Second Force Reconnaissance Commander Receives Bronze Star
Submitted by: MCB Camp Lejeune
Story Identification #: 20042683513
Story by Lance Cpl. Ruben D. Maestre
MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. (January 8, 2004) -- Since returning to Camp Lejeune from Operation Iraqi Freedom last year, San Diego native Lt. Col. James E. Reilly III, has presented the Bronze Star to Marines under his command for their courageous actions.
So, it was no surprise to many who serve with the commanding officer of 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company, II Marine Expeditionary Force, when he was awarded the Bronze Star with a combat ‘V’ device for his actions during OIF in an award ceremony here Jan. 9.
Reilly took time to thank and praise everyone involved who contributed to this effort.
“I am humbled and honored by the recognition,” said Reilly after receiving the award.
“I could not have done the things I had to do without being surrounded by the Marines of 2nd Force Reconnaissance,” he continued. “I received my energy from the Marines and Sailors around me.”
At the battle of An Nasiriyah during the early morning hours of March 23 last year, Reilly led his forward command element and two platoons from 2nd Force Reconnaissance into a “hasty route recon behind enemy lines,” according to the summary action report.
It was after evading and observing the enemy within An Nasiriyah for some time, that the enemy “initiated a coordinated, but pre-mature ambush,” the report read.
Upon receiving intense fire from an enemy armed with AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, Reilly and his men sprung into “well-rehearsed immediate action drills,” it continued.
“For the chaotic situation we encountered, everyone did their job superbly,” said Reilly.
His citation read that, “Reilly exposed himself to enemy fire by dismounting his vehicle and expertly engaging Iraqi forces, killing three enemy soldiers.”
According to Reilly, one tense moment came after disengaging the enemy and retracing the route back.
“We disengaged, and went back down the same route when we came upon a hastily built berm right in the middle of the road,” said Reilly.
It seemed as if the enemy was trying to set up for an ambush, he said, but that proved not to be the case.
Three days later, on March 26, with an impending attack by massing paramilitary forces, Reilly coordinated a hasty defense alongside other Marine units from Task Force Tarawa. Under his leadership the coordination and execution of these forces reduced the potential of friendly fire from occurring, the summary of action report stated.
Reilly also gave credit to the leadership of Task Force Tarawa for allowing greater flexibility to his combat force on the battlefield.
“The men were a highly disciplined, very motivated and close knit unit and Task Force Tarawa entrusted us to go out and get the job done,” Reilly said.
Other acts attributed to his command and battlefield performance were personally coordinating the evacuation of 32 wounded Marines through hostile terrain and coordinating the capture of two Ba’athist officials who were shooting civilians.
Reilly personally emphasized the important job of the Marines and Sailors who evacuated the wounded.
“When called upon for volunteers to go out and recover our wounded, the Marines I served with did so without hesitation,” explained Reilly.
The captured Ba’athists later admitted to “repeated abuses of an American prisoners of war held at the An Nasiriyah hospital,” the summary of action read.
That POW was Army Private Jessica Lynch, whose rescue was partially attributed to combat actions conducted by 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company under Reilly’s command.
“(Reilly) helped coordinate the forces rescuing Jessica Lynch,” said Brig. Gen. Richard Natonski, commanding general of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade who presented Reilly’s Bronze Star.
Throughout the presentation Reilly continued to attribute much of his accomplishments to the Marines under his command.
“I owe everything, including my life, to my Marines,” Reilly said.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
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Common Ground Common Sense > Issues that Affect Our Lives > U.S. Military Issues > U.S. Military Issues Archive
Hagee: Adaptable Tactics Helping to Defeat 'Thinking Enemy'
Submitted by: Headquarters Marine Corps Media
Story Identification #: 200569123936
Story by - By Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON (June 8, 2005) -- America's armed forces face a "thinking enemy" on the battlefield, and defeating it demands adaptable tactics and a fast application of lessons learned, the commandant of the Marine Corps said here today.
"We're going against a smart enemy. That's really important to remember," Gen. Michael W. Hagee said during an interview with the Pentagon Channel.
"We are also going against a very dedicated enemy, and sometimes we forget that," Hagee continued. "They believe just as strongly - I think incorrectly, but just as strongly - in what they are trying to achieve as we believe in what we are trying to achieve."
Keeping ahead of such a committed enemy requires more than just smarts, the general said. It requires adjusting tactics based on the threat, putting lessons learned into practice quickly, and entrusting junior- and mid-grade troops to make decisions.
The threat posed by improvised explosive devices demonstrates exactly what U.S. and coalition forces are up against, Hagee said.
"If we make a change in our tactics or our technology to counter what the enemy is doing with improvised explosive devices, based on current data, the enemy can respond to a change in our tactics within seven to 10 days and change their tactic," he said. "So this is a constant fight.
"Whenever you are going against a thinking enemy, you cannot always use one tactic, because he will respond to that," Hagee explained. "So we have to be able to change our techniques ... our tactics ... our training" to respond to this changing battlefield.
Similarly, Hagee said, it's important to pass on lessons being learned on the battlefield quickly so other servicemembers can benefit from them.
During the past 18 months, the Marine Corps has made big strides in collecting lessons learned in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa and presenting them to Marines preparing for deployment, he said. "We are collecting those lessons in real time, and literally, in a matter of days, we are integrating those lessons into our program of instruction," Hagee said.
The result, he said, is more fluid curriculum that better prepares Marines for what they'll face on the ground.
"A company or battalion going through the training right now will receive slightly different training than the company or battalion that went through just a couple of weeks ago," he said. "So when that battalion arrives on the battlefield, it is going to be better trained and have a better understanding of what the situation is, wherever they happen to be at that particular time."
The next step, he said, is determining which lessons learned have enough long-term consequence to be incorporated into Marine Corps doctrine. When appropriate, the Marine Corps "will change our doctrine on the fly to ensure that we have the best current training that we can provide the Marine, and that we are modifying our doctrine based on what is happening on the battlefield," he said.
As it adapts to the changing situation on the ground and passes on lessons learned there, the Marine Corps is focusing on ensuring its members have the education and training they need to carry out their mission.
"In order to be successful on today's battlefield, you have got to be smart," Hagee said. "We are up against a thinking enemy, and in order to outthink him, our individual Marines have to be smart."
They also have to be properly educated and trained so they can think on their feet and have confidence in their abilities, he said.
The Marine Corps has done a good job of educating its officers, but "can significantly improve how we educate our young enlisted Marines," Hagee said. Doing so, he said, will better prepare them to make critical decisions on the battlefield, particularly when they're operating independently and unable to seek advice from their higher-ups.
"That sergeant has to have the technology and the education to make those critical decisions that he is going to have to make on the battlefield," Hagee said. "He is probably not going to have time to call back to his platoon commander or company commander and say, 'What should I do now?' He is going to have to make the decision."
And the commandant said he recognizes the importance of many of the decisions these Marines -- whom he refers to as "the strategic corporal" or "the strategic sergeant" - will make. "In many cases, the decision that he or she makes is going to have strategic significance," he said.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
Submitted by: Headquarters Marine Corps Media
Story Identification #: 200569123936
Story by - By Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON (June 8, 2005) -- America's armed forces face a "thinking enemy" on the battlefield, and defeating it demands adaptable tactics and a fast application of lessons learned, the commandant of the Marine Corps said here today.
"We're going against a smart enemy. That's really important to remember," Gen. Michael W. Hagee said during an interview with the Pentagon Channel.
"We are also going against a very dedicated enemy, and sometimes we forget that," Hagee continued. "They believe just as strongly - I think incorrectly, but just as strongly - in what they are trying to achieve as we believe in what we are trying to achieve."
Keeping ahead of such a committed enemy requires more than just smarts, the general said. It requires adjusting tactics based on the threat, putting lessons learned into practice quickly, and entrusting junior- and mid-grade troops to make decisions.
The threat posed by improvised explosive devices demonstrates exactly what U.S. and coalition forces are up against, Hagee said.
"If we make a change in our tactics or our technology to counter what the enemy is doing with improvised explosive devices, based on current data, the enemy can respond to a change in our tactics within seven to 10 days and change their tactic," he said. "So this is a constant fight.
"Whenever you are going against a thinking enemy, you cannot always use one tactic, because he will respond to that," Hagee explained. "So we have to be able to change our techniques ... our tactics ... our training" to respond to this changing battlefield.
Similarly, Hagee said, it's important to pass on lessons being learned on the battlefield quickly so other servicemembers can benefit from them.
During the past 18 months, the Marine Corps has made big strides in collecting lessons learned in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa and presenting them to Marines preparing for deployment, he said. "We are collecting those lessons in real time, and literally, in a matter of days, we are integrating those lessons into our program of instruction," Hagee said.
The result, he said, is more fluid curriculum that better prepares Marines for what they'll face on the ground.
"A company or battalion going through the training right now will receive slightly different training than the company or battalion that went through just a couple of weeks ago," he said. "So when that battalion arrives on the battlefield, it is going to be better trained and have a better understanding of what the situation is, wherever they happen to be at that particular time."
The next step, he said, is determining which lessons learned have enough long-term consequence to be incorporated into Marine Corps doctrine. When appropriate, the Marine Corps "will change our doctrine on the fly to ensure that we have the best current training that we can provide the Marine, and that we are modifying our doctrine based on what is happening on the battlefield," he said.
As it adapts to the changing situation on the ground and passes on lessons learned there, the Marine Corps is focusing on ensuring its members have the education and training they need to carry out their mission.
"In order to be successful on today's battlefield, you have got to be smart," Hagee said. "We are up against a thinking enemy, and in order to outthink him, our individual Marines have to be smart."
They also have to be properly educated and trained so they can think on their feet and have confidence in their abilities, he said.
The Marine Corps has done a good job of educating its officers, but "can significantly improve how we educate our young enlisted Marines," Hagee said. Doing so, he said, will better prepare them to make critical decisions on the battlefield, particularly when they're operating independently and unable to seek advice from their higher-ups.
"That sergeant has to have the technology and the education to make those critical decisions that he is going to have to make on the battlefield," Hagee said. "He is probably not going to have time to call back to his platoon commander or company commander and say, 'What should I do now?' He is going to have to make the decision."
And the commandant said he recognizes the importance of many of the decisions these Marines -- whom he refers to as "the strategic corporal" or "the strategic sergeant" - will make. "In many cases, the decision that he or she makes is going to have strategic significance," he said.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
Marines fight enemy across western Iraq
Submitted by: 1st Marine Division
Story Identification #: 200442094220
Story by Gunnery Sgt. Mark Oliva
CAMP BLUE DIAMOND, Iraq (April 20, 2004) -- Marines from the 1st Marine Division engaged enemy forces across the entire Al Anbar Province last week.
Marines saw action against enemy forces in Fallujah, where the cordon of the city remains in effect and offensive operations are still suspended, to Husaybah, a town on the border with Syria.
Seven Marines, soldiers and sailors were killed in action in the past week.
Negotiations between Iraqi civic leaders and Coalition Provisional Authority members are ongoing to extend the unilateral suspension of offensive operations into a full-fledged truce. Marines maintain defensive positions in the city and sporadic firefights were reported.
Still, Marines, even at the highest echelons, expressed frustration with enemy forces who violate the agreements and continue the attacks.
"I don't forecast that this stalemate will go on for long," said Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commanding general of the 1st Marine Division to reporters in Fallujah. "It's hard to have a cease-fire when they maneuver against us, they fire at us."
Marines remain poised to resume their attacks against the enemy, should talks fail.
"We've got to be patient, but not too patient," Mattis added.
By early this week, a basic agreement for a lasting cease-fire was in the works. Still, Marines harbor doubts the enemy will live up to it.
"An agreement has been reached," said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commanding officer for 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, to reporters. "Whether or not that agreement holds is the million dollar question."
Marines witnessed events that demonstrated the enemy's determination to launch attacks from mosques and even use ambulances to transport weapons. Both are protected by Geneva Conventions accords from attacks, but Marines are authorized to target them once they are used for hostile purposes.
Terrorists were discovered to be hiding weapons in sacks stuffed with food and other humanitarian supplies April 14. In the joint operation, Marines and New Iraqi Army soldiers discovered armor piercing rounds, aiming sights for rockets and rifles hidden in bags of grain, rice, and tea. The man detained for transporting the weapons was wearing a poorly made fake Red Crescent uniform in an attempt to make the convoy look legitimate.
The same day, an enemy sniper fled the battlefield in an Iraqi ambulance. The next day, an Iraqi ambulance pulled up to a mosque in Fallujah and another building to unload weapons into both sites.
