American history that has been advanced by Marxist historians. (Simplifying, yes.) And so on; I defy someone to construe this as a piece of radical scholarship. Joan Waugh teaches a highly regarded class on the Civil War, and travels to Gettysburg with her students most summers. Can someone please make a serious case for these two professors being classified as "radical"? My own radical belief is that it is irreponsible to publicly attack people as something that they obviously are not. Speaking of which:
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Lending a Hand
After some careful reflection, I have realized that I now agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Jones, the president of UCLA Profs. Disregard my previous post; I've decided to lend a land as the young Mr. Jones sets out to monitor campus discussions and punish people in the university community for expressing incorrect opinions. Toward that end, I've started my own parallel website, Surveillance Central. Your help is warmly solicited.
Toward a New Purity in Academic Culture
Seeking to expose the rising red menace on a campus infested with an "increasingly radical faculty," the website UCLA Profs offers students a payment of $100 for "Full, detailed lecture notes, all professor-distributed materials, and full tape recordings of every class session, for one class." Better yet, they'll even wire their stoolies prior to the informant's face-to-face with the perp: "If the class in question is ongoing or upcoming, UCLAProfs.com will provide (if needed) all necessary taping equipment and materials."
But UCLA Profs doesn't just surveil the classroom; they also helpfully compile lists of professors who have signed "radical petitions" such as this statement decrying illegal torture and this statement asking the British government to undertake an honest assessment of the number of Iraqis killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Sad, sad days. Horowitzians continually argue that the American left is nostalgic for the late 1960s. What's increasingly clear, however, is that the Horowitzians are nostalgic for the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Or maybe the mid 1930s.
ADDED LATER:
Quoted without comment from a January 18 Los Angeles Times story on the group and its founder, Andrew Jones:
He said he plans to show what he considers biased material to professors and administrators and seek to have teachers present more balanced lectures or possibly face reprimand...
Jones said he has lined up one student who, for $100 a class session, has agreed to provide tapes, detailed lecture notes and materials with what the group considers inappropriate opinion. He would not name the student or the professor whose class will be monitored.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Reality Bites
Victor Davis Hanson is afraid. He is frightened, first, by "Islamic fascists" who wish to destroy the values of Western Civilization; and second, by his certainty that we are nearly alone in a fight for our lives, abandoned by an international community bent on appeasement. In an anguished Letter to the Europeans this month, Hanson tells the people of that continent that they have "dismantled [their] armed forces," an act that follows their "faith that war has become obsolete."
The essay, with the too-enjoyable subtitle "Cry the beloved continent," tries to rouse Europe from its slumber before it Slides Inexorably Over the Lip of the Abbatoir, and yadda yadda yadda. "Even in this era of crisis," he writes to the whole of Europe, "we cling to the notion that in the eleventh hour you, Europe, will yet reawake, rediscover your heritage, and join with us in defending the idea of the West from this latest illiberal scourge of Islamic fascism."
The eleventh hour. "Will yet reawake." Cough, cough.
Now, reality. There are almost too many places to begin, but a column by defense analyst David Smith in the October 12, 2005 issue of Jane's Defence Weekly seems like an especially good start. Smith notes that NATO members, who quickly realized after the Sept. 11 attacks that "Europe could be more vulnerable to terrorism than North America," began the immediate deployment of military assets to protect against al Qaeda attacks. Recognizing the vulnerability of international shipping to terrorists, NATO quickly launched a naval operation called Operation Active Endeavour, putting a joint force of German, Greek, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Turkish, British, and U.S. ships on patrol in the eastern Mediterranean. Elements of the force were in place in the first days of October, 2001. "The mission," Smith writes of the task force, "is to intercept, escort, protect, disrupt, and deter criminal activity that may dovetail with terrorism." (Yes, that sentence is grammatically awkward.)
A similar joint task force, CTF 150, currently patrols the Arabian Sea. In December, a Dutch commodore took command of that task force...from the French vice-admiral who had been in charge. And European navies operating in that neighborhood have acted against threats. Many readers will remember that in 2002 the Spanish Navy boarded a ship bound for Yemen with a load of scud missiles from North Korea. The United States decided to let that ship sail on to deliver its cargo.
Shadows and Fog: An Example
This story, written by an Associated Press reporter who accompanied American soldiers on a raid against the home of a suspected terrorist cell leader in Mosul, illustrates a half-dozen different themes that I have tried, or will try, to get at it in my series of posts on the state of the war. It's a five-minute read, and well worth the time.
Monday, January 16, 2006
The Historian as Soldier: Shadows and Fog (2)
Chris Bray, a member of HNN blog, Cliopatria, is a graduate student in history at UCLA, now on duty in Kuwait with the US Army. This blog entry is one in a series recording his reflections on his experiences. Click here to read the introduction to this series. Click here to read part one.
Last September, American and Iraqi troops swept through the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, killing and capturing insurgents in a strike launched under the name "Operation Restoring Rights." It was the most successful attack on the insurgency in that city, USA Today reported, since "American forces ran insurgents out of Tal Afar a year ago." Before the month was over, a female suicide bomber had launched another attack in Tal Afar, killing six men at an Iraqi Army recruiting center. More recently, insurgents fired mortars at polling stations in Tal Afar during the December elections.
