Robert Kurz - Bildungsproletariat und Elitenbildung

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Rational Peasants, Blowtorch Bob, Counterinsurgency or Independence is Only a Step

At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of the war, Idema persuaded all the major TV networks and scores of journalists that he was some kind of special forces super-hero who was using all kinds of "black ops" to track down and arrest the terrorists. In reality, before 2001, Idema had been running a hotel for pets in North Carolina called The Ultimate Pet Resort. He had been in prison for fraud, and had tried to con journalists before about being some kind of super-spy. But September 11th gave him his chance - and he turned up in Kabul. And everyone believed him and his stories. In the process Idema brilliantly exposed the emptiness and fakery of much of the TV and newspaper reporting of the war on terror. He told the journalists and the TV presenters all kinds of lies and fantasies. He even became the central, heroic figure in a book called The Hunt for Bin Laden. Then Idema charged journalists fortunes for what he said was an "al qaeda" video of a "a training camp" - where strangely many of the terrorists spoke in english, and allegedly you could hear Idema's voice on the soundtrack. Few of the journalists did anything to really check if any of what he was saying was true. CBS did a special programme about the tapes fronted by Dan Rather, called "Heart of Darkness". They did check on the tapes - the producers went to some of the new breed of "terror experts" that were spawning after 2001. CBS's press office said that they "showed the tapes to three former British Special Forces officers, who verified the tactics being practiced in the video were consistent with those of Al Qaeda". The BBC did a report that showed the tapes. And they travelled to the village where they had been recorded - and found an old man who said, yes there had been Arabs there. But much later a number of journalists did investigate Jack Idema properly - and the consensus now is that the tapes are probably fakes. But then Jack Idema started to believe his own stories. He set up his own militia group that he called Task Force Sabre Seven - and he and his men went and arrested Afghans they were convinced were terrorists. And then he locked them up in his own private prison. Things got out of hand in June 2004 when Idema arrested the Afghan Supreme Court judge, Maulawi Siddiqullah, because he believed he might be involved with terrorists. The judge later described what it was like in Idema's prison: "The first night, around midnight, I heard the screams of four people. They then poured very cold water on me. I tried to keep myself from screaming, but coudn't. Then they played loud, strange music. Then they prevented me from going to the bathroom; a terrible situation. I was hooded for twelve days." In July Afghan police raided Idema's house in Kabul and found what was described as a private torture chamber. Eight hooded men, including the judge, were incarcerated there, and three of them were hanging by their feet from the ceiling, with their heads hooded. Idema and two others were put on trial - and sentenced to ten years in an Afghan jail. And all the journalists puffed a lot about how persuasive he had been. But what is also interesting about Jack Idema is that in a strange way he may have been ahead of his time. Because at the moment that Idema was entering his Afghan prison, a group of very senior US military men, led by a General called David Petraeus, were sitting down in a military staff college in Kansas and beginning to write a study that would completely transform the tactics of the US army in Iraq and in Afghanistan. What General Petraeus and his team did was to go back into the past and exhume a theory of warfare that had been discredited by the US military who thought it was long buried and forgotten. It was called Counterinsurgency. And out of that would allegedly come the same kind of arms-length, privatised interrogation and torture methods that Idema was indulging in. I thought I would tell the history of how Counterinsurgency was invented, why it was discredited in America, and how it returned in 2007 to dominate and brutalise the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a fascinating and weird story that is far odder than anything Jack Idema could have dreamt up - it involves Mao Zedong, John F Kennedy, French fascists, the attempted assassination of Charles De Gaulle, and strange Potemkin-style villages in Vietnam where women get pregnant for no discernible reason. The theory of Counterinsurgency also had a terrible logic built into it that repeatedly led, from the 1950s onwards, to horror - torture, assassination and mass killing on a far wider scale than anything Jack Idema ever did in his house in Kabul. The British military (and their associated wonks) like to think that it was Britain's colonial independence struggles in places like Malaya in the 1950s that gave birth to the idea of Counterinsurgency. But the Petraus team in 2006 thought differently. In the foreword to their study, called "FM 3-24 - Counterinsurgency" they point to an enigmatic and long-forgotten French military officer and thinker as their biggest inspiration. They say: Of the many books that were influential in the writing of FM 3-24, perhaps none was as important as David Galula's 'Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice'. David Galula is an absolutely fascinating figure. He turns up everywhere in the second half of the 20th century in the wrong place at the right time - like revolutionary China and the Greek civil war in the 1940s, Indo-China in the early 50s, and above all in the French struggle in Algeria in the late 1950s. In Algeria Galula conducted radical experiments in what was called "revolutionary warfare" - and in these experiments lie the key to understanding the strange revolutionary roots of the theory of Counterinsurgency - and why it could so easily go wrong and lead to horror. David Galula was born in 1919 in one of the most important colonies of the French Empire - Tunisia. His family were rich merchants and in the 1930s Galula went to study at the prestigious St Cyr military college in France and rose rapidly. Then, in 1946, Galula was sent to China as the assistant to the French Charge d'Affairs in Beijing. He arrived in the midst of the civil war being fought between the communists led by Mao Zedong and the Koumintang nationalists. A year later Galula went on a trip by himself into the interior and was captured by the communists and held for a week. Although he was anti-communist, Galula was fascinated by the way the communists behaved towards the local people because it was different from any other troops he had seen. He began to study their tactics which were based on a theory of revolutionary guerrilla war that had been developed by Mao himself. What Galula realised was that Mao had invented a completely new idea of how to fight a war. Put simply - there was no conventional army any longer, the new army were the millions of people the insurgents moved among. And there were no conventional victories any longer, victory instead was inside the heads of the millions of individuals that the insurgents lived among. If they could persuade the people to believe in their cause and to help them - then the conventional forces would always be surrounded - and would be defeated no matter how many traditional battles they won. Mao explained the theory in a famous phrase: "The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea" alula became convinced that if western armies were going to fight against these new revolutionary ideas they were going to have to change radically. And the way to do it, Galula decided, was to behave exactly the same as Mao's revolutionaries - to swim among the people. Over the next eight years Galula moved around the world observing the bitter wars of liberation being fought in Greece, Malaya and in Indo China - and he saw how the French army was catastrophically defeated by the communist revolutionary army in Vietnam. And in 1956 he volunteered to go and serve in Algeria where France was fighting a war against the guerrilla