Enemy fighters shot at Marines from a mosque and a nearby building on Sunday. Marine M-1A1 tanks returned fire against the building, killing one enemy and another group of Marines returned fire at the mosque's minaret, silencing the gun there.
Marines blared loudspeaker messages into Fallujah, saying, "You are cowards for hiding behind women and children. Come out and fight," Byrne said. They also played heavy metal music, including AC/DC's "Shoot to Thrill."
Marines on the outskirts of Fallujah uncovered large caches of enemy weapons and captured scores of enemy forces. Marines found hundreds of AK-47 rifles, pistols and rocket-propelled grenades. Larger munitions such as anti-aircraft guns, rocket launchers and rockets as well as materials for making improvised explosive devices were also seized.
Marines continue to allow humanitarian aid, such as food, water and medical supplies to flow into the city.
Action against the enemy wasn't limited to Fallujah, though. Marines and soldiers from 1st Brigade Combat Team, serving under the Blue Diamond, raided hundreds of homes and buildings, netting hundreds of weapons and munitions and capturing several detainees suspected of carrying out attacks.
Marines also battled as many as 150 enemy forces Saturday in Husaybah, on Iraq's western border.
A daylong series of firefights began around 8 a.m. when a Marine patrol reported they were under fire by enemy forces wielding machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
Additional Marines, backed by helicopter close-air support, were dispatched to the city and soon came under fire by enemy equipped with rifles and RPGs. The enemy forces were operating from positions in the vicinity of the former Ba'ath Party headquarters in Husaybah.
Enemy casualties are estimated to be 25-30 dead and an unknown number of wounded. At least 60 enemy fighters were detained.
"I don't think they expected us to retaliate as hard as we did," said Lt. Col. Matthew A. Lopez, battalion commander for 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment to reporters there.
Enemy forces were observed setting up mortar positions. Women and children surrounded those positions, but it is unknown whether or not they were in those positions on their own free will.
Shots were also fired at medical helicopters carrying wounded Marines from the battlefield.
By Saturday evening, contact with the enemy dropped off significantly, however, fighting at the squad level was sporadic in the city. The city remains cordoned and Marines in that area continue to hunt down enemy forces.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
Submitted by: 1st Marine Division
Story Identification #: 200442094220
Story by Gunnery Sgt. Mark Oliva
CAMP BLUE DIAMOND, Iraq (April 20, 2004) -- Marines from the 1st Marine Division engaged enemy forces across the entire Al Anbar Province last week.
Marines saw action against enemy forces in Fallujah, where the cordon of the city remains in effect and offensive operations are still suspended, to Husaybah, a town on the border with Syria.
Seven Marines, soldiers and sailors were killed in action in the past week.
Negotiations between Iraqi civic leaders and Coalition Provisional Authority members are ongoing to extend the unilateral suspension of offensive operations into a full-fledged truce. Marines maintain defensive positions in the city and sporadic firefights were reported.
Still, Marines, even at the highest echelons, expressed frustration with enemy forces who violate the agreements and continue the attacks.
"I don't forecast that this stalemate will go on for long," said Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commanding general of the 1st Marine Division to reporters in Fallujah. "It's hard to have a cease-fire when they maneuver against us, they fire at us."
Marines remain poised to resume their attacks against the enemy, should talks fail.
"We've got to be patient, but not too patient," Mattis added.
By early this week, a basic agreement for a lasting cease-fire was in the works. Still, Marines harbor doubts the enemy will live up to it.
"An agreement has been reached," said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commanding officer for 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, to reporters. "Whether or not that agreement holds is the million dollar question."
Marines witnessed events that demonstrated the enemy's determination to launch attacks from mosques and even use ambulances to transport weapons. Both are protected by Geneva Conventions accords from attacks, but Marines are authorized to target them once they are used for hostile purposes.
Terrorists were discovered to be hiding weapons in sacks stuffed with food and other humanitarian supplies April 14. In the joint operation, Marines and New Iraqi Army soldiers discovered armor piercing rounds, aiming sights for rockets and rifles hidden in bags of grain, rice, and tea. The man detained for transporting the weapons was wearing a poorly made fake Red Crescent uniform in an attempt to make the convoy look legitimate.
The same day, an enemy sniper fled the battlefield in an Iraqi ambulance. The next day, an Iraqi ambulance pulled up to a mosque in Fallujah and another building to unload weapons into both sites.
Enemy fighters shot at Marines from a mosque and a nearby building on Sunday. Marine M-1A1 tanks returned fire against the building, killing one enemy and another group of Marines returned fire at the mosque's minaret, silencing the gun there.
Marines blared loudspeaker messages into Fallujah, saying, "You are cowards for hiding behind women and children. Come out and fight," Byrne said. They also played heavy metal music, including AC/DC's "Shoot to Thrill."
Marines on the outskirts of Fallujah uncovered large caches of enemy weapons and captured scores of enemy forces. Marines found hundreds of AK-47 rifles, pistols and rocket-propelled grenades. Larger munitions such as anti-aircraft guns, rocket launchers and rockets as well as materials for making improvised explosive devices were also seized.
Marines continue to allow humanitarian aid, such as food, water and medical supplies to flow into the city.
Action against the enemy wasn't limited to Fallujah, though. Marines and soldiers from 1st Brigade Combat Team, serving under the Blue Diamond, raided hundreds of homes and buildings, netting hundreds of weapons and munitions and capturing several detainees suspected of carrying out attacks.
Marines also battled as many as 150 enemy forces Saturday in Husaybah, on Iraq's western border.
A daylong series of firefights began around 8 a.m. when a Marine patrol reported they were under fire by enemy forces wielding machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
Additional Marines, backed by helicopter close-air support, were dispatched to the city and soon came under fire by enemy equipped with rifles and RPGs. The enemy forces were operating from positions in the vicinity of the former Ba'ath Party headquarters in Husaybah.
Enemy casualties are estimated to be 25-30 dead and an unknown number of wounded. At least 60 enemy fighters were detained.
"I don't think they expected us to retaliate as hard as we did," said Lt. Col. Matthew A. Lopez, battalion commander for 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment to reporters there.
Enemy forces were observed setting up mortar positions. Women and children surrounded those positions, but it is unknown whether or not they were in those positions on their own free will.
Shots were also fired at medical helicopters carrying wounded Marines from the battlefield.
By Saturday evening, contact with the enemy dropped off significantly, however, fighting at the squad level was sporadic in the city. The city remains cordoned and Marines in that area continue to hunt down enemy forces.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
TOWs ‘Supergrunts’ take on insurgents
Submitted by: II Marine Expeditionary Force (FWD)
Story Identification #: 200592155645
Story by Cpl. Ruben D. Maestre
AMARIYAH, Iraq (Sept. 20, 2005) -- The Marine convoy was moving fast down the dusty, black road toward Amariyah one recent afternoon when it came up on civilian vehicles speeding toward the group of humvees.
“Let them have it Murph,” yelled Sgt. Chris Serber, 28, team leader, as Cpl. Ryan Murphy, 27, heavy machine gunner, fired a flare from the top of their vehicle to clear a path.
These Marines, anti-tank gunners of Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided missiles, are one of the combat units leading the charge against insurgents here. With their wide range of military expertise in tactics and weaponry, the men of TOW Platoon, 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, combining infantry-style operations with vehicle mobility, consider themselves the original ‘Supergrunts.’
“We set up a combined arms platoon that integrates mounted and dismounted forces,” said 1st Lt. Sean D. Gobin, 30, of Richmond, R.I., platoon commander, TOW platoon. “This gives us [greater] mobility and flexibility when conducting operations against the enemy.”
Originally envisioned during the Cold War to counter large formations of enemy tanks, considerable changes to TOW platoon began in July 2004. The anti-tank gunners reoriented their unit based on the combat experiences from the initial phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom when the adversarial threat was coming less from armored vehicles and more from tactics used by irregular enemy units.
Currently, the platoon consists of two sections and is divided into three teams. Each team has a fire team of dismounted infantry Marines and at least one humvee, with heavy weapons, able to provide increased mobility and greater fire support.
Marines in the unit with specialized training, perform a wide variety of tasks ranging from field communications to combat engineer tasks. Those with the specialized training in turn train their team members, giving the platoon their multi-role versatility.
“We have learned to be diversified in multiple combat roles,” said Murphy, of Springfield, Vt. “This is a new kind of warfare against a new kind of enemy.”
Their abilities have produced results. Since deploying to Iraq in March, the platoon has knocked out at least three insurgent IED teams and a suspected mortar team transporting heavy weapons and ammunition.
“There are no frontlines here, but we are [one unit of Marines] that go and chase after them,” said Serber, of Gladstone, Mo., of their task in tracking insurgents. “We have adapted to the enemy’s guerrilla war tactics.”
The insurgents may attempt to strike again, but TOW platoon and Marine units similar to them will continue their pursuit of the enemy.
“The reason we were able to stop these guys was because of how the platoon is organized and improved tactics,” said Gobin of their success against insurgents.
Added Serber, “When we [were able to think] outside the box, those tactics have succeeded.”
EDITOR’S NOTE
Please feel free to publish this story or any of the accompanying photos. If used, please give credit to the writer/photographer, and contact us at: cepaowo@cemnf-wiraq.usmc.mil so we can update our records.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
Submitted by: II Marine Expeditionary Force (FWD)
Story Identification #: 200592155645
Story by Cpl. Ruben D. Maestre
AMARIYAH, Iraq (Sept. 20, 2005) -- The Marine convoy was moving fast down the dusty, black road toward Amariyah one recent afternoon when it came up on civilian vehicles speeding toward the group of humvees.
“Let them have it Murph,” yelled Sgt. Chris Serber, 28, team leader, as Cpl. Ryan Murphy, 27, heavy machine gunner, fired a flare from the top of their vehicle to clear a path.
These Marines, anti-tank gunners of Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided missiles, are one of the combat units leading the charge against insurgents here. With their wide range of military expertise in tactics and weaponry, the men of TOW Platoon, 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, combining infantry-style operations with vehicle mobility, consider themselves the original ‘Supergrunts.’
“We set up a combined arms platoon that integrates mounted and dismounted forces,” said 1st Lt. Sean D. Gobin, 30, of Richmond, R.I., platoon commander, TOW platoon. “This gives us [greater] mobility and flexibility when conducting operations against the enemy.”
Originally envisioned during the Cold War to counter large formations of enemy tanks, considerable changes to TOW platoon began in July 2004. The anti-tank gunners reoriented their unit based on the combat experiences from the initial phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom when the adversarial threat was coming less from armored vehicles and more from tactics used by irregular enemy units.
Currently, the platoon consists of two sections and is divided into three teams. Each team has a fire team of dismounted infantry Marines and at least one humvee, with heavy weapons, able to provide increased mobility and greater fire support.
Marines in the unit with specialized training, perform a wide variety of tasks ranging from field communications to combat engineer tasks. Those with the specialized training in turn train their team members, giving the platoon their multi-role versatility.
“We have learned to be diversified in multiple combat roles,” said Murphy, of Springfield, Vt. “This is a new kind of warfare against a new kind of enemy.”
Their abilities have produced results. Since deploying to Iraq in March, the platoon has knocked out at least three insurgent IED teams and a suspected mortar team transporting heavy weapons and ammunition.
“There are no frontlines here, but we are [one unit of Marines] that go and chase after them,” said Serber, of Gladstone, Mo., of their task in tracking insurgents. “We have adapted to the enemy’s guerrilla war tactics.”
The insurgents may attempt to strike again, but TOW platoon and Marine units similar to them will continue their pursuit of the enemy.
“The reason we were able to stop these guys was because of how the platoon is organized and improved tactics,” said Gobin of their success against insurgents.
Added Serber, “When we [were able to think] outside the box, those tactics have succeeded.”
EDITOR’S NOTE
Please feel free to publish this story or any of the accompanying photos. If used, please give credit to the writer/photographer, and contact us at: cepaowo@cemnf-wiraq.usmc.mil so we can update our records.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
Texan honored as hero, friend to the end
Submitted by: MCB Camp Pendleton
Story Identification #: 200584104338
Story by Sgt. Monroe F. Seigle
MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (Aug. 4, 2005) -- When Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin was growing up in the heart of Texas, he would put up a fight when anyone messed with the people he considered his friends or family.
Similarly, when insurgents on a rooftop threatened the security of his fellow Marines in Iraq, the warm-hearted Texan threw caution to the wind and entered the line of fire — ultimately fighting to his death and distinction as a certifiable Marine Corps hero.
The hard-charging machine gunner from 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, was posthumously award- ed the Silver Star July 22 in Amarillo, Texas. The award was presented to the Marine’s father, Doug Austin, by Sgt. Justin Rettenberger, 53 Area guard chief for the 1st Marine Divis-ion. Rettenberger was present on April 26, 2004, during the firefight in which Austin gave his life. He helped carry him out of the firefight after he sustained his fatal wounds.