You can tell that story in other Iraqi cities; in a much-quoted op-ed piece in the Washington Post early this month, Paul Schroeder noted that his son, a marine, had died in a familiar town: "Augie was killed on his fifth mission to clear Haditha." A few days before, the news pages of that same paper reported that American soldiers were preparing to hand over the city of Samarra to Iraqi police -- for the third time in three years. American military leaders quoted in the piece were urgently hoping the hand-over would stick the third time.
The unblinking cheerleaders for the war in Iraq like to make comparisons
to WWII: Imagine if we'd left Europe before Hitler's army had been defeated. To which I say, imagine if nine landings at Normandy had led to four liberations of Paris, followed by a series of as-yet-unfinished marches on Berlin.
Why can't the U.S. military -- unquestionably the most powerful in the world -- clear insurgents out of Iraqi towns for good? Because (troop levels aside) the structure and direction of American military force does little to address the structure and direction of the insurgency, a problem that was decades in the making. We went to war with the army we had, and it was the wrong army. To illustrate the point, or begin to, I'm going to try to develop and compare two sets of images.
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Time Out
I'm not planning to post in the "Shadows and Fog" series over the weekend, in part because the army office where I work is deluged with visitors who are keeping us busy. I'll post again on Monday morning. In the meantime, this is a link (in PDF format) to a remarkable article by British Army Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster that was recently published in a U.S. Army journal, Military Review. My sense is that Aylwin-Foster, who served in Iraq, is largely correct in most of what he writes about American military operations there, despite the very loud protests of his American colleagues in the higher pay grades. It's well worth reading if you're interested in what the U.S. Army -- and I mean the army, not the entire military -- is doing in Iraq.
But there is also this little problem, for whatever it's worth.
Also take a look at this short essay by a newly retired Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who served in Iraq, which makes one point that resonates with Aylwin-Foster's discussion of army operations: "I think what has made this war really ugly, in addition to our controversy over the rationale –- Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to terrorists and WMD –- is the way we conduct operations. We go kinetic, kinetic, kinetic."
Friday, January 13, 2006
The Historian as Soldier: Shadows and Fog (1)
Chris Bray, a member of HNN blog, Cliopatria, is a graduate student in history at UCLA, now on duty in Kuwait with the US Army. This blog entry is one in a series recording his reflections on his experiences. Click here to read the introduction to this series. At the bottom of this post: "Notes and Caveats."
In the first weeks of the American occupation of Iraq, two reporters from the Washington Post joined a U.S. Army patrol as it walked through a neighborhood in Baghdad. The first reporter, Thomas Ricks, stayed with the infantry squad throughout the two-hour patrol. The soldiers told Ricks that the morning patrol was going well; they "considered themselves a welcome presence in a friendly land," and guessed that the neighborhood was "ninety-five percent friendly." One soldier declared that "everybody likes us."
The second reporter, Anthony Shadid, trailed the patrol. "I followed fifty meters behind," he later wrote. "There were a few waves from the residents. Most just stared." As Shadid (who speaks Arabic) talked to people in the neighborhood, some expressed cautious support, hoping the the soldiers "would provide a measure of security after weeks of looting." But the more common reaction came from the "many" in the neighborhood who "expressed ambivalence or outright anger as the troops walked by." Supportive statements tended to be less than warm: "An American dog is better than Saddam and his gangs." Hostile statements tended to be stronger: The presence of American troops was termed "despicable" by Iraqis who declared themselves "one thousand percent" against the occupation. "They're walking over my heart," one man told Shadid.
The American infantrymen -- certain their patrol was going well, and seeking to further demonstrate their good will -- left the streets and entered a school, leaving behind a "group of young men standing outside" to go and interact with the students and female teachers inside.
The men on the sidwalk clustered around in front of the school, announcing their suspicion that the soldiers "were having sex with the women inside, a statement as ludicrous as it was suggestive. To these men, the American presence was utterly vile and their intentions base; they would compete with each other in devising the darkest scenarios." The patrol eventually walked out of the school, past the group of men standing on the sidewalk who stood speculating feverishly about what they were really up to, and walked cheerfully on their way. "They love us," a second soldier concluded.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Shadows and Fog
Over the next few days here, as time permits, I plan to lay out my view of the war in Iraq. I have come to view the war as probably unwinnable, and the situation of American soldiers on the ground as painfully untenable.
A few important things to note before I begin.
First, these observations come secondhand; I'm nominally an infantry sergeant, but am currently parked at a not-very-interesting desk job in Kuwait. What I write here comes from what I've read, what I've observed at the periphery of the war, what I've experienced in training, and the discussions I've had with other soldiers who have been in Iraq.
To be clear about sources, a few of the military-themed blogs and websites I read regularly are John Robb's Global Guerillas, Phil Carter's Intel Dump, the anonymous Arms and Influence and Armchair Generalist, and the broader Defense and the National Interest, where I pay particularly close attention to the columns written by William Lind. Some of the books that inform my thinking about the institution of the U.S. Army and the nature of the war in Iraq are Sean Naylor's Not a Good Day to Die, a brilliant examination of Army politics and culture, Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near, and Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy, which reported on the French war in Indochina. More generally, books that I have found useful on the topic of small wars include Brian McAllister Linn's The Philippine War and Elliott West's The Contested Plains. Another exceptionally important book, Ed Ayers' In the Presence of Mine Enemies, informs my understanding of the way that we manage the political meanings of war. Also influential: James Scott's Seeing Like a State and Lt. Col. John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Astute readers will note the absence of Noam Chomsky from this list.
