My last diary was substantially word-for-word a comment in a thread on Lawyers, Guns and Money. I like this site, finding their items usually convincing, and always informative, but I sometimes butt heads with their "centrist" tendency to be "serious" on foreign and military policy. Robert Farley was kind enough to give me a shout-out (well, at least you could say he recognized my butt-headedness) on a new post today, Caveats on the American Way of War, so I feel I should reciprocate.
Below the fold is my answer to his post.
I didn't mention the imperialism part
You're absolutely right, counter-insurgency is not simply genocidal warfare. The technical term for warfare that is purely genocidal in intent is "primary warfare", the struggle between two peoples for survival, usually for each other's land. Both the Third Reich, in its drive for Lebensraum, and the old European colonialism, one example of which is our own struggle with the Native Americans, were enterprises in primary warfare. The participants in such wars seek to exterminate, or at least dispossess of their land, the other side, so that their people can be secure in what they already have by weakening the enemy people, and also grow into newly possessed territory taken from them.
This primary warfare is clearly not what the later waves of colonialism have been about. We don't want to dispossess the Iraqis of their land in order to send Americans there to live, we just want to control the Iraqi people. We don't need, or want, to kill or make refugees of the Iraqis as an end in itself, and will therefore not pursue either means to nearly the extent that we would practice them if we were engaged in primary warfare. But controlling a people who do not want to be controlled does necessarily involve some of both. We have clearly done at least as much killing and dispossessing per year in Iraq as Saddam ever managed, and his level of depredation was indeed freely referred to in public discussion in this country as genocidal.
Counter-insurgency, to complete the elements of which it is composed, is then not simply genocidal primary warfare, but is the application of genocidal means in order to control a foreign people. It is genocide in the service of imperialism. To the observation in Tacitus that the Roman version of imperialism was willing to "create a desert and call it peace", we have to add his observation that such means were deployed in order to "Divide and Rule" the smelly barbarians of the day.
While this political dimension of counter-insurgency clearly does tend to hold down the level of sheer violence visited upon its victims, imperialism hardly redeems any level of violence. What we did to the Native Americans isn't very pretty to contemplate, but they engaged in primary warfare against us as well, and at least we have built something with the land we stole from them. What we have done in Iraq, while not as inherently violent, is to my mind much worse, because we don't even have valid selfish motives behind the truly senseless destruction we are practicing there.
I have heard our cultivation of the sheiks in al Anbar touted as evidence that we are finally getting smart about this political dimension of counter-insurgency. Even if this works in the short run as a "Divide and Rule" strategem to restore an order more to our immediate liking, I can't for the life of me see what true national interest of ours is served by encouraging a return to a more tribalistic society in Iraq. I thought al Qaeda were the folks who wanted Iraq and the rest of the Arab and Muslim worlds to "get Medieval" again. This is just tap-dancing in a desparate search for any policy to belatedly justify the stupidity of occupying in the first place, but a murderous tap-dancing that simply prolongs a lie that has already killed far too many people.
I don't think you can cite the Record article for any support for continuing the current imperialist enterprise. He ends up concluding that the US should not engage in what he calls these limited wars. He has given up on the imperialist project, despite the implication that the smelly barbarians clearly need US control, because recent events have convinced him that the US electorate and the US military are about as benighted in their ignorance as the barbarians, and therefore not fit instruments of empire.
As both a voter and a soldier, I take some exception to such patronizing. The voters were terrorized into supporting invasion and occupation of Iraq by the assurance of their govt, and "experts" in the media and academe, that we were in existential threat from Iraq. But the experts were just kidding, this means of getting the electorate to go along with invasion and occupation of Iraq was just a ploy, and we were not really in a primary warfare situation, of needing to exterminate them before they exterminate us, with the Iraqi people. The least one can say against experts who now complain that the US electorate, and its armed forces, are incapable of accepting limited ends to wars, is that they are complaining that the electorate and military was stupid enough to take them seriously in the first place.
I don't doubt that there is an extensive literature of counter-insurgency. Astrology and Creationism can make the same boast. And even in cases in which there is no question of expertise in a field of pseudo-knowledge being claimed for self-serving ends, such as expertise and literature on Chess Strategy, the existence of an extensive literature and recognized gradations of expertise does not in any way guarantee any relation between the expertise and the real world, only expertise within the reality-bubble defined by the game of chess.
I fully accept the utility of spaces, such as Academe, that can exist only if the participants don't insist on always pushing discussions into existential territory. The Bible, for example, can and must be studied apart from the call to follow its precepts, if only to shed light on what those precepts might be. We can make an analogy with the desirability of civilized nations avoiding Primary Warfare, and try to stay, even in our wars of ideas, with war on the Sport of Kings model of Secondary Warfare. If your intent is that the reality-status of Counter-Insurgency is to be beyond question in this blog space that I will cheerfully admit that you own, I will cheerfully withdraw my forces from this border province, and refrain from further such comment in this space. But you know, if you, admirably, choose to risk bringing ideas out to the blogosphere, rather than keep them cloistered in the Hallowed Halls of Academe, you will tend to run into DFHs such as myself, who have a known tendency to shrillness, and have no investment in concepts beyond their practical utility. The unwashed public can get downright testy when the topic, however theoretically abstractable as a field of merely theoretical concern, has practical entailments that have gotten three and half thousand Americans, and about a half million Iraqis, killed. I would argue that the idea of Counter-Insurgency, that such a thing exists apart from genocidal means and imperialistic ends, is an idea with such entailments. The very idea that it is a fit topic for discussion, how our country might best bring under control the benighted peoples of the earth, however earnestly the intent is to do so for their own good, is the true siren song that got us into this mess, rather than some plot to steal oil profits, etc. I would further offer Record's article as a warning that if you set off by patronizing just those benighted foreigners who you imagine can't manage their own affairs, with a theory of however enlightened a US empire maintained by smart counter-insurgency techniques, you end up patronizing the US electorate, and the US military. The intellectual habits bred of foreign empire have a way of coming home to roost.
Link to the Record article, The American Way of War: Cultural Barriers to Successful Counterinsurgency