“I will always remember Austin as a hero,” Rettenberger said. “He is the poster boy of Marine hero. The sacrifice he made enabled the other Marines to go home.
“Even as he died, he told me not to worry about him and to keep shooting at the enemy.”
The day after Austin passed away, his hometown of Sun Ray, Texas, put all flags at half-mast in honor of the fallen Marine.
When his father was presented with the Silver Star — the military’s third-highest award for battlefield valor — 14 months later, the Veterans of Foreign Wars set up a color guard ceremony. Sgt. Maj. William Skiles initially planned to present the medal, but decided to pass the honor to Rettenberger.
“I was Lance Cpl. Austin’s first sergeant for eight months,” said Skiles, now the top enlistedman at Medium Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 267. “That Marine was a real motivator and he enjoyed life. I felt that it was appropriate for (Rettenberger) to be the one to hand that Marine’s father the Silver Star.”
Skiles said one of the best parts of the ceremony was seeing the mother and father get some closure after losing their son.
According to his award citation, based on battlefield accounts, Austin’s platoon secured and occupied two buildings in enemy-occupied territory. Austin positioned his machine-gun team on the rooftop of the northernmost building. The platoon bolstered its defense and searched for enemy personnel.
At around 11 a.m., a “numerically superior” enemy force attacked Austin’s position from three directions.
Approximately 4,000 rounds of enemy machine-gun and small-arms fire — plus no less than 30 rocket-propelled grenades — rained down on the platoon for 15 minutes, the citation said.
The enemy fighters assaulted to within 20 meters of Austin’s platoon, threw hand grenades and sprayed AK-47 fire, according to the account.
During the hailstorm, Austin discovered many of his comrades had been injured. He whisked them into the building to ensure their medical treatment, the citation said.
Next, he rallied able-bodied comrades: “We’ve got to get back upon the roof and get on that gun (240G machine gun),” he said, according to the award ciation.
Austin, along with other Marines in his company, rushed to the rooftop defensive position, braving small-arms and rocket- propelled grenade fire the whole way. Austin led the way. When he reached the rooftop, he withdrew a hand grenade from his fighting vest and prepared to throw it, according to the account.
He changed positions to get a better look, exposing himself to intense enemy machine-gun fire. Several enemy bullets struck Austin in the chest, the citation said.
Despite his wounds, Austin threw his hand grenade. The resulting explosion disjointed the enemy and allowed the platoon to regain the upper hand, the citation said.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Jason Duty, who now instructs corpsmen in Great Lakes, Ill., was the first to administer medical attention to the mortally wounded Marine.
“All I could do was bandage him up and get him to the hospital as fast as I could,” Duty said. “He died in the back of the vehicle we were in. It was hard as hell for me to watch him die, and I do not care what anyone says, he is a hero and one of the best Marines I have ever met.”
Although painful for Austin’s mother to have lost her son, she said she understands the sacrifice he made and why he made it.
“I will always remember his loyalty and zest for life,” De’on Miller said. “I am so proud of him. I can say, ‘Why can’t it have been someone else instead of my son,’ but I know that what my son did saved some lives; and he gave me the best 21 years of my life, so I will thank God every day for the ones that he gave me.”
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
Submitted by: MCB Camp Pendleton
Story Identification #: 200584104338
Story by Sgt. Monroe F. Seigle
MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (Aug. 4, 2005) -- When Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin was growing up in the heart of Texas, he would put up a fight when anyone messed with the people he considered his friends or family.
Similarly, when insurgents on a rooftop threatened the security of his fellow Marines in Iraq, the warm-hearted Texan threw caution to the wind and entered the line of fire — ultimately fighting to his death and distinction as a certifiable Marine Corps hero.
The hard-charging machine gunner from 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, was posthumously award- ed the Silver Star July 22 in Amarillo, Texas. The award was presented to the Marine’s father, Doug Austin, by Sgt. Justin Rettenberger, 53 Area guard chief for the 1st Marine Divis-ion. Rettenberger was present on April 26, 2004, during the firefight in which Austin gave his life. He helped carry him out of the firefight after he sustained his fatal wounds.
“I will always remember Austin as a hero,” Rettenberger said. “He is the poster boy of Marine hero. The sacrifice he made enabled the other Marines to go home.
“Even as he died, he told me not to worry about him and to keep shooting at the enemy.”
The day after Austin passed away, his hometown of Sun Ray, Texas, put all flags at half-mast in honor of the fallen Marine.
When his father was presented with the Silver Star — the military’s third-highest award for battlefield valor — 14 months later, the Veterans of Foreign Wars set up a color guard ceremony. Sgt. Maj. William Skiles initially planned to present the medal, but decided to pass the honor to Rettenberger.
“I was Lance Cpl. Austin’s first sergeant for eight months,” said Skiles, now the top enlistedman at Medium Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 267. “That Marine was a real motivator and he enjoyed life. I felt that it was appropriate for (Rettenberger) to be the one to hand that Marine’s father the Silver Star.”
Skiles said one of the best parts of the ceremony was seeing the mother and father get some closure after losing their son.
According to his award citation, based on battlefield accounts, Austin’s platoon secured and occupied two buildings in enemy-occupied territory. Austin positioned his machine-gun team on the rooftop of the northernmost building. The platoon bolstered its defense and searched for enemy personnel.
At around 11 a.m., a “numerically superior” enemy force attacked Austin’s position from three directions.
Approximately 4,000 rounds of enemy machine-gun and small-arms fire — plus no less than 30 rocket-propelled grenades — rained down on the platoon for 15 minutes, the citation said.
The enemy fighters assaulted to within 20 meters of Austin’s platoon, threw hand grenades and sprayed AK-47 fire, according to the account.
During the hailstorm, Austin discovered many of his comrades had been injured. He whisked them into the building to ensure their medical treatment, the citation said.
Next, he rallied able-bodied comrades: “We’ve got to get back upon the roof and get on that gun (240G machine gun),” he said, according to the award ciation.
Austin, along with other Marines in his company, rushed to the rooftop defensive position, braving small-arms and rocket- propelled grenade fire the whole way. Austin led the way. When he reached the rooftop, he withdrew a hand grenade from his fighting vest and prepared to throw it, according to the account.
He changed positions to get a better look, exposing himself to intense enemy machine-gun fire. Several enemy bullets struck Austin in the chest, the citation said.
Despite his wounds, Austin threw his hand grenade. The resulting explosion disjointed the enemy and allowed the platoon to regain the upper hand, the citation said.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Jason Duty, who now instructs corpsmen in Great Lakes, Ill., was the first to administer medical attention to the mortally wounded Marine.
“All I could do was bandage him up and get him to the hospital as fast as I could,” Duty said. “He died in the back of the vehicle we were in. It was hard as hell for me to watch him die, and I do not care what anyone says, he is a hero and one of the best Marines I have ever met.”
Although painful for Austin’s mother to have lost her son, she said she understands the sacrifice he made and why he made it.
“I will always remember his loyalty and zest for life,” De’on Miller said. “I am so proud of him. I can say, ‘Why can’t it have been someone else instead of my son,’ but I know that what my son did saved some lives; and he gave me the best 21 years of my life, so I will thank God every day for the ones that he gave me.”
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
Tuskegee Airmen visit New River
Submitted by: MCAS New River
Story Identification #: 20013217531
Story by Sgt. Bobbie Bryant
MARINE CORPS AIR STATION NEW RIVER, JACKSONVILLE, N.C. (March 14, 2001) --
Members of Wilson V. Eagleson Chapter of Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. made a visit to New River during Camp Johnson's celebration of Black History Month Feb. 27 and 28.
The famed Airmen visited the Air Station to view Marine Light/Attack Helicopter Squadron-269 and Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron-263's aircraft Feb 28. Dr. John Driver, a World War II Army Air Corps pilot, said he enjoyed the opportunity to see the modern aircraft. Tuskegee Airman Norris J. Washington had one word about his visit to New River. "Wonderful," said Washington. "This certainly brought back memories. It's a real pleasure to be around any aircraft."
Feburary 27th, the guest speaker and spokesperson for the Tuskegee Airmen, Leonard "Hawk" Hunter of Raleigh, N.C., along with other members, spoke during an open discussion aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune about what it was like during their service and the challenges they faced.
"It is important that the young Marines and sailors know the story of the Tuskegee Airmen because back then blacks were not allowed in the Marine Corps, and the Tuskegee Airmen were instrumental in the desegregation of the armed services in 1948," Hunter said.
According to a 1998 Tuskegee News article, "When bomber crews were chosen to fly deadly missions deep inside Germany, there was just one request from the pilots and crew: 'Let us have the Tuskegee Airmen flying with us.'"
The Airmen, flying fighter planes, protected fully-loaded, slow-flying bombers. The bomber pilots requested the Tuskegee Airmen because they knew how to fly, protect and blow the German fighter planes out of the sky, according to the article.
The Tuskegee Airmen, nicknamed ''Lonely Eagles,'' overcame the "separate but equal" conditions that the US Army sanctioned to become one of the most highly-respected and honored fighter groups.
The men of the 99th Fighter Group completed 1,578 missions, destroyed more than 260 enemy aircraft, sank one enemy destroyer and destroyed numerous enemy installations.
Also, the men of the 332nd Fighter Group never lost a bomber to enemy fighters while escorting 15 Air Force bombing missions. This earned the respect of American bomber crews who later called the airmen "Red-Tailed Angels." The Germans also called the men "Schwartze Vogelmenschen," or "Black Airmen," the article stated.
The Tuskegee Airmen received 95 Distinguished Flying Crosses, as well as Legions of Merit, Silver Stars, Purple Hearts, the French Croix De Guerre and the Red Star of Yugoslavia for their exploits. The struggles of this nation's forefathers have brought about change for black men and women in the military, according to Hunter.
"There have been many changes since I first enlisted. An important change is the way that blacks can be promoted now. I was in for 23 years and was promoted to E-6. Today you see two-star generals, colonels and chiefs. For black men and women, those ranks were unheard of when I was in," Hunter continued.
Today, members of the Tuskegee Airmen travel to different schools and events to inform youth about the struggles and accomplishments of black servicemembers who paved the way so other black Americans could become effective military leaders and combat veterans.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
Submitted by: MCAS New River
Story Identification #: 20013217531
Story by Sgt. Bobbie Bryant
MARINE CORPS AIR STATION NEW RIVER, JACKSONVILLE, N.C. (March 14, 2001) --
Members of Wilson V. Eagleson Chapter of Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. made a visit to New River during Camp Johnson's celebration of Black History Month Feb. 27 and 28.
The famed Airmen visited the Air Station to view Marine Light/Attack Helicopter Squadron-269 and Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron-263's aircraft Feb 28. Dr. John Driver, a World War II Army Air Corps pilot, said he enjoyed the opportunity to see the modern aircraft. Tuskegee Airman Norris J. Washington had one word about his visit to New River. "Wonderful," said Washington. "This certainly brought back memories. It's a real pleasure to be around any aircraft."
Feburary 27th, the guest speaker and spokesperson for the Tuskegee Airmen, Leonard "Hawk" Hunter of Raleigh, N.C., along with other members, spoke during an open discussion aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune about what it was like during their service and the challenges they faced.
"It is important that the young Marines and sailors know the story of the Tuskegee Airmen because back then blacks were not allowed in the Marine Corps, and the Tuskegee Airmen were instrumental in the desegregation of the armed services in 1948," Hunter said.
According to a 1998 Tuskegee News article, "When bomber crews were chosen to fly deadly missions deep inside Germany, there was just one request from the pilots and crew: 'Let us have the Tuskegee Airmen flying with us.'"
The Airmen, flying fighter planes, protected fully-loaded, slow-flying bombers. The bomber pilots requested the Tuskegee Airmen because they knew how to fly, protect and blow the German fighter planes out of the sky, according to the article.
The Tuskegee Airmen, nicknamed ''Lonely Eagles,'' overcame the "separate but equal" conditions that the US Army sanctioned to become one of the most highly-respected and honored fighter groups.
The men of the 99th Fighter Group completed 1,578 missions, destroyed more than 260 enemy aircraft, sank one enemy destroyer and destroyed numerous enemy installations.
Also, the men of the 332nd Fighter Group never lost a bomber to enemy fighters while escorting 15 Air Force bombing missions. This earned the respect of American bomber crews who later called the airmen "Red-Tailed Angels." The Germans also called the men "Schwartze Vogelmenschen," or "Black Airmen," the article stated.