army of the National Liberation Front. Galula found that other officers had been thinking along the same lines - and he was allowed to go and set up what was called "An Experimental Operational Zone". In a book Galula wrote about his Algerian experiment, that was going to become the bible of the Counterinsurgency movement, he said: "I felt I had learned enough about insurgencies, and I wanted to test certain theories I had formed on counterinsurgency warfare." Galula took a village that was in the centre of the insurgency and sent his men to live and work there among the population. The aim was to persuade the people of the village to turn away from the insurgents and thus rob them of their power. The way to do this, Galula said, was through psychological tactics - both by making the villagers feel that they would be safer with the French, but also through indoctrination into a new and modern way of thinking about the world. If his soldiers and civilian advisers could do this, Galula believed, then the villagers would realise that the real way forward to a better life was not through the insurgents and their vicious tactics, but through the European vision of a new, modern democratic community created amid the harsh mountains of Algeria. It was a highly idealistic vision - and in 1960 the BBC made a documentary about one of these experiments. It was a "protected village" high up in the Aures Mountains. Galula does not appear - but it is the area in which he was working and is clearly modelled on Galula's theories. The reporter is the brilliant James Mossman. He was deeply involved in reporting the new wars of liberation that were breaking out round the world - and was no natural supporter of the colonial powers. But he portrays the experiment sympathetically: "How deeply can the officers influence the minds of the young Algerians by these methods? The officers in charge of the new 'protected villages' make no secret of the fact that this is what they are trying to do. What started as a predominantly military-security operation has blossomed into a fully-blown social experiment" But at the end Mossman states bluntly "It's all too late" But there was another side to this Counterinsurgency theory. If you could persuade the local people to come over to your side - then that would leave the insurgents who lived among the people drastically weakened. And that meant you could destroy them. But to do that you had to identify the insurgents - and that meant getting information from your new "friends" the local villagers. But sometimes they didn't want to give that kind of information, possibly because they were frightened, or they might even be an insurgent themselves, just pretending to be a villager. And that led to the French soldiers finding ways to persuade the villagers to tell them who was an insurgent. It was called torture. Here is part of a Panorama film made only two years later in the same Aures Mountain region that revealed some of the horror that had been going on in other of the "protected villages" By 1962 the French President, de Gaulle had given Algeria its independence. The victorious FLN took power - and it's guerrilla army, the ALN, came out of the shadows, with a great slogan: Independence is Only a Step. Revolution is our Goal The Panorama film is a very weird piece of journalism. It treats the ALN like conquering heroes - and slaps an extraordinary piece of romantic music all over shots of them. But it then shows what it says is the reality of the protected camps and villages that the local population had been put in for "re-education". As the commentary says, the reality was very different from that shown by the French to TV and newspaper correspondents while the war was on. The film alleges that torture was used in the camps - and then it shows the revolutionaries unblocking an old well outside one of the villages and sending a young boy into the well to find out what is hidden down there. There was a terrible paradox at the heart of the theory of Counterinsurgency. As formulated by people like Galula, the theory said that the colonial powers had to imitate the tactics of the revolutionary insurgents they were fighting. They had to become like a mirror that copied Mao Zedong's revolutionary theories - but in reverse, so they could pull the people away from the insurgents. But what this also meant was that in effect the Europeans became copies of the insurgents - and that could so easily lead them to use some of the same terror tactics as their guerrilla enemy. The paradox was that while this probably led to less deaths than pointless conventional battles - it also brought torture and murder and a copy of the terrorist mind-set into the heart of the European colonial armies. This was expressed very powerfully in the film The Battle Of Algiers made in 1966 about the struggle against the insurgents in the Casbah in Algiers. They key figure is the French officer Lt Col Mathieu who comes in to separate out and destroy the FLN insurgents. This is the scene in the script of the film where he elegantly and rationally argues the case for this logic of Counterinsurgency. In the French military elite this ruthless extension of counterinsurgency was called "guerre revolutionaire" - or revolutionary war theory. And it captured the imagination of many of the leading officers fighting the war. But it was also going to have very strange consequences for France itself. When President de Gaulle decided to give independence to Algeria, many of the senior French army officers who had been fighting the insurgents were furious. They believed it was a complete betrayal of everything they had been fighting for, and also of the thousands of French Algerians living in Algeria. In their anger they set up their own clandestine organisation to try and stop de Gaulle. It was called the Organisation de L'Armee Secrete - the OAS - and among its leaders were some of the officers that had led the Counterinsurgency programme. But Galula himself was not among them. The OAS was a terrorist organisation that between 1961 and 1962 created an intensely violent campaign of bombings and assassinations in both Algeria and France. At one point they exploded hundreds of bombs a day, killing innocent people, to try and force the FLN to resume their terrorist attacks and thus justify the return of French control. They also tried to assassinate President de Gaulle five times. Historians who have studied the OAS have argued that this terror campaign had many of its roots in the "black ops" and techniques of subversion that had been developed by the French military in their Counterinsurgency campaign against the insurgents in the late 1950s - techniques that they had come to believe in deeply. One historian says that the descent of many of the French officers into... "..the OAS's terror campaign is inexplicable without their faith in the magical qualities of the counterinsurgency theory" What had begun as a reverse copy of Mao's revolutionary theories had now mutated into a form of revolutionary terror that was trying to bring down a major European political system. But David Galula had nothing to do with this horrific corruption of Counterinsurgency. Instead, in the early 1960s, he went to America to spread his idealistic vision of the theory among the US military elite. And the reason he was invited was because an ambitious young Senator had become fascinated with the whole notion of how to fight the spread of communism around the world in a new, revolutionary way. He was John F Kennedy. Counterinsurgency ideas had first reached America in the form of a best-selling novel. It was called The Ugly American and was published in 1958. It told the story of how communism was spreading through SE Asia - helped on its way by the stupid, arrogant behaviour of the Americans there. But the hero of the novel - an American engineer called Homer Atkins - behaves differently. He goes and works in local villages to help the local people develop and modernise. Then an American military officer points out that what Atkins is doing is exactly the same as Mao's revolutionary theories set out to do - "win the minds and the hearts" of the local people. The Ugly American was a runaway bestseller and was later made