(More below)
Saturday, January 7, 2006
Portrait of a Liberator
Remarkable letter in today's edition of Stars and Stripes:
The bottom line up front (BLUF) is this: If the United States leaves Iraq before the job is at least 90 percent done, it would be catastrophic on a biblical scale ("War based on a lie," letter, Nov. 28). First, you would have civil war and ethnic strife. Then would come the genocide — if I offended anyone, I apologize; I meant "ethnic cleansing." After all that, another Taliban-style regime would take hold. Then another "coalition of the willing" would have to be assembled and we would be right back in Iraq.
Sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture. What would have happened if the U.S. had prematurely come home during World War II? This is no easy task. It takes time to force change on people.
Personally, I hate this country. I hated it the first time I was here. I will despise it and most of its ungrateful people until the day I die. Regardless of the reason we are here — weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to al-Qaida, or whatever — the BLUF is that we are here and have a job to do.
Staff Sgt. David J. Wallach
Forward Operating Base Summerall, Iraq
It takes time to force change on people you despise. And the baffling thing is, they don't even seem grateful.
Thursday, January 5, 2006
Five O'Clock Follies Redux
U.S. Department of State International Information Program, Dec. 29:
Insurgents in Iraq are showing little capacity to keep up numerous and persistent attacks, a senior U.S. general in Baghdad says.
At a briefing December 29, Air Force Brigadier General C.D. Alston said there are three reasons for the diminishing capability of the insurgents to keep up attacks...
The security offensive has been focused on defeating terrorists and foreign fighters, and disrupting the insurgency, he said, with great effect....
"Today, there are 223,000 trained and equipped members of the Iraqi security forces," Alston said during the briefing carried by a Pentagon teleconference from Baghdad...
Alston said the third factor that has contributed to the diminishing capacity of the insurgents has been the active participation in the political process by Sunni Iraqis...
Because of this improvement among Iraqi security forces, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said during recent appearances in Iraq that the United States would reduce the number of combat troops there by approximately 7,000 in 2006.
Stars and Stripes (Mid-East Edition), Jan. 4:
"A daunting task lies ahead, but I have no doubt you are well-trained," said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, V Corps commander since 2003, who spent a tumultuous year in Iraq...[brief discussion below]
"The country’s on the verge of a civil war," he said, and told the soldiers the mission now is to transfer responsibility for Iraq stability to Iraqi troops, including what he said had been "neglected police capacity."
Sunday, December 4, 2005
Our Curiously Desultory War
I recently posted this at my other blog home, Historiblography, and Ralph Luker suggested I posted it here. Not much history in it -- well, none at all -- but maybe still an interesting view from someone trained in history and parked at the periphery of the current war.
Training for war, I spent an afternoon in an army classroom listening to presentations on improvised explosive devices and the insurgents who plant them. Droning through one of the inevitable PowerPoint presentations, a sergeant first class read directly from the slide in front of us: The insurgency, he read, will probably die down after we capture Saddam Hussein. Except that the class was taught this October, a couple of years after that former dictator had been dragged out of his spider hole. The sergeant stopped for the briefest moment, mumbled that the slides were a little out of date, and went right on reading.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
The Problem from Hell
A question (or two) that I'm not equipped to answer: Is it possible that conditions in Iraq might lead, over time, to an attempt at a genocidal solution to the problem of political and religious divisions? How might the Iraq of 2007 or 2008, with the United States gone, compare to pre-genocide Rwandan or Balkan society?
A precise and narrowly framed question, I know, but I still wonder if anyone has given serious consideration to the possibility.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Frenchmen and Peasants
Some analysts of military affairs have lately argued that the world is seeing the rise of "fourth-generation warfare," an emergence of significant non-state military actors whose confrontation with formal government will challenge the very legitimacy of the state. Such "warfare" doesn't always look like the kinds of activity we associate with that word. At the website Defense and the National Interest, the deeply conservative (and highly provocative) writer William Lind finds in the recent riots in France a perfect example of the "4GW" phenomenon: "Here we find ourselves peering over the crater of the Fourth Generation volcano directly into its heart, the transfer of primary loyalties away from the state."
What's remarkable, in the coverage of the riots, is how little anyone has noted the historically recent nature of those loyalties to the state. I'm thinking in particular of Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, which depicted a 19th-century France in which many nominally French peasants spoke provincial languages, knew no French at all, and paid little attention (and little money) to the central French administration. I'm not trained in French history, read very little in the field, and am several thousands of miles away from my copy of Weber's book, so my discussion here will be awfully limited. But isn't the jealous protection of putatively French culture by the French state -- such as the much-noted practice of teaching every child in France that their ancestors were Gauls -- a likely product of the tenuousness, the historical recentness, of the very idea of "French culture" or a shared loyalty to the French state?