The Tuskegee Airmen received 95 Distinguished Flying Crosses, as well as Legions of Merit, Silver Stars, Purple Hearts, the French Croix De Guerre and the Red Star of Yugoslavia for their exploits. The struggles of this nation's forefathers have brought about change for black men and women in the military, according to Hunter.
"There have been many changes since I first enlisted. An important change is the way that blacks can be promoted now. I was in for 23 years and was promoted to E-6. Today you see two-star generals, colonels and chiefs. For black men and women, those ranks were unheard of when I was in," Hunter continued.
Today, members of the Tuskegee Airmen travel to different schools and events to inform youth about the struggles and accomplishments of black servicemembers who paved the way so other black Americans could become effective military leaders and combat veterans.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ghlight=2,enemy
Silver Star awarded to Marine for actions in Iraq
Submitted by: 31st MEU
Story Identification #: 2005699476
Story by Cpl. Will Lathrop
CAMP HANSEN, OKINAWA, Japan (June 9, 2005) -- The Silver Star was awarded to 1st Lt. Thomas E. Cogan, executive officer for Company E, Battalion Landing Team, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, June 9 by Lt. Gen. Robert R. Blackman, commanding general, III Marine Expeditionary Force, during an early morning ceremony held at the camp's West Chapel.
Cogan, a Philadelphia native, was presented the award for actions during Operation Iraqi Freedom in Ramadi, Iraq, while serving as the platoon commander, 3rd Platoon of Echo Co. during April of last year.
On April 6, 2004, 2nd Platoon was ambushed by enemy forces while moving to reinforce a heavily engaged unit. With total disregard for his personal safety, Cogan led his platoon across a fire-swept field and directed fire. Though caught in the crossfire, he exposed himself to direct fire in order to cross an open field and position himself to direct fires on the enemy. His actions enabled the company command element to move to safety. After consolidating his platoon, Cogan led his men through a fierce, three-hour, house-to-house assault that destroyed remaining enemy forces in his zone of action.
Blackman spoke to the Marines attending the ceremony about the award, hailing Cogan’s deeds on the battlefield as great leadership under fire.
“Lieutenant Cogan displayed great tactical skill in a combat environment, leading his Marines and pursuing the enemy,” Blackman said.
Cogan also spoke, giving a few short and humble words about his accomplishment, thanking those in attendance for their presence, but mostly attributing the award to his Marines who where involved in the action.
“I’m sure, at times, my Marines were wondering ‘What is this guy thinking?’” Cogan said. “But they never hesitated, and it’s because of their hard work and willingness that we were able to push through.”
The Silver Star is the nation’s third-highest award, after the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross, respectively.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...hlight=2,silver
Submitted by: 31st MEU
Story Identification #: 2005699476
Story by Cpl. Will Lathrop
CAMP HANSEN, OKINAWA, Japan (June 9, 2005) -- The Silver Star was awarded to 1st Lt. Thomas E. Cogan, executive officer for Company E, Battalion Landing Team, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, June 9 by Lt. Gen. Robert R. Blackman, commanding general, III Marine Expeditionary Force, during an early morning ceremony held at the camp's West Chapel.
Cogan, a Philadelphia native, was presented the award for actions during Operation Iraqi Freedom in Ramadi, Iraq, while serving as the platoon commander, 3rd Platoon of Echo Co. during April of last year.
On April 6, 2004, 2nd Platoon was ambushed by enemy forces while moving to reinforce a heavily engaged unit. With total disregard for his personal safety, Cogan led his platoon across a fire-swept field and directed fire. Though caught in the crossfire, he exposed himself to direct fire in order to cross an open field and position himself to direct fires on the enemy. His actions enabled the company command element to move to safety. After consolidating his platoon, Cogan led his men through a fierce, three-hour, house-to-house assault that destroyed remaining enemy forces in his zone of action.
Blackman spoke to the Marines attending the ceremony about the award, hailing Cogan’s deeds on the battlefield as great leadership under fire.
“Lieutenant Cogan displayed great tactical skill in a combat environment, leading his Marines and pursuing the enemy,” Blackman said.
Cogan also spoke, giving a few short and humble words about his accomplishment, thanking those in attendance for their presence, but mostly attributing the award to his Marines who where involved in the action.
“I’m sure, at times, my Marines were wondering ‘What is this guy thinking?’” Cogan said. “But they never hesitated, and it’s because of their hard work and willingness that we were able to push through.”
The Silver Star is the nation’s third-highest award, after the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross, respectively.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...hlight=2,silver
Los Angeles local earns Silver Star in Iraq
Submitted by: II Marine Expeditionary Force
Story Identification #: 200581016620
Story by - II Marine Expeditionary Force
MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. (Aug. 10, 2005) -- Cpl. Danny S. Santos, a rifleman with the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (Anti-Terrorism) and a native of south-central Los Angeles, received a Silver Star Aug. 10 from Lt. Gen. James F. Amos, commanding general of II Marine Expeditionary Force, for his actions in Operation Iraqi Freedom April 2004.
The Silver Star is the nation’s third-highest award, after the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross, respectively.
Amos noted the significance of the award in his presentation.
“In all my years in the Marine Corps, I have pinned on a lot of medals and decorations, but this is the first Silver Star. I want to make sure everyone understands how significant this is,” he said, “this is extreme heroism.”
Santos was then part of 3d Battalion, Regimental Combat Team 7, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. On April 17, 2004 during a battalion attack against militia forces, the lead element of Kilo Company was attacked from several enemy strong points located in two story houses.
Santos’ point man was wounded and exposed to enemy fire. Exposing himself to enemy fire, Santos’ ran to the wounded Marine and dragged him to safety. Santos continued the fight, leading his squad against the positions, destroying one position while exposed to enemy fire.
In the course of the fight, Santos sustained wounds to his shoulder and stomach, but refused medical attention until his men were properly treated.
“Everyone from 3/7 deserves this,” said Santos, who was soft-spoken during the ceremony. “I was only able to do it because of the people who were with me.”
Santos’ company commander at the time, Capt. Trent A. Gibson, spoke on his behalf to let the audience know of his heroism.
“No one tore up more than him,” said Gibson.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...hlight=2,silver
Submitted by: II Marine Expeditionary Force
Story Identification #: 200581016620
Story by - II Marine Expeditionary Force
MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. (Aug. 10, 2005) -- Cpl. Danny S. Santos, a rifleman with the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (Anti-Terrorism) and a native of south-central Los Angeles, received a Silver Star Aug. 10 from Lt. Gen. James F. Amos, commanding general of II Marine Expeditionary Force, for his actions in Operation Iraqi Freedom April 2004.
The Silver Star is the nation’s third-highest award, after the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross, respectively.
Amos noted the significance of the award in his presentation.
“In all my years in the Marine Corps, I have pinned on a lot of medals and decorations, but this is the first Silver Star. I want to make sure everyone understands how significant this is,” he said, “this is extreme heroism.”
Santos was then part of 3d Battalion, Regimental Combat Team 7, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. On April 17, 2004 during a battalion attack against militia forces, the lead element of Kilo Company was attacked from several enemy strong points located in two story houses.
Santos’ point man was wounded and exposed to enemy fire. Exposing himself to enemy fire, Santos’ ran to the wounded Marine and dragged him to safety. Santos continued the fight, leading his squad against the positions, destroying one position while exposed to enemy fire.
In the course of the fight, Santos sustained wounds to his shoulder and stomach, but refused medical attention until his men were properly treated.
“Everyone from 3/7 deserves this,” said Santos, who was soft-spoken during the ceremony. “I was only able to do it because of the people who were with me.”
Santos’ company commander at the time, Capt. Trent A. Gibson, spoke on his behalf to let the audience know of his heroism.
“No one tore up more than him,” said Gibson.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...hlight=2,silver
Rochester, N.Y. Marine, receives Navy Cross
Submitted by: MCB Camp Pendleton
Story Identification #: 200456162723
Story by Cpl. Jeremy Vought
MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (May 6, 2004) -- Marine Capt. Brian R. Chontosh received the Navy Cross Medal from the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, during an awards ceremony Thursday at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Training Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Three other Marines received medals for valor at the same ceremony.
Chontosh, 29, from Rochester, N.Y. , received the naval service's second highest award for extraordinary heroism while serving as Combined Anti-Armor Platoon Commander, Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom March 25, 2003. The Medal of Honor is the highest military award.
While leading his platoon north on Highway 1 toward Ad Diwaniyah, Chontosh's platoon moved into a coordinated ambush of mortars, rocket propelled grenades and automatic weapons fire. With coalitions tanks blocking the road ahead, he realized his platoon was caught in a kill zone.
He had his driver move the vehicle through a breach along his flank, where he was immediately taken under fire from an entrenched machine gun. Without hesitation, Chontosh ordered the driver to advanced directly at the enemy position enabling his .50 caliber machine gunner to silence the enemy.
He then directed his driver into the enemy trench, where he exited his vehicle and began to clear the trench with an M16A2 service rifle and 9 millimeter pistol. His ammunition depleted, Chontosh, with complete disregard for his safety, twice picked up discarded enemy rifles and continued his ferocious attack.
When a Marine following him found an enemy rocket propelled grenade launcher, Chontosh used it to destroy yet another group of enemy soldiers.
When his audacious attack ended, he had cleared over 200 meters of the enemy trench, killing more than 20 enemy soldiers and wounding several others.
"They are the reflection of the Marine Corps type who's service to the Marine Corps and country is held above their own safety and lives," said Gen. Hagee, commenting on the four Marines who received medals during the ceremony. "I'm proud to be here awarding the second highest and third highest awards for bravery to these great Marines."
"These four Marines are a reflection of every Marine and sailor in this great battalion," said Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, Sgt. Maj. John L. Estrada.
"I was just doing my job, I did the same thing every other Marine would have done, it was just a passion and love for my Marines, the experience put a lot into perspective," said Chontosh.
In effect since April 1917, and established by an Act of Congress on Feb. 4, 1919, the Navy Cross may be awarded to any person who, while serving with the Navy or Marine Corps, distinguishes himself/herself in action by extraordinary heroism not justifying an award of the Medal of Honor.
The action must take place under one of three circumstances: while engaged in action against an enemy of the United States; while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or, while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict in which the United States is not a belligerent party.
To earn a Navy Cross the act to be commended must be performed in the presence of great danger or at great personal risk and must be performed in such a manner as to render the individual highly conspicuous among others of equal grade, rate, experience, or position of responsibility.
More than 6,000 Navy Crosses have been awarded since World War I.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...00?OpenDocument
Submitted by: MCB Camp Pendleton
Story Identification #: 200456162723
Story by Cpl. Jeremy Vought
MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (May 6, 2004) -- Marine Capt. Brian R. Chontosh received the Navy Cross Medal from the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, during an awards ceremony Thursday at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Training Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Three other Marines received medals for valor at the same ceremony.
Chontosh, 29, from Rochester, N.Y. , received the naval service's second highest award for extraordinary heroism while serving as Combined Anti-Armor Platoon Commander, Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom March 25, 2003. The Medal of Honor is the highest military award.
While leading his platoon north on Highway 1 toward Ad Diwaniyah, Chontosh's platoon moved into a coordinated ambush of mortars, rocket propelled grenades and automatic weapons fire. With coalitions tanks blocking the road ahead, he realized his platoon was caught in a kill zone.
He had his driver move the vehicle through a breach along his flank, where he was immediately taken under fire from an entrenched machine gun. Without hesitation, Chontosh ordered the driver to advanced directly at the enemy position enabling his .50 caliber machine gunner to silence the enemy.
He then directed his driver into the enemy trench, where he exited his vehicle and began to clear the trench with an M16A2 service rifle and 9 millimeter pistol. His ammunition depleted, Chontosh, with complete disregard for his safety, twice picked up discarded enemy rifles and continued his ferocious attack.
When a Marine following him found an enemy rocket propelled grenade launcher, Chontosh used it to destroy yet another group of enemy soldiers.
When his audacious attack ended, he had cleared over 200 meters of the enemy trench, killing more than 20 enemy soldiers and wounding several others.
"They are the reflection of the Marine Corps type who's service to the Marine Corps and country is held above their own safety and lives," said Gen. Hagee, commenting on the four Marines who received medals during the ceremony. "I'm proud to be here awarding the second highest and third highest awards for bravery to these great Marines."
"These four Marines are a reflection of every Marine and sailor in this great battalion," said Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, Sgt. Maj. John L. Estrada.
"I was just doing my job, I did the same thing every other Marine would have done, it was just a passion and love for my Marines, the experience put a lot into perspective," said Chontosh.