into a film starring Marlon Brando. Senator John Kennedy was gripped by The Ugly American. In 1960 he and five other opinion leaders bought a large advertisement in the New York Times saying that they had sent copies of the novel to every US senator because its message was so important. And on January 18th 1961 - two days before taking office as President - Kennedy set up the new Special Group, Counterinsurgency in the Pentagon - SGCI, led by a powerful General. But there was only one problem - it couldn't find any real Counterinsurgency experts in America. So David Galula was invited over by the American military as one of the few people who knew what the new President was on about - and had even written a book about it. And in April 1962 Galula was one of the main guests at a now legendary symposium on Counterinsurgency held by the RAND Corporation military think tank. All sorts of people were there - like Lt. Col. Frank Kitson who had led the British struggle against insurgents in Malaya, and the mysterious American Colonel Edward Lansdale who was involved in attempts to overthrow Castro in Cuba, and was fascinated by communist theories of revolutionary war. Galula was the star guest and he got up to speak first. To begin with he put forward his fundamental theory. "Revolutionary warfare requires a revolutionary approach on both sides in the struggle. Whereas in ordinary war the objective is to destroy the enemy and occupy his territory, the guerrilla's aim is to control the population. This, therefore, must be the aim of the counter-guerrilla as well" But then Galula put the boot in to the aspiring counter-insurgents. Whether it was due to his disenchantment with what had happened in Algeria is not clear - but Galula laid out the central problem for the counterinsurgents when they tried to mirror the communist revolutionaries - they didn't have a cause: "One basic difference between insurgency and counterinsurgency is that the insurgent starts out with nothing but a cause and grows to strength, while counterinsurgent often starts with everything but a cause and gradually declines in strength to the point of weakness" So the RAND corporation decided to find something equivalent to a cause, powerful enough to bring the villagers in SE Asia over to the American side. Up to this point RAND had been exclusively dealing with the tactics of nuclear warfare, but in the mid 60s it turned its attention to counterinsurgency - or what they started calling COIN. And very quickly there was a furious debate within the think tank. The traditionalists argued that you stuck with the Hearts and Minds approach - or what they now called HAM. But others said that this never worked because the Americans didn't have as powerful a vision to offer the peasants as the communist revolutionaries did. They didn't have a romantic picture of creating a new world. The solution, they said, was to fuse counterinsurgency with modern economic theory - above all the theory of the free market - and treat the villagers as "rational actors" in an economic system. You didn't offer them a vision, or a cause, instead you gave them "selective incentives" to co-operate with the government, plus disincentives to stop them resisting. One of the men behind this new approach was an economist at RAND called Charles Wolfe Jr. The new theory was called: "The Cost/Benefit-Coercion theory of Counterinsurgency" It still believed in Galula's theory of putting the local population into protected villages and making them feel safe. But it gave up on worrying about what was in the villagers heads and treated them instead as self-interested "rational actors" who would respond in more or less predictable ways to incentives - and to disincentives. It was best summarised in a later book written by another economist called Samuel Popkin all about the cost/benefit calculations of Vietnamese peasants. It was called "The Rational Peasant" In some ways the shift that happened in Counterinsurgency theory was a picture in microcosm of the much wider shift that was going to happen to all Western societies over the next thirty years. Politicians would give up on the idea that politics was about inspiring the people - and giving them a vision of changing the world. Instead the politicians would adopt the ideas, and the language, of economics, and turn to treating their population as individuals who could simply be incentivised and disincentivised by appealing to their self-interest. You didn't change society any longer - you managed it. But when this new hybrid theory of counterinsurgency was applied in South Vietnam in the 1960s it didn't work out the way it was intended. To begin with it led to absurdity. And then, just like in Algeria, it led to horror. Here is part of a film made in 1969 which brilliantly illustrates the absurdity. It is about a South Vietnamese village called Bin Hao - which was held up by the Americans as the model of a pacified village, an example of how their theory and its use of incentives was really working. But then the Americans discover that the village that their theory has created isn't at all what it appears to be. Their worries begin when many of the women become pregnant - yet there seems to be only old men in the village. And then they discover something much worse. ut, just as in Algeria, the counterinsurgency programme had its own logic that led to torture and murder. The aim of the protected villages and all the incentives was to separate the population from the insurgents. The next objective was to destroy the insurgents - and to do this the CIA set up what they called The Phoenix Programme. One of the men in charge was another RAND theorist called Robert Komer. He knew David Galula and had read his books, but he took a rather tougher approach which was summarised by his nick name - "Blowtorch Bob". What Komer and the others who ran the Phoenix programme did was set up camps to train Vietnamese militias - drawn from the rational peasants. Their job was going to be to root out and kill the communist insurgents. Following the counterinsurgency theory, the militias were direct copies of the communist cadres. But also - following the economic model - they were to be incentivised. They were given money for killing Vietcong, twenty pounds for a village official, thirty for a district officer. In a really good documentary made in the 1990s about the Phoenix Programme, Robert Komer appears. He is a great character - and he is absolutely blunt about what his aim was with the militias: "We would use the Vietcong techniques to beat them. They conducted a terror campaign, so I thought we had to conduct a counter-terror campaign to kill the VC assassins. And we did." Another of the architects of the Phoenix Programme, who is interviewed, was Nelson Brickham. He was a devotee of David Galula's ideas and he took Galula's books everywhere he went in South Vietnam. He claims in the film to have been "the conceptual father of the Phoenix Programme" - and says that it worked well. But others involved have now changed their mind. The film shows, with first hand testimony, how that counter-terror campaign ran out of control. Men who directed the campaign for the CIA say that in essence it led them to become terrorists themselves. - Adam Curtis

Adam Curtis - It Felt Like A Kiss

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Bananas, Wars and Rackets

Bisher ist es nirgendwo gelungen, historische Prozesse, die in Krieg, Genozid oder anderen Formen menschengemachter Katastrophen enden, so abzuschließen, dass diese Ereignisse als verarbeitet gelten können. Die Trauer, die Verwirrung, die Wut und andere Gefühle derer, die mit Kriegserfahrungen umzugehen haben, müssen sich wohl fiktionaler Wege der Verarbeitung bedienen. Kriegsfilme können nachträglich Motive konstruieren, individuelle Verantwortung im kollektiven Geschehen aufgehen lassen oder in Einzelschicksalen Identifikationsangebote für persönliche Beruhigungen schaffen. Was aber ist, wenn ein ganzer Zeitabschnitt cineastisch weder rekonstruiert, geschweige denn verarbeitet wurde? WEITERLESEN HIER

Remotely Piloted War

In the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greeted as if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles.