Friday, September 30, 2005
Reality Bites
Commenters here have sharply disputed my not-very-controversial contention that the U.S. Army was facing serious recruiting shortages. The recruiting year ends today, and here's the end of the story:
"The Army has not published official figures yet, but it apparently finished the 12-month counting period that ends Friday with about 73,000 recruits. Its goal was 80,000. A gap of 7,000 enlistees would be the largest — in absolute number as well as in percentage terms — since 1979, according to Army records.
The Army National Guard and the Army Reserve, which are smaller than the regular Army, had even worse results.
The active Army fell short for the year by half a division. Hard to argue with that, but I'm sure someone will.
Friday, July 29, 2005
Hattiesburg Bleg
I'm currently stationed at Camp Shelby, Mississippi for training -- or, this being the army, for a period of "standing by" prior to the emergence of hypothetical future training -- and will be allowed off post for the first time on Saturday. I'll be staying in a hotel near the USM campus, and have no idea at all what there is to do in Hattiesburg. Any Cliopatria readers in the area? What should I do with myself? Post suggestions below, or email me at chrisabray - at - yahoo - dot - com.
Thanks.
Saturday, July 2, 2005
Snapshots and Chatter
My first surprise upon reporting to Fort Benning for active duty was the identity of the folks who greeted me outside the barracks. Two buildings on Kelley Hill now house soldiers called back from the Individual Ready Reserve, while the buildings directly adjacent to the IRR barracks house soldiers in a medical retention unit -- soldiers, in other words, who were injured in combat while in Iraq. It's interesting that the Army has chosen to park those two groups of soldiers side by side.
So I had been on post for thirty minutes when I started talking to a group of those injured soldiers, drinking beer outside the dayroom on a Sunday evening. Their message would be unsurprising to anyone who has been reading the newspaper: You can't tell which Iraqis are going to try to kill you, so you should act on any doubt or suspicion you have by cutting down anyone who makes you nervous. Act on hunches; pull the trigger. It may turn out to be the wrong choice, but it's a wrong choice that you'll live through.
As the days went on, I met other soldiers with similar stories to tell. Sitting in the computer room checking email, I heard a soldier at the next terminal asking an officer if he'd been over there yet. Since the officer had not, and since I hadn't either, the soldier showed us his photos from over there: Image after image of American soldiers cut to pieces by IEDs, missing limbs and missing faces. In a formal training session, we watched videotape footage of other American soldiers being killed in IED explosions; in one clip, the turret of an M-1 Abrams tank took flight, sailing above a massive cloud of dirt and black smoke.
Soldiers who have been in Iraq offer a mixed bag of lessons for soldiers who are going to Iraq, telling us that we'll make a difference and do important work in almost the same breath that they warn us not to trust the ragheads and to drop anyone who makes us feel nervous. We are warned that Hajii is a sneaky little fucker and can't be trusted, that Iraqi soldiers and police are to be kept at arms length or farther, that it's much too easy to be killed. An NCO explained to a class that the ragheads won't understand what you tell them, and you won't understand that little gobbledy-gook that they talk, so the best way to get them on the ground to search them is to kick 'em in the balls or butt-stroke 'em in the face. That they'll understand.
It's difficult to blame American soldiers for viewing Iraqis as ragheads and sneaky Orientals while those soldiers face death and mutilation from sneak attack every day, thousands of miles from home in a place where they don't speak the language and have no education or training in the culture or religion. Another NCO who was injured in Iraq responded to a question last week about the regional differences in fighting by saying that things are apparently different among the Sunnis and the whatever, all those other types of people they've got over there -- the kind of differences, he concluded, that officers have to worry about. For grunts, he suggested, those differences are not worth considering; just be prepared to shoot back when it's time.
I hesitate to begin drawing Big Conclusions based on two weeks of barracks chatter and PowerPoint presentations, but it does seem to me that there's a problem with the idea that American military power is the right tool for a pedagogy of liberation. We are partners in freedom with the fucking ragheads, teaching those sneaky little fuckers about the values of a constitutional republic. Something seems a little off, there.
I also remember reading a news story, just before I left, about an incident in which American soldiers shot and killed an unarmed, 57 year-old high school teacher in Baghdad because they thought she might have been a suicide bomber. After talking with American soldiers who have been in Iraq and have been horribly maimed in Iraq, that mistake seems entirely human and understandable to me. We cannot place ordinary men and women in an untenable circumstance and expect them to exercise more-than-human judgment and forbearance. It is reasonable to expect human beings to be afraid of dying, and it is reasonable to expect them to act against that fear. Again, this suggests some significant implications for a liberationist project that attempts to use heavily armed nineteen year-olds to carry the torch of freedom in the face of daily suicide bombings.
But I have a long way to go, and look forward to the journey. I'm keeping an open mind, and have predictably met many, many soldiers who are smart, highly capable, and worthy of the greatest respect. None of the stories that I've told here are the full story, and none represent the complete spectrum of thought and behavior among soldiers.
More later. I hope that everyone back home is healthy, happy, and productive.
(Cross-posted on Historiblography)
Sunday, June 19, 2005
That's It, For Now
I'll be leaving very early in the morning, headed for Fort Benning by way of my favorite pre-dawn nightmare, LAX. Not sure how long it will be, but I do suspect that I won't be able to post here for quite a while. Thanks for the opportunity, which I look forward to once again being able to use.