In effect since April 1917, and established by an Act of Congress on Feb. 4, 1919, the Navy Cross may be awarded to any person who, while serving with the Navy or Marine Corps, distinguishes himself/herself in action by extraordinary heroism not justifying an award of the Medal of Honor.
The action must take place under one of three circumstances: while engaged in action against an enemy of the United States; while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or, while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict in which the United States is not a belligerent party.
To earn a Navy Cross the act to be commended must be performed in the presence of great danger or at great personal risk and must be performed in such a manner as to render the individual highly conspicuous among others of equal grade, rate, experience, or position of responsibility.
More than 6,000 Navy Crosses have been awarded since World War I.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...00?OpenDocument
The legend of Gunnery Sgt. Basilone
Submitted by: HQBn Henderson Hall
Story Identification #: 20043982830
Story by Cpl. Clinton Firstbrook
ARLINGTON, Va. (March 5, 2004) -- For more than 60 years Marines have heard about the legendary acts of Gunnery Sgt. John "Manila" Basilone.
In the steaming jungles of Guadalcanal, two sections of heavy .30-caliber machine guns at the Tenaru River were in charge of defending a narrow pass to Henderson Airfield in the Solomon Islands. Suddenly, Japanese forces attacked their position. Vastly out numbered, the Marines held their ground and fought valiantly to check the savage and determined assault.
Suddenly one of the gun crews was knocked out. Disregarding his own life, a Marine lifted his 90 pounds of weaponry and raced 200 yards to the silenced gun pit and started firing. Enemy soldiers attacked to his rear. He cut them down with his Colt .45 pistol. Short of shells, he dashed 200 yards amid a stream of bullets to an ammunition dump and returned with an armload of ammo for his gunners. This Marine battled his way through hostile lines running back and forth between gun pits clearing jams and re-supplying the other Marines with ammo. Flares lit up more swarms of grenade-tossing attackers. The Marines' hands started blistering from the heat of his machine gun, but still he kept shooting.
At dawn, reinforcements found this Marine resting his head at the edge of his pit. The line had held. Nearly 100 sprawled enemy dead were around his cut-off outpost. At least 38 enemy dead were credited to this Marine, many killed at arms length. The day was Oct. 24, 1942 and his name was Gunnery Sgt. Basilone. For his actions he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Upon returning to the United States, this Raritan, N.J. native traveled across the country on a war bond tour that prompted $1.4 million in pledges. He met Hollywood starlets and his picture even made the cover of Life magazine.
The Marine Corps offered to make him an officer and let him spend the rest of the war in Washington, but he reportedly turned them down stating, "I'm a plain soldier, and I want to stay one."
After his war bond tour, Gunnery Sgt. Basilone requested to be reassigned to a gunner unit with the 27th Marines. He could have continued to sell war bonds or he could have even stayed back in the states. But this man instead chose to live his life as a Marine.
So he said farewell to his new wife, Lena Riggi, and joined the Fifth Division. Staying behind, he told buddies, would be "like being a museum piece." And it wouldn't seem right, he said, "if the Marines made a landing on the Manila waterfront and 'Manila John' wasn't among them."
On February 19, 1945, Basilone was again in action on the black sands of Iwo Jima on Red Beach II. Enemy gunfire pinned down his platoon. Everyone, that is, but Basilone, who walked straight up, kicking butts and yelling, "Get off the beach! Move out," he yelled at the gunners just behind, hunkered low and straining under the heavy loads of weapons and ammunition amid the blistering fire. Minutes later an enemy artillery round exploded, killing Gunnery Sgt. Basilone and four other members from his platoon. Immediately before, he had single-handedly destroyed a Japanese blockhouse, allowing his unit to capture an airfield. On his outstretched left arm was a tattoo that read "Death before Dishonor." He was 27 years old.
After World War II, his body was reburied with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery and he was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross. A life-size bronze statue depicting him in battle dress and cradling a machine gun now watches over his hometown of Raritan.
Gunnery Sgt. Basilone, the man whom Gen. Douglas MacArthur called "a one-man army," became the only man in the history of the United States awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Navy Cross, and the Purple Heart.
John Basilone has been remembered in a variety of ways for his service and supreme sacrifice. In 1949 a destroyer, the USS Basilone was commissioned. The New Jersey Turnpike Bridge across the Raritan River is named in his honor, as are numerous American Legion and Marine Corps League Posts. Interstate 5 outside of Camp Pendleton has been renamed the John Basilone Memorial Highway. A tribute to the war hero started in 1981 with "Basilone Day" and continues to be celebrated annually in Raritan, N.J. on the last weekend in September.
However, John Basilone never cared much for the fame that accompanied his Medal of Honor. The parades, the newsreel appearances, the starlets who hung on his arm; he would much rather, he insisted, be just a "plain Marine" like his buddies who were still out in the Pacific. He told his brother after joining the Marines that, "Without his Corps, his life meant nothing."
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...d8?OpenDocument
Submitted by: HQBn Henderson Hall
Story Identification #: 20043982830
Story by Cpl. Clinton Firstbrook
ARLINGTON, Va. (March 5, 2004) -- For more than 60 years Marines have heard about the legendary acts of Gunnery Sgt. John "Manila" Basilone.
In the steaming jungles of Guadalcanal, two sections of heavy .30-caliber machine guns at the Tenaru River were in charge of defending a narrow pass to Henderson Airfield in the Solomon Islands. Suddenly, Japanese forces attacked their position. Vastly out numbered, the Marines held their ground and fought valiantly to check the savage and determined assault.
Suddenly one of the gun crews was knocked out. Disregarding his own life, a Marine lifted his 90 pounds of weaponry and raced 200 yards to the silenced gun pit and started firing. Enemy soldiers attacked to his rear. He cut them down with his Colt .45 pistol. Short of shells, he dashed 200 yards amid a stream of bullets to an ammunition dump and returned with an armload of ammo for his gunners. This Marine battled his way through hostile lines running back and forth between gun pits clearing jams and re-supplying the other Marines with ammo. Flares lit up more swarms of grenade-tossing attackers. The Marines' hands started blistering from the heat of his machine gun, but still he kept shooting.
At dawn, reinforcements found this Marine resting his head at the edge of his pit. The line had held. Nearly 100 sprawled enemy dead were around his cut-off outpost. At least 38 enemy dead were credited to this Marine, many killed at arms length. The day was Oct. 24, 1942 and his name was Gunnery Sgt. Basilone. For his actions he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Upon returning to the United States, this Raritan, N.J. native traveled across the country on a war bond tour that prompted $1.4 million in pledges. He met Hollywood starlets and his picture even made the cover of Life magazine.
The Marine Corps offered to make him an officer and let him spend the rest of the war in Washington, but he reportedly turned them down stating, "I'm a plain soldier, and I want to stay one."
After his war bond tour, Gunnery Sgt. Basilone requested to be reassigned to a gunner unit with the 27th Marines. He could have continued to sell war bonds or he could have even stayed back in the states. But this man instead chose to live his life as a Marine.
So he said farewell to his new wife, Lena Riggi, and joined the Fifth Division. Staying behind, he told buddies, would be "like being a museum piece." And it wouldn't seem right, he said, "if the Marines made a landing on the Manila waterfront and 'Manila John' wasn't among them."
On February 19, 1945, Basilone was again in action on the black sands of Iwo Jima on Red Beach II. Enemy gunfire pinned down his platoon. Everyone, that is, but Basilone, who walked straight up, kicking butts and yelling, "Get off the beach! Move out," he yelled at the gunners just behind, hunkered low and straining under the heavy loads of weapons and ammunition amid the blistering fire. Minutes later an enemy artillery round exploded, killing Gunnery Sgt. Basilone and four other members from his platoon. Immediately before, he had single-handedly destroyed a Japanese blockhouse, allowing his unit to capture an airfield. On his outstretched left arm was a tattoo that read "Death before Dishonor." He was 27 years old.
After World War II, his body was reburied with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery and he was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross. A life-size bronze statue depicting him in battle dress and cradling a machine gun now watches over his hometown of Raritan.
Gunnery Sgt. Basilone, the man whom Gen. Douglas MacArthur called "a one-man army," became the only man in the history of the United States awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Navy Cross, and the Purple Heart.
John Basilone has been remembered in a variety of ways for his service and supreme sacrifice. In 1949 a destroyer, the USS Basilone was commissioned. The New Jersey Turnpike Bridge across the Raritan River is named in his honor, as are numerous American Legion and Marine Corps League Posts. Interstate 5 outside of Camp Pendleton has been renamed the John Basilone Memorial Highway. A tribute to the war hero started in 1981 with "Basilone Day" and continues to be celebrated annually in Raritan, N.J. on the last weekend in September.
However, John Basilone never cared much for the fame that accompanied his Medal of Honor. The parades, the newsreel appearances, the starlets who hung on his arm; he would much rather, he insisted, be just a "plain Marine" like his buddies who were still out in the Pacific. He told his brother after joining the Marines that, "Without his Corps, his life meant nothing."
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...d8?OpenDocument
You know ghost we used to have a saying that ten percent never get's the word, I guess you fit right in proving that. Get yourself up to speed with what has happened in the past 30 years.
Thirty years ago, on May 7, 1975, the Vietnam War Era officially ended. Though that day signaled a cutoff date to qualify for original era benefits, it was in many ways only the beginning of a fight for assistance that had not even been contemplated.
Sub-divided by both tangible and symbolic milestones of the era, this chronology provides an easy reference for recalling the relevant highlights of the times. Many of the home front battles for veterans rights would continue well into the 1990s.
The Vietnam Era began Aug. 5, 1964, (Feb. 28, 1961, for veterans who served in-country) and ended May 7, 1975, by presidential proclamation. Some 9 million Americans--3.4 million in the Southeast Asia Theater of operations--served on active duty over that decade. Those who actually served in the war zone amounted to only 8% of draft-age males during the era. They are, indeed, a select minority of the so-called "Vietnam Generation."
Education: GI Bill of Rights
Mar 3, 1966: Veterans Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966 (P.L. 89-358). Originally provides one month (later 1? ) of schooling for each of month of active duty. A single vet receives $100 per month. It must be used within 8 years of discharge (later extended to 10 years).
Aug 31, 1967: Omnibus Veterans Bill (P.L. 90-77). Provides new benefits for Vietnam vets, broadens GI Bill and increases monthly stipend to $130.
April 1970: Amendments to the 1966 Act. President Nixon signs, increasing the monthly stipend by more than one-third, from $130 to $175.
Oct 24, 1972: Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1972 (P.L. 92-540). Raises the monthly stipend from $175 to $220 per month.
Dec 3, 1974: GI Bill Increase. Congress passes--over President Ford's veto--a 22.7% increase in educational benefits from $220 to $270 per month, retroactive to Sept. 1.
Oct 15, 1976: Veterans Education & Employment Assistance Act (P.L. 94-502). Increases the educational allowance by 8% (to $292), adds 9 months of assistance and extends the 10-year delimiting period in some cases.
Nov 23, 1977: GI Bill Improvement Act of 1977 (P.L. 95-202). Increases monthly stipend to $310 and mandates VA to conduct a study of its vocational rehab program.
Oct 17, 1984: Veterans Rehabilitation & Education Amendments of 1980 (P.L. 96-466). Enables vets with service-connected disabilities to be more independent in their living arrangements. Stipend increases to $327 (1980), $342 (1981) and $376 (1984).
Dec 31, 1989: Vietnam Era GI Bill Expires. 6.8 million era vets used Bill for education/training (4.3 million at colleges).
Employment
Oct 15, 1970: Jobs for Veterans Committee. Created by President Nixon, this massive PR drive spearheaded by the National Alliance for Businessmen bolsters awareness among employers of the need to hire veterans.
1971: Emergency Employment Act. Unemployment among Vietnam vets (age 20-29) peaks at 11% in March 1971. Lasting until 1973, this act provides government jobs to 75,000 vets.
Oct 15, 1976: Veterans Education & Employment Assistance Act of 1976. Increases subsistence allowance for disabled vets participating in vocational rehabilitation programs.
Jun 5, 1979: Veterans Preference. A Supreme Court decision upholds its constitutionality.
Dec 1981: Veterans Employment & Training Service. Created under the Department of Labor to coordinate vet programs at the policy-making level.
Aug 15, 1983: Emergency Veterans Job Training Act of 1983 (P.L. 98-77). Offers monetary incentives to employers who hire unemployed Korean and Vietnam War vets.
Mar 22, 1991: Veterans Readjustment Appointment Authority (P.L. 102-16). Allows vets to bypass the normal competitive hiring process and be hired directly for certain jobs.
Insurance & Rehabilitation
Sep 29, 1965: Uniformed Services-Group Life Insurance Act of 1965 (P.L. 89-214). Establishes the Servicemen's Group Life Insurance program.