When the first American drone assassins burst onto the global stage early in the last decade, they caught most of us by surprise, especially because they seemed to come out of nowhere or from some wild sci-fi novel. Ever since, they’ve been touted in the media as the shiniest presents under the American Christmas tree of war, the perfect weapons to solve our problems when it comes to evildoers lurking in the global badlands.
And can you blame Americans for their love affair with the drone?  Who wouldn’t be wowed by the most technologically advanced, futuristic, no-pain-all-gain weapon around?
Here’s the thing, though: put drones in a more familiar context, skip the awestruck commentary, and they should have been eerily familiar.  If, for instance, they were car factories, they would seem so much less exotic to us.
Think about it: What does a drone do? Like a modern car factory, it replaces a pilot, a skilled job that takes significant training, with robotics and a degraded version of the same job outsourced elsewhere.  In this case, the “offshore” location that job headed for wasn’t China or Mexico, but a military base in the U.S., where a guy with a joystick, trained in a hurry and sitting at a computer monitor, is “piloting” that plane.  And given our experience with the hemorrhaging of good jobs from the U.S., who will be surprised to discover that, in 2011, the U.S. Air Force was already training more drone “pilots” than actual fighter and bomber pilots combined?
That’s one way drones are something other than the futuristic sci-fi wonders we imagine them to be.  But there’s another way that drones have been heading for the American “homeland” for four decades, and it has next to nothing to do with technology, advanced or otherwise.
In a sense, drone war might be thought of as the most natural form of war for the All Volunteer Military. To understand why that’s so, we need to head back to a crucial decision implemented just as the Vietnam war was ending.
Disarming the Amateurs, Demobilizing the Citizenry
It’s true that, in the wake of grinding wars that have also been debacles – the Afghan version of which has entered its 11th year — the U.S. military is in ratty shape. Its equipment needs refurbishing and its troops are worn down. The stress of endlessly repeated tours of duty in war zones, brain injuries and other wounds caused by the roadside bombs that have often replaced a visible enemy on the “battlefield,” suicide rates that can’t be staunched, rising sexual violence within the military, increasing crime rates around military bases, and all the other strains and pains of unending war have taken their toll.
Still, ours remains an intact, unrebellious, professional military. If you really want to see a force on its last legs, you need to leave the post-9/11 years behind and go back to the Vietnam era. In 1971, in Armed Forces Journal, Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., author of a definitive history of the Marine Corps, wrote of “widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917.”
The U.S. military in Vietnam and at bases in the U.S. and around world was essentially at the edge of rebellion. Disaffection with an increasingly unpopular war on the Asian mainland, rejected by ever more Americans and emphatically protested at home, had infected the military, which was, after all, made up significantly of draftees.
Desertion rates were rising, as was drug use. In the field, “search and evade” (a mocking, descriptive accurate replacement for “search and destroy”) operations were becoming commonplace. “Fraggings” — attacks on unpopular officers or NCOs — had doubled. (“Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.”) And according to Col. Heinl, there were then as many as 144 antiwar “underground newspapers” published by or aimed at soldiers. At the moment when he wrote, in fact, the antiwar movement in the U.S. was being spearheaded by a rising tide of disaffected Vietnam veterans speaking out against their war and the way they had fought it.
In this fashion, an American citizen’s army, a draft military, had reached its limits and was voting with its feet against an imperial war. This was democracy in action transferred to the battlefield and the military base. And it was deeply disturbing to the U.S. high command, which had, by then, lost faith in the future possibilities of a draft army. In fact, faced with ever more ill-disciplined troops, the military’s top commanders had clearly concluded: never again!
So on the very day the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, officially signaling the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam (though not quite its actual end), President Richard Nixon also signed a decree ending the draft. It was an admission of the obvious: war, American-style, as it had been practiced since World War II, had lost its hold on young minds.
There was no question that U.S. military and civilian leaders intended, at that moment, to sever war and war-making from an aroused citizenry. In that sense, they glimpsed something of the future they meant to shape, but even they couldn’t have guessed just where American war would be heading.  Army Chief of Staff General Creighton Abrams, for instance, actually thought he was curbing the future rashness of civilian leaders by — as Andrew Bacevich explained in his book The New American Militarism – “making the active army operationally dependent on the reserves.” In this way, no future president could commit the country to a significant war “without first taking the politically sensitive and economically costly step of calling up America’s ‘weekend warriors.’”
Abrams was wrong, of course, though he ensured that, decades hence, the reserves, too, would suffer the pain of disastrous wars once again fought on the Eurasian mainland. Still, whatever the generals and the civilian leaders didn’t know about the effects of their acts then, the founding of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) may have been the single most important decision made by Washington in the post-Vietnam era of the foreshortened American Century.
