Just in Case You Weren’t Sure: Counterinsurgency Isn’t “Progressive”
Posted by Kevin Carson on Apr 30, 2010 in Commentary • 10 commentsMatt Yglesias finds it necessary to point out, of all things, that counterinsurgency warfare isn’t really as progressive as it’s cracked up to be. He confessed to “a sort of nagging concern that counterinsurgency advocates have sold the public—or at least a certain swathe of left-of-center elites—on a prettied-up version of what their brand of warfare means. Like it’s really development work and human rights, except the people will carry guns.” But he quotes Michael Cohen (“The Myth of a Kindler, Gentler War”), to the effect that all those counterinsurgency success stories “don’t actually look like a kinder, gentler form of war.” Cohen points, specifically, to the case of the counterinsurgency in Malaysia, which–like pretty much all counterinsurgencies–relied mainly on “separating the ethnic Chinese population from the insurgents, by force.” The “compelling list of indignities visited upon this group” included “mass arrests, the death penalty for carrying weapons, food control systems, burning down of the homes of Communist sympathizers, curfews and fines against communities as forms of collective punishment for individual offenses, detention without trial.”
“Which is just to say,” Yglesias concludes, “that people shouldn’t kid themselves about what’s involved in a war, even a counterinsurgency war.”
“Even”? “EVEN”?!!
That it should even be necessary to point out that counterinsurgency is not a kindler and gentler form of warfare utterly astounds me.
The U.S. operation in South Vietnam–Operation Phoenix, strategic hamlets, free fire zones, and all the rest of it–was a counterinsurgency. Ditto the Soviet operation in Afghanistan, the Brits in the Boer republics, the Spanish in Cuba, the American suppression of the Moros in the Philippines, the Japanese counterinsurgency in Manchuria, the Belgians in the Congo, and all the rest of it. All these operations aimed at the same general objective: preventing an occupied population from supporting an insurgency it sympathized with. And they all followed the same rulebook: herd the civilian population into glorified prison camps where they could be controlled, shooting everything that moved outside, and if necessary resorting to terror when support for the insurgency continued.
Unfortunately, the specter of Kennedy liberalism still haunts the Democratic Party fifty years after a vigorous, charismatic young President packaged it as some kind of “progressive” venture (“bear any burden, pay any price,” etc.) to send Green Berets to Saigon. You may recall that spirit was symbolized by James T. Kirk, Kennedy’s alter ego, who generally said “we come in peace” about a nanosecond before “set phasers to kill.”
That Yglesias even finds it necessary to debunk the idea that counterinsurgency is “progressive” or “idealistic” should demonstrate beyond question that the influence of George McGovern on the Democratic Party mainstream is long dead. “Progressivism” may mix a bit of New Left cultural leaven in with the old-style liberal lump, but in the mainstream Democratic establishment—and that means Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and all those people who talk about Afghanistan as the “good war”—the heart of Cold War Liberalism is still beating strongly.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
If anyone actually thinks counterinsurgencies are “kinder, gentler,” then they ought to watch the WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” video where American troops get absolutely giddy when they get to massacre a group civilians from an Apache helicopter for the offense of possessing weapons for self-defense in a dangerous part of Baghdad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
According to two of the soldiers who were involved with the incident, “the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region.”
http://www.truthout.org/soldiers-wikileaks-company-apologize-violence
“… the Brazilians in the Congo”
When? What was that about?
Aaaack! Thanks, Joe.
But now you've got "…the Belgians in the Congo…", which is also wrong, because:-
- It mostly wasn't the Belgians doing it, but a collection of individual Europeans from all over, often German (with at least one Canadian as well), under the ultimate direction of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, even though there were quite a few individual Belgians too.
- It was actually the Belgians who put a stop to that, by taking the Congo Free State out of the king's hands.
In other words, the Belgians are getting guilt by association. Taken as a whole, when they found out, they stopped the atrocities – granted, without going so far as to free up the locals completely, but even there, as much as anything, the restrictions were aimed at preventing European residents having an autonomous power structure to infiltrate.
My own childhood experiences in the region have since led me to pay attention to material on the subject.
Thanks, PML. I guess I should have said King Leopold in the Congo. But I think I'll leave it as is for the sake of continuity, since at least it doesn't provoke the same "WTF" reaction as the Brazilians.
In my previous comment I put an asterisk after Wurtzburg. I'd meant to put at the end of the comment
* "To Destroy a City" by Hermann Knell Stategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II. Before World War II, in a book by Major General H H Arnold and Colonel Ira C Eaker, :Winged Warfare" they suggest, (pages 8 an 9) that the bomber like poison gas be made illegal in warfare. That of course was before the war, and their morals an scruples went right out the window after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Had the Japanese gone to war with us in 1907 over our racist segregation policies in California public schools, it would have been quite interesting. In 1907 the Japanese and the British had a mutual defense treaty. In 1921 as part of that treaty, the Sempill mission gave the Japanese plans for aircraft carriers. The Brits also sold the Japanese torpedo planes, and gave training for their operation.