1971: Veterans Mortgage Life Insurance Act of 1971. Provides for severely disabled vets who receive grants for specially adapted housing.
Mar 29, 1973: Cash Bonuses. At war's end, 10 states offer in amounts ranging from $120 to $750: Conn., Del., Ill., La., Mass., N.D., Pa., S.D. (disabled only), Vt. and Wash.
Sep 26, 1973: Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (P.L. 93-112). Provides vocational rehab services for the handicapped.
Dec 3, 1974: Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 (P.L. 93-508). Renews the provisions of the 1962 Veterans Benefits Act, which authorized peacetime vocational rehabilitation services.
Psychological Counseling
Jun 13, 1979: Veterans Health Care Amendments (P.L. 96-22). After five legislative attempts, it provides for the establishment of a readjustment counseling program, making eligible those vets who request help within two years of discharge. First centers open in Van Nuys, Calif., and Burlington, Vt., that November. The Vet Center concept was conceived largely by VA clinical social worker Shad Meshad, a Vietnam vet. Designed to expire Sept. 30, 1981. Today, there are 206 Vet Centers.
Nov 3, 1981: Veterans Health Care Training & Small Business Loan Act (P.L. 97-72). Extends for 3 years (through Sept. 30, 1984) the period in which a Vietnam vet may initially request psychological counseling.
Nov 21, 1983: Veterans Administration Health Programs Amendments (P.L. 98-160). Attached to the VA omnibus bill, they include a provision that makes a vet eligible for counseling for life.
Dec 3, 1985: VA Health Care Amendments (P.L. 99-166). Creates pilot program expanding Vet Center services to include employment, substance abuse and benefits counseling (later permanent).
1989: National Center for PTSD. VA creates with headquarters at White River Junction, Vt. By fall 2004, 161,028 Vietnam vets were receiving compensation for PTSD.
Agent Orange
Mar 23, 1978: National Issue. Agent Orange, the primary herbicide used for defoliating jungle cover for the enemy in Vietnam, becomes the center of national attention after the airing of a Chicago CBS affiliate documentary on the subject.
August 1978: Agent Orange Registry. Provides VA medical examinations for vets to identify potential claimants. By February 2005, 371,307 Vietnam vets, or 14% of those who served on the ground, were registered.
Dec 31, 1978: Agent Orange Victims International. Founded by vet Paul Reutershan shortly before his death from cancer. Vets Frank McCarthy and Jimmy Sparrow take over using VFW Post 10013 in Stamford, Conn., as the core of AOVI.
Dec 20, 1979: Veterans Health Programs Extension & Improvement Act (P.L. 96-151). Directs VA to conduct a study of the long-term health effects of exposure to dioxins.
Nov 3, 1981: Veterans Health Care Training & Small Business Loan Act (P.L. 97-72). Entitles a vet exposed to dioxins to hospital care.
November 1982: Proposed Agent Orange Legislation. VFW endorses Rep. Tom Daschle's (D-S.D.) bill after polling its membership. It dies in the Senate.
May 7, 1984: Agent Orange Lawsuit. A $180 million compensation fund for claimants is agreed to by chemical companies (first claimant check is not mailed until March 1989).
Oct 24, 1984: Veterans Dioxin & Radiation Exposure Compensation Standards Act of 1984 (P.L. 98-542). Codifies the reasonable doubt standard and provides interim disability benefits to atomic and Vietnam vets.
Nov 11, 1988: American Legion Study. Releases the results of its study begun Oct. 15, 1983. It concludes that thousands of Vietnam vets were "heavily exposed" to dioxins.
Mar 29, 1990: Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. VA grants presumptive service connection for the first time for an Agent Orange-related disease (and soft-tissue sarcomas May 19).
Feb 6, 1991: Agent Orange Act of 1991 (P.L. 102-4). Provides for service connection for disabilities resulting from exposure to herbicides in Vietnam.
Jul 27, 1993: Diseases Added. VA adds Hodgkin's disease and a liver disease to the presumptive disability list. On Sept. 27, VA recognizes three respiratory cancers (lung, larynx, trachea) and a bone marrow cancer for compensation. By 2004, 12 diseases are listed, the most recent being a type of leukemia.
Sep 26, 1996: Agent Orange Benefits Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-204). Provides monetary, health and vocational assistance to any Vietnam vet's child who has birth defects. Marks the first time that children of U.S. servicemen receive compensation for health problems related to war. Effective Oct. 1, 1997.
Mar 12, 1999: Korea DMZ Service. VA's Board of Appeals awards full disability benefits to the first DMZ duty (1966-69) vet suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
May 8, 2001: Diabetes Added. The Federal Register
publishes VA's final benefits' rules for vets with Type 2.
Prisoners of War/Missing in Action
May 9, 1970: Voices in Vital America. Based in southern California and formed by college students, VIVA launches its POW bracelet of remembrance campaign.
May 28, 1970: National League of Families of American Prisoners & Missing in Southeast Asia. Incorporated by family members to demand humane treatment and return of POWs.
1977: Woodcock Commission. Declares that no live Americans exist in Southeast Asia.
Memorial Day, 1984: Vietnam Unknown. A Vietnam serviceman is entombed in the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery. But on May 13, 1998, his remains are disinterred and ultimately identified as those of Air Force 1st Lt. Michael Blassie. Instead of remains, the Vietnam crypt is left empty with only an inscription--"Honoring and Keeping Faith with America's Missing Serviceman"--dedicated Sept. 17, 1999.
1987: Special Emissary to Vietnam. Gen. John Vessey.
1991: Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs formed.
1991: McCain Amendment. Requires the Pentagon to declassify all information related to Vietnam POWs and MIAs.
1992: Joint Task Force-Full Accounting. Replaces Joint Casualty Resolution Center (created in 1973).
1993: Department of Defense POW/MIA Office. Created to unite four disparate Pentagon offices.
Oct. 1, 2003: JTF-FA and the Central Identification Laboratory (Hawaii) merge to form the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).
2005: Accounting Effort. The remains of 747 Americans had been identified as of March 2005.
Recognition & Remembrance
Dec 4, 1961: Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal. Recognizes service in Vietnam (July 1, 1958 to July 3, 1965).
Jul 9, 1965: Vietnam Service Medal. Awarded for service in the war zone between July 4, 1965, and ultimately March 28, 1973.
Apr 15, 1967: Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Founded by six vets after the anti-war demonstration in New York City to protest U.S. involvement. VVAW self-destructs after the Revolutionary Communist Party infiltrates it in 1973.
Jul 10, 1969: Seattle Parade. Returning vets (814) of the 3rd Bn., 60th Inf., 9th Inf. Div., march downtown.
May 22, 1971: Vietnam Veterans Peace & Brotherhood Chapel. Created by Dr. Victor Westphall and located in Angel Fire, N.M., it is the first "national" Vietnam memorial.
Mar 31, 1973: New York City Parade. 1,000 Vietnam servicemen lead the "Home With Honor" parade up Broadway as 150,000 spectators look on. Organized by Raymond W. Gimmler,
chairman of "We Supported Our Men in Vietnam, Inc." and member of VFW Post 3350 in East Rockaway, N.Y.
Mar 29, 1974: Vietnam Veterans Day. Proclaimed by President Nixon.
1975: Gallup Poll. In a landmark survey, 51% of Vietnam vets say the war was just; 49% say unjust.
Mar 2, 1977: VA Director. Georgian Max Cleland is sworn as the first Vietnam vet director of the Veterans Administration.
Jan 1978: Vietnam Veterans of America. Founded by Robert Muller and Stuart Feldman, a non-vet lobbyist, in Washington, D.C. Originally called the Vietnam Veterans Coalition, then quickly changed to the Council on Vietnam Veterans before becoming VVA in summer 1979. Now 40,000 members.
1978: Vietnam Era Veterans in Congress. Created as an official caucus to press legislative issues.
May 28 - Jun 3, 1979: Vietnam Era Veterans Week. Congress proclaims, but public interest is virtually non-existent.
Nov 11, 1979: Veterans Day. Officially dedicated to Vietnam veterans.
Jan 25, 1981: Iran Hostage Return. Heroes' welcome for 53 hostages awakens dormant resentment over lack of official homecoming for Vietnam vets.
Apr 26, 1981: Vietnam Veterans Recognition Day. Congress declares in response to Iran returnee celebrations.
Nov 11, 1981: Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program. VVLP is launched by the federal ACTION agency to help veterans find meaningful employment and to combat negative images of vets perpetuated by the media. Volunteer boards are formed in 47 cities to coordinate efforts in 41 states. After 1984, local boards must raise their own funds.
Nov 13, 1982: Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Dedicated in Washington, D.C., with 150,000 spectators on hand. VFW made one of the first contributions ($2,500); $180,000 was given on Dec. 22, 1981; and $300,000 in total. Cost was $7 million and funded by 275,000 contributors. By spring 2005, 45 states have memorials inscribed with names.
Nov 10, 1984: Postage Stamp. As a tribute, a commemorative postage stamp bearing the image of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is released by the Postal Service.
Nov 11, 1984: Vietnam Memorial Statue. Sculpted by Frederick Hart, the 7-foot bronze grouping of three infantrymen called Three Fighting Men is dedicated 100 feet from the Wall with 150,000 people in attendance. A U.S. flag also is installed. VFW donated $10,000 to "National Salute II."
May 7, 1985: New York City Parade. 25,000 Vietnam vets march through Broadway's "Canyon of Heroes" in lower Manhattan as 1 million spectators watch. 468 tons of ticker-tape are used.
Jun 13, 1986: Vietnam Veterans Day in Chicago.
May 23, 1987: Vietnam Veterans Parade in Houston.
Nov 11, 1993: Women's Vietnam Memorial. Statue of nurses is dedicated at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Oct 9, 1996: Veterans Benefits Improvements Act (P.L. 104-275). Sec. 505 revises the definition of "Vietnam era" as it pertains to those who actually served in Vietnam, extending the beginning date to Feb. 28, 1961.
2003: Defense Authorization Act of 2003 (P.L. 107-314). Sec. 542 offers the 5,000 "evacuation" veterans of Operation Frequent Wind (April 29-30, 1975) the option to convert their AFEM to a Vietnam Service Medal.
May 21-23, 2004: Gallup Poll. Only 33% of Americans say they believe Vietnam to be a "just war." Still, a poll taken in April 1990 indicated 87% of the public held Vietnam vets in high esteem.
May 7, 2005: Veterans of Foreign Wars. Some 25% of VFW's membership is made up of Vietnam vets; they have held the top leadership position 13 times.
Thirty years ago, on May 7, 1975, the Vietnam War Era officially ended. Though that day signaled a cutoff date to qualify for original era benefits, it was in many ways only the beginning of a fight for assistance that had not even been contemplated.
Sub-divided by both tangible and symbolic milestones of the era, this chronology provides an easy reference for recalling the relevant highlights of the times. Many of the home front battles for veterans rights would continue well into the 1990s.
The Vietnam Era began Aug. 5, 1964, (Feb. 28, 1961, for veterans who served in-country) and ended May 7, 1975, by presidential proclamation. Some 9 million Americans--3.4 million in the Southeast Asia Theater of operations--served on active duty over that decade. Those who actually served in the war zone amounted to only 8% of draft-age males during the era. They are, indeed, a select minority of the so-called "Vietnam Generation."
Education: GI Bill of Rights
Mar 3, 1966: Veterans Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966 (P.L. 89-358). Originally provides one month (later 1? ) of schooling for each of month of active duty. A single vet receives $100 per month. It must be used within 8 years of discharge (later extended to 10 years).
Aug 31, 1967: Omnibus Veterans Bill (P.L. 90-77). Provides new benefits for Vietnam vets, broadens GI Bill and increases monthly stipend to $130.
April 1970: Amendments to the 1966 Act. President Nixon signs, increasing the monthly stipend by more than one-third, from $130 to $175.
Oct 24, 1972: Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1972 (P.L. 92-540). Raises the monthly stipend from $175 to $220 per month.
Dec 3, 1974: GI Bill Increase. Congress passes--over President Ford's veto--a 22.7% increase in educational benefits from $220 to $270 per month, retroactive to Sept. 1.
Oct 15, 1976: Veterans Education & Employment Assistance Act (P.L. 94-502). Increases the educational allowance by 8% (to $292), adds 9 months of assistance and extends the 10-year delimiting period in some cases.
Nov 23, 1977: GI Bill Improvement Act of 1977 (P.L. 95-202). Increases monthly stipend to $310 and mandates VA to conduct a study of its vocational rehab program.