Today, few enough even remember that moment and far fewer have considered its import. Yet, historically speaking, that 1973 severing of war from the populace might be said to have ended an almost two-century-old democratic experiment in fusing the mobilized citizen and the mobilized state in wartime.  It had begun with the levée en masse during the French Revolution, which sent roused citizens to the front to save the republic and spread their democratic fervor abroad.  Behind them stood a mobilized population ready to sacrifice anything for the republic (and all too soon, of course, the empire).
It turned out, however, that the drafted citizen had his limits and so, almost 200 years later, another aroused citizenry and its soldiers, home front and war front, were to be pacified, to be put out to pasture, while the empire’s wars were to be left to the professionals.  An era was ending, even if no one noticed. (As a result, if you’re in the mood to indulge in irony, citizen’s war would be left to the guerrillas of the world, which in our era has largely meant to fundamentalist religious sects.)
Just calling in the professionals and ushering out the amateurs wasn’t enough, though, to make the decision truly momentous.  Another choice had to be married to it.  The debacle that was Vietnam — or what, as the 1970s progressed, began to be called “the Vietnam Syndrome” (as if the American people had been struck by some crippling psychic disease) — could have sent Washington, and so the nation, off on another course entirely.
The U.S. could have retreated, however partially, from the world to lick its wounds.  Instead, the country’s global stance as the “leader of the free world” and its role as self-appointed global policeman were never questioned, nor was the global military basing policy that underlay it.  In the midst of the Cold War, from Indonesia to Latin America, Japan to the Middle East, no diminution of U.S. imperial dreams was ever seriously considered.
The decision not to downsize its global military presence in the wake of Vietnam fused with the decision to create a military that would free Washington from worry about what the troops might think.  Soon enough, as Bacevich wrote, the new AVF would be made up of “highly trained, handsomely paid professionals who (assuming that the generals concur with the wishes of the political leadership) will go anywhere without question to do the bidding of the commander-in-chief.”  It would, in fact, open the way for a new kind of militarism at home and abroad.
The Arrival of the Warrior Corporation
In the wake of Vietnam, the wars ceased and, for a few years, war even fled American popular culture.  When it returned, the dogfights would be in outer space. (Think Star Wars.)  n the meantime, a kind of stunned silence, a feeling of defeat, descended on the American polity — but not for long. In the 1980s, the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, American-style war was carefully rebuilt, this time to new specifications.
Reagan himself declared Vietnam “a noble cause,” and a newly professionalized military, purged of malcontents and rebels, once again began invading small countries (Grenada, Panama).  At the same time, the Pentagon was investing thought and planning into how to put the media (blamed for defeat in Vietnam) in its rightful place and so give the public the war news it deserved.  In the process, reporters were first restrained from, then “pooled” in, and finally “embedded” in the war effort, while retired generals were sent into TV newsrooms like so many play-by-play analysts on Monday Night Football to narrate our wars as they were happening.  Meanwhile, the public was simply sidelined.
Year by year, war became an ever more American activity and yet grew ever more remote from most Americans. The democratic citizen with a free mind and the ability to rebel had been sent home, and then demobilized on that home front as well. As a result, despite the endless post-9/11 gab about honoring and supporting the troops, a mobilized “home front” sacrificing for those fighting in their name would become a relic of history in a country whose leaders had begun boasting of having the greatest military the world had ever seen.
It wasn’t, however, that no one was mobilizing. In the space vacated by the citizen, mobilization continued, just in a different fashion. Ever more mobilized, for instance, would be the powers of big science and the academy in the service of the Pentagon, the weapons makers, and the corporation.
Meanwhile, over the years, that “professional” army, that “all volunteer” force, began to change as well. From the 1990s on, in a way that would have been inconceivable for a draft army, it began to be privatized — fused, that is, into the corporate way of war and profit.
War would now be fought not for or by the citizen, but quite literally for and by Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, KBR, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and Blackwater (later Xe, even laterAcademi).  Meanwhile, that citizen was to shudder at the thought of our terrorist enemies and then go on with normal life as if nothing whatsoever were happening.  (“Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed,” wasGeorge W. Bush’s suggested response to the 9/11 attacks two weeks after they happened, with the “war on terror” already going on the books.)
Despite a paucity of real enemies of any substance, taxpayer dollars would pour into the coffers of the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, as well as a new mini-homeland-security-industrial complex and a burgeoning intelligence-industrial complex, at levels unknown in the Cold War years.  Lobbyists would be everywhere and the times would be the best, even when, in the war zones, things were going badly indeed.
Meanwhile, in those war zones, the Big Corporation would take over the humblest of soldierly roles — the peeling of potatoes, the cooking of meals, the building of bases and outposts, the delivery of mail — and it would take up the gun (and the bomb) as well.  Soon enough, even the dying would be outsourced to corporate hirees.  Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan would be flooded with tens of thousands of private contractors and hired guns, while military men trained in elite special operations units would find their big paydays by joining mercenary corporations doing similar work, often in the same war zones.
It was a remarkable racket. War and profit had long been connected in complicated ways, but seldom quite so straightforwardly. Now, win or lose on the battlefield, there would always be winners among the growing class of warrior corporations.
The All-Volunteer Force, pliant as a military should be, and backed by Madison Avenue to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars to insure that its ranks were full, would become ever more detached from most of American society.  It would, in fact, become ever more foreign (as in “foreign legion”) and ever more mercenary (think Hessians).  The intelligence services of the national security state would similarly outsource significant parts of their work to the private sector. According to Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post, by 2010, about 265,000 of the 854,000 people with top security clearances were private contractors and “close to 30% of the workforce in the intelligence agencies [was] contractors.”
No one seemed to notice, but a 1% version of American war was coming to fruition, unchecked by a draft Army, a skeptical Congress, or a democratic citizenry.  In fact, Americans, generally preoccupied with lives in which our wars played next to no part, paid little attention.