For whatever it's worth, I really am capable of forming thoughts on subjects unrelated to neocons and the war in Iraq. I've had a long post stuck in my head for a few weeks on the topic of the "myth of passivity" described in Noenoe Silva's Aloha Betrayed. But I just haven't had the energy these last few weeks to articulate other thoughts, for the obvious reasons. I look forward to coming home and returning to a larger range of topics.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
An Empire, Not a Republic
At the blog for the libertarian magazine Reason, Matt Welch notes the interesting example of prominent neocon war-proponents who now enthusiastically embrace comparisons between the contemporary United States and the Roman Empire.
"When war enthusiasts are no longer even defensive about comparisons to the Roman Empire," Welch concludes, "we have arguably crossed over into new territory. "
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
"History's Rhyme"
A conservative blogger offers "fifteen similarities between the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq." If we accept his premise, the next question would be to ask what we do with the comparison. Does historical understanding lead, at least in the case of the war in Iraq, to some sort of useful policy prescription?
Note also the invitation, at the end of the post, for commenters to offer their own lists of significant differences between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam. A few commenters have taken a shot, and their comments are worth reading. But why is there always that one anonymous jackass who thinks it's worth the time to post the half-literate "you're argument is to stoopid for me to argue against, but your wrong" comment?
Saturday, June 11, 2005
A Conservative Road to Serfdom
As a Marxist, Eugene Genovese recognized the failure of the Soviet experiment as the decisive end of a road he had spent his life walking. But as he took in the disheartening failure in his own political neighborhood, he heard familiar sounds to his right. As he wrote in the curious The Southern Tradition: "The socialist debacle has exposed the false premises on which the Left has proceeded, but it has done so at a time in which the Right is embracing many of those premises -- notably, personal liberation and radical egalitarianism."
Genovese first published those words in 1994, well before our current set of putative conservatives embarked on their global crusade for Western Civilization. But his premise has grown stronger with time. To return to a favorite and endlessly useful figure, look at this Victor Davis Hanson column on the purportedly conservative National Review Online. Writing in March, Hanson offered a triumphal catalog of those moments in which the U.S. government has "acted boldly" against the "unstable and corrupt...status quo" to achieve "a radical and systematic political solution...to the entire Arab cycle of failure."
In the alternative universe we currently call home, "conservative" writers now celebrate moments in which the state takes bold action against the status quo in the service of dramatic societal transformations; a "conservative" is someone who urges his neighbors to march to utopia behind the banner of the liberationist state. I have previously described the application of this new ideal as the conservative Great Society program for the Middle East, a fevered embrace of the nearly unlimited application of state power. The United States government, possessing great human truths, will make common cause with the world's oppressed, and spread its system of freedom across the globe. So far, this is familiar stuff that I have said before (and will say again and again).
But the interesting development now underway is that putative conservatives, having abandoned moral modesty in global affairs in favor of an unyielding ideological certitude, are now compelled to take a distinctly Soviet attitude toward the simplest realities. While people who follow the U.S. military closely are describing a "manpower meltdown" -- especially in the army, and especially among soldiers in the combat arms -- the emerging collapse of the very force needed to sustain the liberationist project is entirely absent from the neoconservative radar. Look at Michelle Malkin's blog, or Victor Davis Hanson's website. See any signs in there that American military power is reaching its limit on the ground? Any mention of the growing crisis in recruiting and retention?
Meanwhile, Hanson wonders publicly if it isn't maybe time -- you can't make this stuff up -- to "press on" and begin bombing Syria. The war is going so well, in the alternative universe these folks have constructed for themselves, that it's time to think about extending the project.
Our soldiers are Stakhanovites for global liberation! All are marching in unison behind the banner of glory!
Sing that anthem, brothers and sisters. Conservatism is no longer premised on limited power, cautious goals, and modest means. The law of unintended consequences is repealed, and there are no barriers to the global success of Our Glorious Way of Life. (And you should really take a moment to click on that last link. Soon, all will bow down before us! Hail! All hail!)
But here's the bottom line, and it just doesn't fit the message.
So they simply aren't going to notice it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a dynamic that the world has seen before. Fortunately, the available political forms are very different; the United States is nowhere near the model of the Soviet Union, and our own Stalinist faithful are more pathetic than powerful. But the psychology is there, and worth watching very closely.
Seriously: Read this. Remember that you've read it. (The man opens with a radical global power shift and ends with the thought that one day our enemies will whimper back, asking for our friendship.) (Our struggle will be vindicated! Hail!)
Keep your eyes on these folks.
(Cross-posted on Historiblography)
Monday, May 30, 2005
Writing History in Crayon
Writing about recent news media scandals, Victor Davis Hanson neatly demonstrates his historical method:
The recent Dan Rather and Newsweek controversies hardly seem connected. But on closer examination, both incidents symbolize what has gone wrong with traditional news organizations.It's all here, the entire Hansonian palette. Note the magnificent clarity of the "old assumption"; once, everything was just as we would have wished it to be. The Glorious Past is placed against our own sordid and spoiled day: Prior to Dan Rather, news media offered disinterested reporting, and kept their opinions out of the news sections. (Pause for laughter.) Tradition "has been shattered in recent years."