Oct 17, 1984: Veterans Rehabilitation & Education Amendments of 1980 (P.L. 96-466). Enables vets with service-connected disabilities to be more independent in their living arrangements. Stipend increases to $327 (1980), $342 (1981) and $376 (1984).
Dec 31, 1989: Vietnam Era GI Bill Expires. 6.8 million era vets used Bill for education/training (4.3 million at colleges).
Employment
Oct 15, 1970: Jobs for Veterans Committee. Created by President Nixon, this massive PR drive spearheaded by the National Alliance for Businessmen bolsters awareness among employers of the need to hire veterans.
1971: Emergency Employment Act. Unemployment among Vietnam vets (age 20-29) peaks at 11% in March 1971. Lasting until 1973, this act provides government jobs to 75,000 vets.
Oct 15, 1976: Veterans Education & Employment Assistance Act of 1976. Increases subsistence allowance for disabled vets participating in vocational rehabilitation programs.
Jun 5, 1979: Veterans Preference. A Supreme Court decision upholds its constitutionality.
Dec 1981: Veterans Employment & Training Service. Created under the Department of Labor to coordinate vet programs at the policy-making level.
Aug 15, 1983: Emergency Veterans Job Training Act of 1983 (P.L. 98-77). Offers monetary incentives to employers who hire unemployed Korean and Vietnam War vets.
Mar 22, 1991: Veterans Readjustment Appointment Authority (P.L. 102-16). Allows vets to bypass the normal competitive hiring process and be hired directly for certain jobs.
Insurance & Rehabilitation
Sep 29, 1965: Uniformed Services-Group Life Insurance Act of 1965 (P.L. 89-214). Establishes the Servicemen's Group Life Insurance program.
1971: Veterans Mortgage Life Insurance Act of 1971. Provides for severely disabled vets who receive grants for specially adapted housing.
Mar 29, 1973: Cash Bonuses. At war's end, 10 states offer in amounts ranging from $120 to $750: Conn., Del., Ill., La., Mass., N.D., Pa., S.D. (disabled only), Vt. and Wash.
Sep 26, 1973: Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (P.L. 93-112). Provides vocational rehab services for the handicapped.
Dec 3, 1974: Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 (P.L. 93-508). Renews the provisions of the 1962 Veterans Benefits Act, which authorized peacetime vocational rehabilitation services.
Psychological Counseling
Jun 13, 1979: Veterans Health Care Amendments (P.L. 96-22). After five legislative attempts, it provides for the establishment of a readjustment counseling program, making eligible those vets who request help within two years of discharge. First centers open in Van Nuys, Calif., and Burlington, Vt., that November. The Vet Center concept was conceived largely by VA clinical social worker Shad Meshad, a Vietnam vet. Designed to expire Sept. 30, 1981. Today, there are 206 Vet Centers.
Nov 3, 1981: Veterans Health Care Training & Small Business Loan Act (P.L. 97-72). Extends for 3 years (through Sept. 30, 1984) the period in which a Vietnam vet may initially request psychological counseling.
Nov 21, 1983: Veterans Administration Health Programs Amendments (P.L. 98-160). Attached to the VA omnibus bill, they include a provision that makes a vet eligible for counseling for life.
Dec 3, 1985: VA Health Care Amendments (P.L. 99-166). Creates pilot program expanding Vet Center services to include employment, substance abuse and benefits counseling (later permanent).
1989: National Center for PTSD. VA creates with headquarters at White River Junction, Vt. By fall 2004, 161,028 Vietnam vets were receiving compensation for PTSD.
Agent Orange
Mar 23, 1978: National Issue. Agent Orange, the primary herbicide used for defoliating jungle cover for the enemy in Vietnam, becomes the center of national attention after the airing of a Chicago CBS affiliate documentary on the subject.
August 1978: Agent Orange Registry. Provides VA medical examinations for vets to identify potential claimants. By February 2005, 371,307 Vietnam vets, or 14% of those who served on the ground, were registered.
Dec 31, 1978: Agent Orange Victims International. Founded by vet Paul Reutershan shortly before his death from cancer. Vets Frank McCarthy and Jimmy Sparrow take over using VFW Post 10013 in Stamford, Conn., as the core of AOVI.
Dec 20, 1979: Veterans Health Programs Extension & Improvement Act (P.L. 96-151). Directs VA to conduct a study of the long-term health effects of exposure to dioxins.
Nov 3, 1981: Veterans Health Care Training & Small Business Loan Act (P.L. 97-72). Entitles a vet exposed to dioxins to hospital care.
November 1982: Proposed Agent Orange Legislation. VFW endorses Rep. Tom Daschle's (D-S.D.) bill after polling its membership. It dies in the Senate.
May 7, 1984: Agent Orange Lawsuit. A $180 million compensation fund for claimants is agreed to by chemical companies (first claimant check is not mailed until March 1989).
Oct 24, 1984: Veterans Dioxin & Radiation Exposure Compensation Standards Act of 1984 (P.L. 98-542). Codifies the reasonable doubt standard and provides interim disability benefits to atomic and Vietnam vets.
Nov 11, 1988: American Legion Study. Releases the results of its study begun Oct. 15, 1983. It concludes that thousands of Vietnam vets were "heavily exposed" to dioxins.
Mar 29, 1990: Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. VA grants presumptive service connection for the first time for an Agent Orange-related disease (and soft-tissue sarcomas May 19).
Feb 6, 1991: Agent Orange Act of 1991 (P.L. 102-4). Provides for service connection for disabilities resulting from exposure to herbicides in Vietnam.
Jul 27, 1993: Diseases Added. VA adds Hodgkin's disease and a liver disease to the presumptive disability list. On Sept. 27, VA recognizes three respiratory cancers (lung, larynx, trachea) and a bone marrow cancer for compensation. By 2004, 12 diseases are listed, the most recent being a type of leukemia.
Sep 26, 1996: Agent Orange Benefits Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-204). Provides monetary, health and vocational assistance to any Vietnam vet's child who has birth defects. Marks the first time that children of U.S. servicemen receive compensation for health problems related to war. Effective Oct. 1, 1997.
Mar 12, 1999: Korea DMZ Service. VA's Board of Appeals awards full disability benefits to the first DMZ duty (1966-69) vet suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
May 8, 2001: Diabetes Added. The Federal Register
publishes VA's final benefits' rules for vets with Type 2.
Prisoners of War/Missing in Action
May 9, 1970: Voices in Vital America. Based in southern California and formed by college students, VIVA launches its POW bracelet of remembrance campaign.
May 28, 1970: National League of Families of American Prisoners & Missing in Southeast Asia. Incorporated by family members to demand humane treatment and return of POWs.
1977: Woodcock Commission. Declares that no live Americans exist in Southeast Asia.
Memorial Day, 1984: Vietnam Unknown. A Vietnam serviceman is entombed in the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery. But on May 13, 1998, his remains are disinterred and ultimately identified as those of Air Force 1st Lt. Michael Blassie. Instead of remains, the Vietnam crypt is left empty with only an inscription--"Honoring and Keeping Faith with America's Missing Serviceman"--dedicated Sept. 17, 1999.
1987: Special Emissary to Vietnam. Gen. John Vessey.
1991: Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs formed.
1991: McCain Amendment. Requires the Pentagon to declassify all information related to Vietnam POWs and MIAs.
1992: Joint Task Force-Full Accounting. Replaces Joint Casualty Resolution Center (created in 1973).
1993: Department of Defense POW/MIA Office. Created to unite four disparate Pentagon offices.
Oct. 1, 2003: JTF-FA and the Central Identification Laboratory (Hawaii) merge to form the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).
2005: Accounting Effort. The remains of 747 Americans had been identified as of March 2005.
Recognition & Remembrance
Dec 4, 1961: Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal. Recognizes service in Vietnam (July 1, 1958 to July 3, 1965).
Jul 9, 1965: Vietnam Service Medal. Awarded for service in the war zone between July 4, 1965, and ultimately March 28, 1973.
Apr 15, 1967: Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Founded by six vets after the anti-war demonstration in New York City to protest U.S. involvement. VVAW self-destructs after the Revolutionary Communist Party infiltrates it in 1973.
Jul 10, 1969: Seattle Parade. Returning vets (814) of the 3rd Bn., 60th Inf., 9th Inf. Div., march downtown.
May 22, 1971: Vietnam Veterans Peace & Brotherhood Chapel. Created by Dr. Victor Westphall and located in Angel Fire, N.M., it is the first "national" Vietnam memorial.
Mar 31, 1973: New York City Parade. 1,000 Vietnam servicemen lead the "Home With Honor" parade up Broadway as 150,000 spectators look on. Organized by Raymond W. Gimmler,
chairman of "We Supported Our Men in Vietnam, Inc." and member of VFW Post 3350 in East Rockaway, N.Y.
Mar 29, 1974: Vietnam Veterans Day. Proclaimed by President Nixon.
1975: Gallup Poll. In a landmark survey, 51% of Vietnam vets say the war was just; 49% say unjust.
Mar 2, 1977: VA Director. Georgian Max Cleland is sworn as the first Vietnam vet director of the Veterans Administration.
Jan 1978: Vietnam Veterans of America. Founded by Robert Muller and Stuart Feldman, a non-vet lobbyist, in Washington, D.C. Originally called the Vietnam Veterans Coalition, then quickly changed to the Council on Vietnam Veterans before becoming VVA in summer 1979. Now 40,000 members.
1978: Vietnam Era Veterans in Congress. Created as an official caucus to press legislative issues.
May 28 - Jun 3, 1979: Vietnam Era Veterans Week. Congress proclaims, but public interest is virtually non-existent.
Nov 11, 1979: Veterans Day. Officially dedicated to Vietnam veterans.
Jan 25, 1981: Iran Hostage Return. Heroes' welcome for 53 hostages awakens dormant resentment over lack of official homecoming for Vietnam vets.
Apr 26, 1981: Vietnam Veterans Recognition Day. Congress declares in response to Iran returnee celebrations.
Nov 11, 1981: Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program. VVLP is launched by the federal ACTION agency to help veterans find meaningful employment and to combat negative images of vets perpetuated by the media. Volunteer boards are formed in 47 cities to coordinate efforts in 41 states. After 1984, local boards must raise their own funds.
Nov 13, 1982: Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Dedicated in Washington, D.C., with 150,000 spectators on hand. VFW made one of the first contributions ($2,500); $180,000 was given on Dec. 22, 1981; and $300,000 in total. Cost was $7 million and funded by 275,000 contributors. By spring 2005, 45 states have memorials inscribed with names.
Nov 10, 1984: Postage Stamp. As a tribute, a commemorative postage stamp bearing the image of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is released by the Postal Service.
Nov 11, 1984: Vietnam Memorial Statue. Sculpted by Frederick Hart, the 7-foot bronze grouping of three infantrymen called Three Fighting Men is dedicated 100 feet from the Wall with 150,000 people in attendance. A U.S. flag also is installed. VFW donated $10,000 to "National Salute II."
May 7, 1985: New York City Parade. 25,000 Vietnam vets march through Broadway's "Canyon of Heroes" in lower Manhattan as 1 million spectators watch. 468 tons of ticker-tape are used.
Jun 13, 1986: Vietnam Veterans Day in Chicago.
May 23, 1987: Vietnam Veterans Parade in Houston.
Nov 11, 1993: Women's Vietnam Memorial. Statue of nurses is dedicated at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Oct 9, 1996: Veterans Benefits Improvements Act (P.L. 104-275). Sec. 505 revises the definition of "Vietnam era" as it pertains to those who actually served in Vietnam, extending the beginning date to Feb. 28, 1961.
2003: Defense Authorization Act of 2003 (P.L. 107-314). Sec. 542 offers the 5,000 "evacuation" veterans of Operation Frequent Wind (April 29-30, 1975) the option to convert their AFEM to a Vietnam Service Medal.
May 21-23, 2004: Gallup Poll. Only 33% of Americans say they believe Vietnam to be a "just war." Still, a poll taken in April 1990 indicated 87% of the public held Vietnam vets in high esteem.
May 7, 2005: Veterans of Foreign Wars. Some 25% of VFW's membership is made up of Vietnam vets; they have held the top leadership position 13 times.
Battle of Dogger Bank
At 4.45 pm (GMT) on the 23 January 1915 Rear-Admiral Hipper sailed from the Jade with the 1st and 2nd Scouting Groups of three battlecruisers, the large armoured cruiser Blücher and four light cruisers to scout the Dogger Bank region of the North Sea and attack any British light forces in the region.