Remotely Piloted War
Although early drone technology was already being used over North Vietnam, it’s in another sense entirely that drones have been heading into America’s future since 1973.  There was an eerie logic to it: first came professional war, then privatized war, then mercenary and outsourced war — all of which made war ever more remote from most Americans.  Finally, both literally and figuratively, came remote war itself.
It couldn’t be more appropriate that the Air Force prefers you not call their latest wonder weapons “unmanned aerial vehicles,” or UAVs, anymore.  They would like you to use the label “remotely piloted aircraft” (RPA) instead.  And ever more remotely piloted that vehicle is to be, until – claim believers and enthusiasts — it will pilot itself, land itself, maneuver itself, and while in the air even chose its own targets.
In this sense, think of us as moving from the citizen’s army to a roboticized, and finally robot, military — to a military that is a foreign legion in the most basic sense.  In other words, we are moving toward an ever greater outsourcing of war to things that cannot protest, cannot vote with their feet (or wings), and for whom there is no “home front” or even a home at all.  In a sense, we are, as we have been since 1973, heading for a form of war without anyone, citizen or otherwise, in the picture — except those on the ground, enemy and civilian alike, who will die as usual.
Of course, it may never happen this way, in part because drones are anything but perfect or wonder weapons, and in part because corporate war fought by a thoroughly professional military turns out to be staggeringly expensive to the demobilized citizen, profligate in its waste, and — by the evidence of recent history — remarkably unsuccessful.  It also couldn’t be more remote from the idea of a democracy or a republic.
In a sense, the modern imperial age began hundreds of years ago with corporate war, when Dutch, British and other East India companies set sail, armed to the teeth, to subdue the world at a profit.  Perhaps corporate war will also prove the end point for that age, the perfect formula for the last global empire on its way down.


- Tom Engelhardt

Debt and Violence

In this essay I don’t want so much to delve into the philosophical questions as to lay out the historical groundwork, the rhythmic structure of history if imagined as a history of debt. Here my training as an anthropologist becomes particularly useful. One of the traditional roles of the economic anthropologist is to point out that the standard narrative set out in economic textbooks — the one we all take for granted,really, that once upon a time there was barter; that when this became too inconvenient, people invented money; that eventually, this lead to abstract systems of credit and debt, banking, and the New York Stock Exchange — is simply wrong. There is in fact no known example of a human society whose economy is based on barter of the ‘I’ll give you ten chickens for that cow’ variety. Most economies that don’t employ money — or anything that we’d identify as money, anyway — operate quite differently. They are, as French anthropologist Marcel Mauss famously put it, ‘gift economies’ where transactions are either based on principles of open-handed generosity, or, when calculation does take place, most often descend into competitions over who can give the most away. What I want to emphasise here, though, is what happens when money does first appear in something like it’s current form (basically, with the appearance of the state). Because here, it becomes apparent that not only do the economists get it wrong, they get it precisely backwards. In fact, virtual money comes first. Banking, tabs, and expense accounts existed for at least 2 thousand years before there was anything like coinage, or any other physical object that was regularly used to buy and sell things, anything that could be labeled ‘currency’.‘Money’ in that modern sense, a uniform commodity not only chosen to measure the value of other commodities, but actually stamped in uniform denominations and paid out every time anyone bought or sold something, was an Iron Age innovation — most likely, invented to pay mercenaries. Barter in the sense imagined by Adam Smith, the direct exchange of arrowheads for shoes or the like, can sometimes develop at the margins between societies, or as part of international trade, but it mainly tends to occur in places where people have become accustomed to the use of money and then that supply of money disappears. Examples of the latter include some parts of 18th and 19th century West Africa, or more recently, if more briefly, in Russia or Argentina. What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call ‘the economy’. What’s more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence — but also, the systematic threat of violence — maintained bythe contemporary state. Let me start with the institution of slavery, whose role, I think, is key. In most times and places, slavery is seen as a consequence of war. Sometimes most slaves actually are war captives, sometimes they are not, but almost invariably, war is seen as the foundation and justification of the institution. If you surrender in war, what you surrender is your life; your conqueror has the right to kill you, and often will. If he chooses not to, you literally owe your life to him, a debt conceived as absolute, infinite, irredeemable. He can in principle extract anything he wants, and all debts — obligations — you may owe to others (your friends, family, former political allegiances), or that others therefore owe you, are seen as being absolutely negated. Your debt to your owner is all that now exists. This sort of logic has at least two very interesting consequences, though they might be said to pull in rather contrary directions. First of all, as we all know, it is another typical — perhaps defining — feature of slavery that slaves can be bought or sold. In this case, absolute debt becomes (in another context, that of the market) no longer absolute — in fact, it can be precisely quantified. There is good reason to believe that it was precisely this operation that made it possible to create something like our contemporary form of money to begin with, since what anthropologists used to refer to as ‘primitive money’, the kind that one finds in stateless societies (Solomon Island feather money, Iroquois wampum), was mostly used to arrange marriages, resolve blood-feuds, and fiddle with other sorts of relations between people rather than to buy and sell commodities. For instance, if slavery is debt, then debt can lead to slavery. A Babylonian peasant might have paid a handy sum in silver to his wife’s parents to officialise the marriage, but he in no sense owned her. He certainly couldn’t buy or sell the mother of his children. But all that would change if he took out a loan. Were he to default, his creditors could first remove his sheep and furniture, then his house, fields and orchards, and, finally, take his wife, children, and even himself as debt peons until the matter was settled (which, as his resources vanished, of course became increasingly difficult to do.) Debt was the hinge that made it possible to imagine money in anything like the modern sense, and therefore, too, to produce what we like to call the market: an arena where anything can be bought and sold, because all objects are (like slaves) disembedded from their former social relations and exist only in relation to money. But at the same time the logic of debt as conquest can, as I mentioned, pull another way. Kings, throughout history, tend to be profoundly ambivalent towards allowing the logic of debt to get completely out of hand. This is not because they are hostile to markets. On the contrary, they normally encourage them, for the simple reason that governments find it inconvenient to levy everything they need (silks, chariot wheels, flamingo tongues, lapis lazuli) directly from their subject population; it’s much