The old assumption was that opinion media — such as the National Review, The Nation and The New Republic — offer a slant on current events, but that major news outlets, outside of their designated opinion sections, do not.
This commitment to disinterested reporting — and along with it the public's trust in mainstream media — has been shattered in recent years.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Victor Davis Hanson template. You are now released from ever having to read one of his columns again. Past perfection; radicals arrive, stage left; tradition shatters.
Of course, given the presence of figures like Harrison Gray Otis and William Randolph Hearst, it takes a vigorous and calculated blindness to turn the history of American news media into a history of "disinterested reporting." But Hanson is up to that historical blindness, as he proves time and time again. It's how he earns his bread.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Bear Market on White Feathers
Why the War in Iraq is Unsustainable
Last week*, the major general in charge of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command held a press briefing to discuss the army's recruiting problems. The most interesting part was this little-noticed exchange on the topic of "influencers" (emphasis added):
GEN. ROCHELLE: I don't believe anyone believes it's a life or death situation. Is it challenging? Yes. It's challenging under the very best of conditions. Today's conditions represent the most challenging conditions we have seen in recruiting in my 33 years in this uniform. We are faced with very low unemployment; the first time that the all-volunteer force has been challenged in sustained land combat -- I believe that the total casualties are up over 8,000. And in point of fact, we now have very, very low propensity to enlist, both on the part of our young Americans and likewise on the part of influencers -- and by that, I mean parents, coaches, other adults whose opinions matter to our young 17-to-24-year-olds -- to recommend Army service. Those couple to provide a very, very challenging environment.Now, this is obviously total bullshit. Twice a year, the Department of Defense compiles data on "influencers," finding out if they are encouraging or discouraging the enlistment of young people under their influence. Currently the military knows that most influencers are sharply opposed to the enlistment of young people they know...but they have no idea why, and apparently haven't even thought to ask. La la la, fingers in our ears, la la la.
Yes, ma'am?
Q: Could you explain why you think that parents and young people don't have a propensity to join?
GEN. ROCHELLE: I don't have a lot of research to answer that question, merely Department of Defense-level research that does tell us -- and it's a quarterly research -- biannually, excuse me, that does tell us that parents are less inclined today than they were immediately after September 11th to recommend.
Q: But if you don't have reasons, you can't address that. Knowing that they are less inclined is one thing, but knowing why they are less inclined allows you to address the problem.
GEN. ROCHELLE: Well, if we attempt to address every problem, I think it would simply water down our message. What we are attempting to do is focus on the value of service. And the secretary of the Army has launched a campaign -- (pause) -- a call to duty campaign. I was going to say call to service, but it's in fact call to duty campaign, which elevates service to a whole different level -- elevates it to the level of patriotism; elevates it to the level of service to country, service to nation.
(snip)
Q: General?
GEN. ROCHELLE: Yes?
Q: Can you comment a little bit more on the data on influencers? I mean, how much further down is it compared to September 11th? And is it simply that we're in an extended conflict in Iraq that's driving it down, you know, compared to the patriotic fervor after September 11th, or how do you explain it?
GEN. ROCHELLE: Let me see if I can recall the numbers. I believe that shortly after September the 11th, the propensity for influencers was measured at about the 22 percent who would say, yes, I would recommend military service to a young man or woman of recruitment age. And the last data point I saw, it's down to -- I think it's 14 percent, if that gives you some relative scope.
Would I attribute it to any single factor? No, sir, I would not. I think it's far more complex than that.
Because the elephant in the room (and I think I may actually mean that as a pun) is that large numbers of people who sport yellow ribbon bumperstickers on their cars -- sorry, their SUVs -- and tell pollsters that they support the war in Iraq don't actually support the war in the sense that they want anyone they know to fight in it. The enlistment numbers, and the dynamic behind them, suggest quite strongly that the American project in Iraq is unsustainable. Wars require bodies in uniform, and the trend for that commodity is down, down, down. However many Americans "support" the war, the fact is that fourteen percent support the war.
(*On the day I was getting married -- this is why it has taken me a week to begin commenting on old news, yes. I think it's a pretty good excuse.)
(Cross-posted on Historiblography)
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Knowledge is Powerless
(Cross-posted at Historiblography)
David Hackworth fought in three wars before he turned to writing about military affairs:
At 14, as World War II was sputtering out, he lied about his age to join the Merchant Marine, and at 15 he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Over the next 26 years he spent fully seven in combat. He was put in for the Medal of Honor three times; the last application is currently under review at the Pentagon. He was twice awarded the Army's second highest honor for valor, the Distinguished Service Cross, along with 10 Silver Stars and eight Bronze Stars. When asked about his many awards, he always said he was proudest of his eight Purple Hearts and his Combat Infantryman's Badge.
So here, of course, is how Regnery hack Michelle Malkin greeted his death: "Didn't agree with much of his work, especially over the last few years, but he lived a fascinating life of service to this country."
Get that? Malkin, with her zero years of military service and her zero years of training in military history and military affairs, examines the career of a man who spent many decades fighting in wars and writing critically about war and the military, and casually offers that she didn't agree with much of his work. She has standing to judge, and sufficient knowledge to dismiss. He was a critic, so he was wrong. Only cheerleaders are right. Nothing else matters.