Re: WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” video where American troops get absolutely giddy when they get to massacre a group civilians from an Apache helicopter.
How is what the troops did wrong? if this and My Lia were wrong, then firebombing German and Japanese cities was wrong. If fire bombing Dresden, Wurtzburg* Tokyo, Hiroshima etc was right, then troops shooting civilians was right. If Lt. Calley had called in Artillery or an Air Strike, he could have gone to be be a General. The people at the top, Truman, Churchhill, King Leopold, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Nixon, LBJ, Bush, Obama and their cronies are the ones that should have been/should be tried for war crimes. We did sign the UN charter you know, wars of aggression and torture are illegal. Nothing seems to ever change, we say we are a nation of laws, and we get in a war, and all the laws go right out the window. Mao was right, Power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
As a kid I thought “why didn’t the German people stop Hitler” Grown up I think, how could they? We didn’t stop George Bush from invading Iraq. We can’t seem to stop the drone strikes.
You take a nice young man put him in a war, let him see his friends killed by the enemy, and some of those nice young men will kill innocent civilians. My Lai and Nagaski, its just a matter of scale.
And by the way, I’m glad there is still some semblance of a free press, and wikiLeaks. Be nice if they could get feed from a drone strike. OMG it was a wedding not an assembly of “terrorists”.
OHK140: I'm assuming your question is rhetorical, because I don't think you'll find anyone at C4SS who defends American strategic bombing of Germany and Japan. I know I agree with your comments across the board.
Of course the answer to your point about the UN Charter is that it wasn't meant to apply to the U.S. The UN was intended to be a world order enforced *by* the great powers' club in the Security Council. And by definition, only countries other than the U.S. can be guilty of aggression. When the U.S. does it, it's self-defense. Expecting the international political order enforced *by* the U.S. to apply *to* the U.S. would be like expecting cops to, you know, not break the law.
Kevin, I do not agree with your idea that that UN charter didn't apply to us too. I thought all nations that signed the Charter were to agree to it and uphold its laws. Even us. But it would be no surprise to me that the US considers it to be "more equal" than other nations. Right after the UN adopted the plank of "self determination of nations", Churchhill stated it was only to apply to European nations. That's in line with your statement. In effect, there are a bunch of laws, but some nations pick and choose which ones they will obey. During the war we kept assuring the "Free French" that after the War they would get Indochina back. The Vichy governments in Vietnam turned captured US pilots over to the Japanese and they were executed. OTOH Ho's forces got the pilots back to China.
The killing of people of one nation is wrong regardless of the scale of the events. My Lai was no less wrong than was Hiroshima, Dresden, or Coventry. Fortunately sometimes soldiers refuse to kill. Some of the people Calley ordered to shoot civilians refused the order. But the people who put Calley and his men where there were are the people who should stand trial for War Crimes. Sec Of Defense Rumsfeld, President Bush, not SP/4 England should have on the dock.
I made the comment that Calley could have retired as a General had he killied the people of My Lia with an airstrike, because near My Lai I saw such a thing. Best I can do for a date would be Feb to April of 1968. I was crewing a Chinook flying north out of Phu Bai. As we passed a village with about 50 houses, I thought I heard small arms fire, Or it might have been blade pop. We were at about 1000 feet AGLand offset about 1000 feet from the village. I could see women and kids on the paths through the village, and in the rice paddies around it. What I'd call a Pastoral Scene. Under our rules of engagement I could have fired into the village, but Ichose not too. We passed back by the village about an hour later, and there were some 20 to 25 bomb craters scattered through the village, and I saw no people at all. I have no idea what the cause of he bombing was, and I do not know for sure if any villagers died, but I'd be surprised if none were killed. This village was about 50 miles of My Lai. I've never heard any mention of this "incident".
I volunteered to go to Vietnam to help the Vietnamese. I came home hating all the Gooks. It was years before I used the word Vietnamese again.
I retired two years early (less retirement pay) as i was sickened by what we were doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Especially that we were torturing people. Was horrifying to me that we would do that. When I was on Active Duty in the Army we'd get lectures by our Officers about "why we fight". Like bad stuff the Soviets did, torturing prisoners. Its simple to figure out if something is torture. Things that you'd not ever want done to yourself or your family.
Yeah, the Vietnamese sympathized with the Commies so much that about a million of them fled from the North between 1954 & 1960, and at least another million fled from Hanoi’s conventional invasion of the South in 1975, with about half of them dying in the process.
Sorry, Carson, your Marxism is showing through again, rather transparently. Nor is this the only one of your examples that doesn’t fit your theory, either. E.g., the Soviets never tried to protect the Afghan population, whereas the US did that in the Philippine-American War. The main threat to Filipinos in the camps was cholera due to bad sanitation, which threatened the lives of US soldiers just as much as the civilians, and which the US did its utmost to combat. When it came to the Moro Rebellion, every effort was made not only to spare the lives of the Christian Filipinos, but the women and children trapped in the Moro cottas, too.