easier to encourage markets and then buy them. Early markets often followed armies or royal entourages, or formed near palaces or on the fringes of military posts. This actually helps explain more, rather puzzling behavior on the part of royal courts: after all, since kings usually controlled the gold and silver mines, what exactly was the point of stamping bits of the stuff with your face on it, dumping it on the civilian population, and then demanding they give it back to you again as taxes? It only makes sense if levying taxes was really a way to force everyone to acquire coins, so as to facilitate the rise of markets, since markets were convenient to have around. However, for our present purposes, the critical question is: how were these taxes justified? Why did subjects owe them, what debt were they discharging when they were paid? Here we return again to right of conquest. (Actually, in the ancient world, free citizens — whether in Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome — often did not have to pay direct taxes for this very reason, but for obvious reasons I’m simplifying here.) If kings claimed to hold the power of life and death over their subjects by right of conquest, then their subjects’ debts were, also, ultimately infinite; and also, at least in that context, their relations to one another, what they owed to one another, was unimportant; all that really existed was their relation to the king. This in turn explains why kings and emperors invariably tried to regulate the powers that masters had over slaves, and creditors over debtors. At the very least they would always insist, if they had the power, that the lives of war prisoners having once been spared, their masters could no longer kill them; that, in fact, only rulers could have arbitrary power over life and death. One’s ultimate debt was to the state; it was the only one that was truly unlimited, that could make absolute, cosmic, claims. The reason I stress this is because this logic is still with us. When we speak of a ‘society’ (French society, Jamaican society) we are really speaking of people organised by a single nation state. That is the tacit model, anyway. ‘Societies’ are really states, the logic of states is that of conquest, the logic of conquest is ultimately identical to that of slavery. True, in the hands of state apologists, this becomes transformed into a notion of a more benevolent ‘social debt’. Here there is a little story told, a kind of myth. We are all born with an infinite debt to the society that raised, nurtured, fed and clothed us, to those long dead who invented our language and traditions, to all those who made it possible for us to exist. In ancient times we thought we owed this to the gods (it was repaid in sacrifice — or, sacrifice was really just the payment of interest — ultimately, it was repaid by death). Later the debt was adopted by the state — itself a divine institution — with taxes substituted for sacrifice, and military service for one’s debt of life. Money is simply the concrete form of this social debt, the way that it is managed. Keynesians like this sort of logic. So do various strains of socialist, social democrats, even crypto-fascists like Auguste Comte (the first, as far as I am aware, to actually coin the phrase ‘social debt’). But the logic also runs through much of our common sense: consider for instance, the phrase, ‘to pay one’s debt to society’, or, ‘I felt I owed something to my country’, or, ‘I wanted to give something back.’ Always, in such cases, mutual rights and obligations, mutual commitments — the kind of relations that genuinely free people could make with one another — tend to be subsumed into a conception of ‘society’ where we are all equal only as absolute debtors before the (now invisible) figure of the King, who stands in for your mother, and by extension, humanity. What I am suggesting then is that while the claims of the impersonal market, and the claims of ‘society’, are often juxtaposed — and certainly have had a tendency to jockey back and forth in all sorts of practical ways — they are both ultimately founded on a very similar logic of violence. Neither is this a mere matter of historical origins that can be brushed away as inconsequential: neither states nor markets can exist without the constant threat of force. One might ask, then, what is the alternative?

- David Graeber

Psychology of the State

Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest primitive pulls which keeps together the herds of the different species of higher animals. Mankind is no exception. Our pugnacious evolutionary history has prev~nted the impulse from ever dying out. This gregarious impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform, to coalesce together, and is most powerful when the herd believes itself threatened with attack. Animals crowd together for protection, and men become most conscious of their collectivity at the threat of war. Consciousness of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength, which in turn arouses pugnacity and the battle is on. In civilized man, the gregarious impulse acts not only to produce concerted action for defense, but also to produce identity of opinion. Since thought is a form of behavior, the gregarious impulse floods up into its realms and demands that sense of uniform thought which wartime produces so successfully. And it is in this flooding ofthe conscious life of society that gregariousness works its havoc. For just as in modem societies the sex-instinct is enormously oversupplied for the requirements of human propagation, so the gregarious impulse is enormously over-supplied for the work ofprotection which it is called upon to perform. It would be quite enough if we were gregarious enough to enjoy the companionship of others, to be able to cooperate with them, and to feel a slight malaise at solitude. Unfortunately, however, this impulse is not content with these reasonable and healthful demands, but insists that like mindedness shall prevail everywhere, in all departments of life, so that all human progress, all novelty, and nonconformity must be carried against the resistance of this tyrannical herd-instinct which drives the individual into obedience and conformity with the majority. Even in the most modem and enlightened societies this impulse shows little sign of abating. As it is 9.riven byinexorable economic demand out of the sphere of utility, it seems to fasten itself ever more fiercely in the realm of feeling and opinion, so that conformity comes to be a thing aggressively desired and demanded. The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the more virulently because whenthe group is in motion or is taking any positive action, this feeling of being with and supported by the collective herd very greatly feeds that will to power, the nourishment of which the individual organism so constantly demands. You feel powerful by conforming, and you feel forlorn and helpless if you· are out of the crowd. While even if you do not get any access to power by thinking and feeling just as everybody else in your group does, you get at least the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing irresponsibility·ofprotection. Joining as it does to these very vigorous tendencies of the individual the pleasure in power and the pleasure of obedience-this gregarious impulse becomes irresistible in society. War stimulates it to the highest possible degree, sending the influence of its mysterious herd-current with its inflations ofpower and obedience to the farthest reaches of the society, to every individUal and little group that can possibly be affected. And it is these impulses which the State-the organization of the entire herd, the entire collectivity-is founded on and makes use of. There is, of course, in the feeling towards the State a large element of pure filial mysticism. The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one's desire backto the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for nothing that one's