Second example, with a slightly different flavor. Andrew Bacevich is a conservative Vietnam veteran, a West Point grad, a career U.S. Army officer who retired as a colonel, and a Princeton PhD who now works as a professor of international relations at Boston University. Take a look at the Amazon.com reader reviews for Bacevich's recent book on what he calls The New American Militarism, and you'll see that this retired colonel is an America-hating left-winger who is spitting on the graves of our soldiers:
We walk among the hundreds of thousands of graves of brave American men at dozens of cemeteries around the globe and remember how people like Bacevich promised "peace in our time", just before the bloodletting began that resulted in the deaths of scores of millions of humans. This book is interesting for those whose understanding of history is warped by the leftists who rule academia today, but if you have the slightest understanding of the relationship of might vs. right, this book is a total waste of money. It is no different than spitting on the graves of those who served their country and stabbing them in the back when they returned...
And never mind that Bacevich actually fought alongside those soldiers. Just never mind at all.
If Patton, Bradley, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Grant, and Sherman all collectively rose from the grave one morning and carefully acknowledged that they were somewhat concerned about the current administration, the war in Iraq, or the state of contemporary U.S. military-civil affairs in general, they would all be smeared as America-hating, terrorist-loving, ultra-leftist ivory-tower radicals before the sun went down.
Lifelong civilians like Michelle Malkin, Victor Davis Hanson, Hugh Hewitt, David Horowitz, and Daniel Pipes are trustworthy experts in military affairs, because they love war without question (as long as they don't have to fight in it). Andrew Bacevich and David Hackworth, with all their combat experience and all their books between them, mean less than nothing. They questioned the project, and can't be allowed to remain at the table.
One day, I sincerely hope, people like Malkin will come to their senses and feel real shame about this period in their lives.
ADDED LATER: This is also worth a look.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
And the Sun is a Ball of Hot Gas
Cross-posted on Historiblography
This is a major news flash, I know, but Victor Davis Hanson has written something dumb. The fun part is that he wrote something dumb in response (or in "response," since he doesn't really bother to respond) to a question I asked him:
In a March answer to a reader, you wrote on your website that "race studies,” queer studies, gender studies, etc." have become "the establishment" on university campuses, resulting in the destruction of the "old liberal arts curriculum." A New York Times story on April 24, 2005 reports on the most common and least common majors on contemporary campuses. At the University of California at San Diego, for example, 3,368 students are majoring in biology; 1,787 are majoring in economics; and a whopping 23 are majoring in critical gender studies.Hanson's response is yet another regurgitation of the same-old same-old, and go ahead and place your bets on whether or not he mentions Ward Churchill. (Ward Churchill now singlehandedly comprises fifty percent of all known American academics.)
Isn't it possible that you've overstated the significance of "studies" programs? I apologize for challenging your declensionist worldview with actual facts.
Backing up the claim that race/class/gender/sexuality "studies" have taken over the academy, Hanson now writes:
All these 'studies' programs have no popular appeal to students at all, who rarely major in them, or take more than one (required) course. But their influence is nevertheless enormous and hardly to be measured simply by official majors.So the new "establishment" on American university campuses is a set of programs that students don't find appealing or useful at all. Supermarket X has no loyal customers, and is therefore the leader in the supermarket industry.
First, most campuses now have some sort of requirement in the General Education curriculum for an ethnic or gender studies class; and these courses, unlike most others, thus reach most of the student body .
Note also that "studies" programs "have no popular appeal to students at all," but somehow are full of snarky grad students and politically correct professors. And where do grad students and professors come from? Not from the undergraduate population, apparently. Maybe universities are raising these professor types in some sort of kooky left-wing test tubes.
Finally, I love that "studies" programs have taken over the academy and destroyed the traditional curriculum because many universities now require students to take "one (required) course" in those programs. At UCLA, where we're on the quarter system, an undergraduate needs 160 credits -- at four credits per class -- to graduate. That means 40 classes for a B.A. At Pitzer College, where I was an undergrad, we needed 32 semester-long classes to graduate. So one required class in a race/class/gender/sexuality topic would comprise either 1/40th or 1/32nd of an undergraduate education -- and heaven forbid that a student spend 1/40th an education thinking about women, African Americans, or homosexuality. They should stick to, you know, normal topics.
Hanson continues:
Second, the class/race/gender fixation insidiously transcends these titled courses proper; thus former Revolutionary war classes might now be in fact studies of the 'other' during colonial times; a class nominally on some of Shakespeare's plays turns out to be deconstructing gender, or a history of Latin America often becomes a melodrama about European pathology and culpability.Well, sure. What's all this discussion of European culpability doing in Latin American history courses? If we have any readers in the Fresno area, someone might want to ask Victor Davis Hanson why people in Latin America speak Spanish and Portugese, which are widely believed (by leftist academics) to be European languages. How on earth would one design a class on Latin America without referencing the presence of European colonizers? Why is the inclusion of this presence a radical choice?