State is still thought of as Father or Motherland, that one's relation towards it is conceived in terms of family affection. The war has shown that nowhere under the shock ofdanger have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves again, as much in this country as anywhere. If we have not the intense Father-sense ofthe German who worships his Vaterland, at least in Uncle Sam we have a symbol ofprotecting, kindly authority, and in the many Mother-posters of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the -more tender functions ofwar service, the ruling organization is conceived in family terms. A people at war have become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naive faith in the all-wisdom and all-power ofthe adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort, and a certain influx ofpower. On most people the strain ofbeing an independent adult weighs heavily, and upon none more than those members of the significant classes who have bequeathed to thelll; or have assumed the responsibilities of governing. The State provides the convenientest ofsymbols under which these classes can retain all the actual pragmatic satisfaction ofgoverning, but can rid themselves of the psychic burden ofadulthood. They continue to direct industry and government and all the institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their own conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public,·they are turned from their selfish and predatory ways, and have .become loyal ..servants of society, or. something. greater than they-the State. The man who moves from the direction of a large business in New York to a post in the war management industrial service in Washington ..does not apparently alter very much his power or his administrative technique. But psychically, what a transformation has occurred! His is not now only the power but the glory! And his sense of satisfaction is directly proportional not to the genuine amount ofpersonal sacrifice that may be involved in the change but to the extent to which he retains his industrial prerogatives and sense of command. From members of this class a certain insuperable indignation arises if the change from private enterprise to State service involves any real loss of power and personal privilege. If there is to be any pragmatic sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the field ofhonor, in the traditionally acclaimed deaths by battle, in that detour to suicide, as Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime supplies satisfaction for this very real craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it gives for this regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father ofthe flock, the quasipersonal symbol ofthe strength ofthe herd, and the leader and determinant ofyour definite action and ideas. .The members of the working-classes, that portion at least which does not identify itselfwith the significant classes and seek to imitate it and rise to it, are notoriously less affected by the symbolism of the State, or, in other words, are less patriotic than the significant classes. For theirs is neither the power nor the gloiy. The State in wartime does not offer them the opportunity to regress, for, never having acquired social adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have been drilled and regimented, as by the industrial regime ofthe last century, they go out docilely enough to do battle for their State, but they are almost entirely without that filial sense and even without that herd-intellCtct sense which operates so powerfully among their "betters." They live habitually in an industrially serfdom, by which though nominally free, they are. in practice as a class bound to a system of a machine-production, the implements ofwhich they do now own,and in the distribution ofwhose product they have not the slightest voice, except what they can occasionally exert bya veiled;intimidation which draws slightly more of the product in their direction. From· such serfdom, military conscription is not so great a change. But into the military enterprise they go, not with those hurrahs of the significant classes whose instincts war so powerfully feeds,butwith the same apathy with which they· enter and continue in the industrial enterprise. From this point ofview, war can be called almost an upper-class sport. The novel interests and excitements it provides, the inflations ofpower, the satisfaction it gives to those very tenacious human impulses-·.gregariousness and parent-regression-endow it with all the qualities of a luxurious collective game which is felt intensely just in proportion to the sense of significant rule the person has in the class-division ofbis society. A country at war-particularly our own country at war~oes not act asa purely homogenous herd. The s~gnificant classes have all the herd-feeling·in all Its primitive intensity, so that this feeling does not flow freely without impediment throughout the entire nation. A modern country represents a long historical and social. process of disaggregation of the nerd. The .national at peace is not a group, it isa network of myriads of groups representing the cooperation and similar feeling. of menon.all-·sorts of planes and in all sorts ofhuman interests andenterprises.cIn.every modem industrial coUntry, there are parallel planes of economic· classes with divergent attitudes and institutions and interests-bourgeois and proletariat-.with their many subdivisions according to power. and function, and even their interweaving, such.as those more highly skilled workers who habitually· identify themselves with the owning and the significant classes and strive to raise themselves to the bourgeois level, imitating their cultural standards and manners. Then there are religious groups with a certain definite, though weakening sense of kinship, and there are the powerful ethnic groups which behave almost as cultural colonies in the New World, clinging tenaciously to language and historical tradition, though their herdishness is usually founded on cultural rather than State symbols. There are certain vague section al groups. All these small sects, political parties, classes, levels, interests, may act as foci for herd-feelings. They intersect and interweave, andthe same person may be a member of several different groups lying at different planes. Different occasions will set offhis herdfeeling in one direction or another. In a religious crisis he will be intensely conscious of the necessity that his sect-or sub-herd-may prevail; in a political campaign, that his party shall triumph. To the spread ofherd-feeling~ therefore, all these smaller herds offer resistance. To the spread ofthat herd-feeling which arises from the threat of war, and which would normally involve the entire nation, the only groups which make serious resistance are those, of course, which continue to identify themselves with the other nation from which they or their parents have come. In times of peace they are for all practical purposes citizens oftheir newcolijltry. They keep C\!jvetheir ethnic. traditions more as a luxury than anything. Irtdeed these traditions tend rapidly to die out except where they connect with some still unresolved nationalistic cause abroad, with some struggle for freedom, or some irredentism. If they are consciously opposed by a too invidious policy ofAmericanism, they tend to be strengthened. And in time ofwar, these ethnic elements which have any traditfonal.connection with the enemy, even though most of the individuals may have· little real sympathy with the enemy's cause, are naturally lukewarm to.the hard-feeling9fthe·nation with goes back to State ttaditionsmwh1~h they have no shart:,_~Butto the natives imbued with State...reeling, any such resistance or apa,~y .is intolerable.~_This herdfeeling,~ isnewly.. awakened cons,?ioust)ess of. the State, demands universality. The leaders o£the significant classes, .who feel most intensely this .State-compulsion, dem~d a on~. hun
- Randolph Bourne