And finally, Hanson writes:
Fourth, the politically-correct emphasis on race/class/gender studies puts enormous pressure on untenured faculty to publish in these areas and upon graduate students to steer their research in this direction — and to serve obsequiously those faculty who, they sense, have gravitated in these directions and thus will have greater clout when it comes time to parcel out fellowships, teaching assignments, and recommendations for jobs. Perusal of the Modern Language Association's, American Historical Association's, or American Philological Association's lists of PhD dissertation titles or annual convention talks bears out this over-concentration...I have suggested before that the AHA's list of dissertations in progress proves that Hanson and others like him are mostly full of hot air, and I'll say it again: Go look for yourself. Yes, you will find titles that focus on race/class/gender/sexuality themes. Yes, some will sound silly. Most will not. Some of those that sound silly will actually contain good scholarship; some of those that sound smart and "traditional" will actually contain poor scholarship.
Were the world anywhere near as simple as Victor Davis Hanson makes it out to be, we would all be drawn in crayon.
Monday, May 16, 2005
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
As Ralph Luker has mentioned, I recently received orders from the army for 18 months of active duty. One unfortunate consequence of the army's generous invitation is that I'll be leaving two weeks before the end of the quarter at UCLA, where I am a teaching assistant in a survey course on ninteenth century U.S. history.
I've been considering a question without much success at finding an answer: What do I tell the students in my discussion sections? I graded their midterms and first papers, but will not be here to grade their second papers and final exams. I'll also miss the last discussion, which will be covered by other TAs. I'll have to say something about my coming absence. They'll also probably notice the sudden appearance of a wedding ring in the week before I leave.
I'm not inclined to discuss personal business or contemporary politics in the classroom, and so have been thinking I'll just announce that I won't be here for the end of the quarter, thank you and goodnight. Others here have argued that I should -- even must -- tell them why I'm leaving and where I'm going. I can think of arguments for and against, but I'll just ask this as a question, or as several questions: Should I tell? Should I tell, and try to use the news to generate a classroom discussion? Is there a reasonable way to drag a history lesson out of my news? (My research interests relate to the development of an American empire in the late nineteenth century, so it seems like some very careful and limited analogies might be made.)
One concern worth mentioning: In previous quarters, I have had active and engaged sections, and have also had students who were in ROTC or considering careers in the foreign service or the CIA, bless their innocent hearts. This quarter, the universe is punishing me for unidentified prior transgressions, and I have one section that could serve as a perfect metaphor for sailing through the doldrums. They just...don't...care. About anything. Ever. (I'm told that this is normal for the spring quarter.)
Does the composition and chemistry of a class change the answer to the questions? If they're disengaged, do I not bother? Or do I just sigh and step out there?
And, to repeat the question, is there a discussion about history available in the decision to tell them that I'm headed for Iraq?
Friday, May 13, 2005
The Society of the Spectacle
(Cross-posted at Historiblography)
Reporting from the front in WWII, Ernie Pyle was most impressed by the degree to which American soldiers weren't natural warriors. War had come, and they had simply faced it. "They just went," Pyle wrote. In a running commentary on the dignity of the everyman, Pyle described citizens who fought reluctantly and looked forward to getting the job done. "They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice. They were good boys."
This sort of narrative surely speaks to a longstanding piece of American myth, but it also points to an important reality regarding the development of the U.S. military for WWII: Faced with a challenge, a small standing army grew rapidly as Americans rushed (with considerable nudging) to the ranks.
And so I've been struck -- struck forcefully, for the obvious reasons -- by reports that the U.S. Army is currently flailing miserably behind a growing failure to recruit new soldiers. Most seriously, an army deeply entangled in a grinding and persistent conflict is having very little success at recruiting combat troops. "As of the end of March, 7,800 infantry soldiers had been trained at Fort Benning, compared with a target of 25,541 for fiscal 2005." (Fiscal 2005, if I'm not mistaken, ends on June 30.) These are stunning numbers.
Compare and contrast: In WWII, a small standing army grew rapidly; in 2005, an enormous standing army is adrift, and slowly shrinking away. Americans are simultaneously embracing a new militarism -- witness the most recent Democratic presidential candidate saluting and reporting for duty, or the Republican president striding across an aircraft carrier deck in a flight suit, two images that would have baffled a certain ex-general by the name of Eisenhower -- while aggressively declining to serve in the military or to let their children serve. Tens of millions of Americans appear to support the war in Iraq, and this year the U.S. Army has been unable to find 10,000 Americans to serve as riflemen in it.
I very much hesitate to use the phrase historically unprecedented, and I look forward to hearing arguments against, but it seems like this might be a good time to think about using it. The U.S. military projects force around a world in which its power is unmatched; a parallel army of chest-thumping, war-hungry bloggers and columnists celebrate American power; and Fort Benning can't keep its drill sergeants busy.
In a series of posts at his blog, Mark Grimsley has discussed the standing of military history in the contemporary academy. In a milieu defined by the embrace of social history, the story (at least the perceived story) of generals and statesmen has been marginalized as passe. But it seems to me that current events suggest the degree to which military history is social history: The way a society lives is the way it fights. When historians look back at 2005, I suspect that some will make a great deal out of a war that was widely supported and widely avoided. We can draw the picture of an entire culture, living soft and talking hard. Everyone wants to eat, but nobody wants to cook.
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