Unfortunately the order to Hipper from Admiral von Ingenohl, head of the German navy, was intercepted and decoded by the British Admiralty's deciphering service Room 40 and Vice-Admiral Beatty with his Rosyth based battlecruiser force and the Harwich Force of light cruisers and destroyers under Commodore Tyrwhitt was ordered to rendezvous at Dogger Bank at 7.00 am on the 24 January. The British units left port only minutes after the German fleet.
At 7.14 am, just before daybreak, of 24 January the German light cruiser Kolberg on the portside of the German fleet sighted the light cruiser Aurora of the Harwich Force. Aurora challenged the German ship which opened fire scoring two hits, Aurora returned fire also scoring a couple of hits.
Hipper turned his heavy units towards the firing thinking that there were only light enemy units in the area. Almost immediately on turning Stralsund saw the smoke form Beatty's battlecruisers to the north-north-west. He decided to head for home and so turned to the south-west at 7.35 am towards the German Bight. Hipper at first thought they British ships were battleships, which he could easily outrun, but by the time he realised that they were battlecruisers the range had already dropped to 25,000 yards. The German line was in the order Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger with the large armoured cruiser Blucher last. The British pursued in a staggered line a head formation with Lion leading followed by Tiger, Princess Royal and then the slower New Zealand and Indomitable.
Blücher was the slowest German ship at 23 knots and along with some of the cola fired torpedo boats slowed the German force down whilst the first three British battlecruisers reached 27 knots, at one point Beatty ordered the impossible speed of 29 knots to gee on his force, the two older and slower battlecruisers of the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron gradually lagged behind despite exceeding their trial speeds. The British light forces attempted to get in a position to attack but the speeds were too high and as the smoke they were generating was interfering with gunnery Beatty ordered them out of the way.
At 8.52 am Lion opened fire on Blücher but the range was too great, but by 9.00 am Blücher was within range, 20,000 yards, and Lion commenced firing followed by Tiger and Princess Royal, the first hits on Blücher being achieved at 9.09.
The Germans returned fire at 9.11 concentrating on Lion. As the range closed New Zealand joined the firing and Beatty ordered his ships to engage the corresponding ship in the enemy line except Indomitable which was not in range. Unfortunately Tiger included Indomitable in her calculations and so joined Lion firing on Seydlitz, leaving Moltke alone. To compound her error Tiger mistook Lions fall of shot for her own making her aim ineffective.
At 9.40 Lion scored a damaging hit on Seydlitz which penetrated the barbette of the rear turret and set fire to some of the shell propellant. The flames rose into the turret and through a connecting door, which should have been shut, to the second turret killing the crews of both turrets, 159 men in total. Fortunately for Hipper both magazines were flooded before things got any worse. Lion was not having it all her own way as by now she had all three leading German battlecruisers concentrating on her and she was repeated hit, the most serious hit from Derfflinger causing her port water feed to be contaminated and within half an hour her port engine to be shut down.
Blücher had taken heavy punishment and her speed had dropped to 17 knots and was forced to drop out of the German line, Beatty ordered the lagging Indomitable to intercept.
Lions speed was also dropping and was about to be overtaken by Tiger and Princess Royal. As this was happening the a periscope was thought to be sighted from Lion and Beatty ordered a 90 degree turn to port at 10.58. This manoeuvre also had the effect of forcing Hipper to cancel an attack he had just ordered by his torpedo boats. Once clear of the perceived danger the order to change course to the north-east was given.
Beatty tried to signal Nelson's famous "Engage the enemy more closely" but this was not in the signal book so "Attack the rear of the enemy" was substituted. Unfortunately Lions wireless antenna were destroyed , her signal lamps had no power and all but two of her signalling halyards had been shot away and a basic signalling error by Beatty's flag-lieutenant Lieutenant-Commander Seymour meant that the signal was combined with the course change to the north-east and so read "Attack the rear of the enemy, bearing NE" - which was Blücher.
Beatty had to watch helplessly as his newly appointed second in command, Rear-Admiral Moore in New Zealand, led the British force against the already doomed Blücher and let the rest of the German force escape.
Beatty transferred to the destroyer HMS Attack in order to move to Princess Royal but by the time he achieved this the battle was over.
The British ships finished off SMS Blücher, in the end she was hit by torpedoes from Arethusa and destroyers, HMS Meteor being damaged by Blücher in the process. As Arethusa was rescuing survivors a British stoker called 'Nobby' Clark was helping to haul German sailors up over the side he was surprised to be greeted by a German with 'Hello Nobby! Fancy meeting you here!' - it turned out that the German sailor had been his next door neighbour in Hull before the start of world War 1. Whilst survivors were being picked up the a seaplane and Zeppelin L5 bombed the operation, forcing the abandonment of rescue efforts.
At 4.45 pm (GMT) on the 23 January 1915 Rear-Admiral Hipper sailed from the Jade with the 1st and 2nd Scouting Groups of three battlecruisers, the large armoured cruiser Blücher and four light cruisers to scout the Dogger Bank region of the North Sea and attack any British light forces in the region.
Unfortunately the order to Hipper from Admiral von Ingenohl, head of the German navy, was intercepted and decoded by the British Admiralty's deciphering service Room 40 and Vice-Admiral Beatty with his Rosyth based battlecruiser force and the Harwich Force of light cruisers and destroyers under Commodore Tyrwhitt was ordered to rendezvous at Dogger Bank at 7.00 am on the 24 January. The British units left port only minutes after the German fleet.
At 7.14 am, just before daybreak, of 24 January the German light cruiser Kolberg on the portside of the German fleet sighted the light cruiser Aurora of the Harwich Force. Aurora challenged the German ship which opened fire scoring two hits, Aurora returned fire also scoring a couple of hits.
Hipper turned his heavy units towards the firing thinking that there were only light enemy units in the area. Almost immediately on turning Stralsund saw the smoke form Beatty's battlecruisers to the north-north-west. He decided to head for home and so turned to the south-west at 7.35 am towards the German Bight. Hipper at first thought they British ships were battleships, which he could easily outrun, but by the time he realised that they were battlecruisers the range had already dropped to 25,000 yards. The German line was in the order Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger with the large armoured cruiser Blucher last. The British pursued in a staggered line a head formation with Lion leading followed by Tiger, Princess Royal and then the slower New Zealand and Indomitable.
Blücher was the slowest German ship at 23 knots and along with some of the cola fired torpedo boats slowed the German force down whilst the first three British battlecruisers reached 27 knots, at one point Beatty ordered the impossible speed of 29 knots to gee on his force, the two older and slower battlecruisers of the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron gradually lagged behind despite exceeding their trial speeds. The British light forces attempted to get in a position to attack but the speeds were too high and as the smoke they were generating was interfering with gunnery Beatty ordered them out of the way.
At 8.52 am Lion opened fire on Blücher but the range was too great, but by 9.00 am Blücher was within range, 20,000 yards, and Lion commenced firing followed by Tiger and Princess Royal, the first hits on Blücher being achieved at 9.09.
The Germans returned fire at 9.11 concentrating on Lion. As the range closed New Zealand joined the firing and Beatty ordered his ships to engage the corresponding ship in the enemy line except Indomitable which was not in range. Unfortunately Tiger included Indomitable in her calculations and so joined Lion firing on Seydlitz, leaving Moltke alone. To compound her error Tiger mistook Lions fall of shot for her own making her aim ineffective.
At 9.40 Lion scored a damaging hit on Seydlitz which penetrated the barbette of the rear turret and set fire to some of the shell propellant. The flames rose into the turret and through a connecting door, which should have been shut, to the second turret killing the crews of both turrets, 159 men in total. Fortunately for Hipper both magazines were flooded before things got any worse. Lion was not having it all her own way as by now she had all three leading German battlecruisers concentrating on her and she was repeated hit, the most serious hit from Derfflinger causing her port water feed to be contaminated and within half an hour her port engine to be shut down.
Blücher had taken heavy punishment and her speed had dropped to 17 knots and was forced to drop out of the German line, Beatty ordered the lagging Indomitable to intercept.
Lions speed was also dropping and was about to be overtaken by Tiger and Princess Royal. As this was happening the a periscope was thought to be sighted from Lion and Beatty ordered a 90 degree turn to port at 10.58. This manoeuvre also had the effect of forcing Hipper to cancel an attack he had just ordered by his torpedo boats. Once clear of the perceived danger the order to change course to the north-east was given.
Beatty tried to signal Nelson's famous "Engage the enemy more closely" but this was not in the signal book so "Attack the rear of the enemy" was substituted. Unfortunately Lions wireless antenna were destroyed , her signal lamps had no power and all but two of her signalling halyards had been shot away and a basic signalling error by Beatty's flag-lieutenant Lieutenant-Commander Seymour meant that the signal was combined with the course change to the north-east and so read "Attack the rear of the enemy, bearing NE" - which was Blücher.
Beatty had to watch helplessly as his newly appointed second in command, Rear-Admiral Moore in New Zealand, led the British force against the already doomed Blücher and let the rest of the German force escape.
Beatty transferred to the destroyer HMS Attack in order to move to Princess Royal but by the time he achieved this the battle was over.
The British ships finished off SMS Blücher, in the end she was hit by torpedoes from Arethusa and destroyers, HMS Meteor being damaged by Blücher in the process. As Arethusa was rescuing survivors a British stoker called 'Nobby' Clark was helping to haul German sailors up over the side he was surprised to be greeted by a German with 'Hello Nobby! Fancy meeting you here!' - it turned out that the German sailor had been his next door neighbour in Hull before the start of world War 1. Whilst survivors were being picked up the a seaplane and Zeppelin L5 bombed the operation, forcing the abandonment of rescue efforts.
Proactive Marines place posters, attempt to get community involved
Submitted by: 2nd Marine Division
Story Identification #: 200561923554
Story by Lance Cpl. Athanasios L. Genos
CAMP DELTA, Iraq (June 19, 2005) -- Lance Cpl. Toben Medeiros and Marines of Company I, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment passed out leaflets to citizens and posted them on trees and light poles, encouraging them to alert coalition and Iraqi forces of insurgent activity in their city.
After the success of Operation Clear Decision, the Marines continue to work with the local community in an effort to keep up citizens’ involvement in reporting suspicious activities or known whereabouts of the insurgents to the Marines and ISF.
Medeiros, led by Sgt. Nicholas W. Jenkins, 1st Squad Leader, 2nd Platoon, moved through the outskirts of the city to hang posters with the same messages to help root out attackers.
“We stopped to put up some posters on a couple of trees and a man came up asking us in broken English if something was wrong and if he could help us,” the 2003 Dartmouth High School graduate said.
“Along with our counter IDF (indirect fire) operations we were putting up the posters to be proactive in getting the community involved in eliminating the insurgents who are placing IED’s (improvised explosive devices) and shooting mortars,” said Jenkins, a Twin City, Ga. native explained.
Medeiros began the patrol as point man for his squad, searching the roads and ditches ahead for improvised explosive devices. He scanned the area for anything suspicious while checking his global positioning system to make sure he was taking the squad in the right direction.
The locals played a large part in feeling out the area to see if there were any indications of insurgent activity in the area.
“It’s like a see-saw, some days it’s good and then the insurgents will get to the people and intimidate them and we go back out passing candy and medical supplies to them, attempting to get them to work with us again,” Medeiros explained.
Though this is Medeiros’ first deployment supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom, this is not the first time he’s deployed. He has a short deployment to Haiti under his belt. In Haiti, he worked in the streets conducting raids, ambushes and regular patrols on a daily basis.
“Haiti was a good stepping stone for us coming here,” he explained. “There’s a lot of good experiences we brought with us, helping us be more prepared for what was to come here.”
Company I, and the rest of the battalion work as much as possible with the Iraqi Security Forces and the local public to help work toward a free Iraq.
“We are working with the local public to stop the everyday attacks that injure civilians and our Marines in an attempt to one day make this country free,” Jenkins explained.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ght=2,insurgent
Submitted by: 2nd Marine Division
Story Identification #: 200561923554
Story by Lance Cpl. Athanasios L. Genos
CAMP DELTA, Iraq (June 19, 2005) -- Lance Cpl. Toben Medeiros and Marines of Company I, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment passed out leaflets to citizens and posted them on trees and light poles, encouraging them to alert coalition and Iraqi forces of insurgent activity in their city.
After the success of Operation Clear Decision, the Marines continue to work with the local community in an effort to keep up citizens’ involvement in reporting suspicious activities or known whereabouts of the insurgents to the Marines and ISF.
Medeiros, led by Sgt. Nicholas W. Jenkins, 1st Squad Leader, 2nd Platoon, moved through the outskirts of the city to hang posters with the same messages to help root out attackers.
“We stopped to put up some posters on a couple of trees and a man came up asking us in broken English if something was wrong and if he could help us,” the 2003 Dartmouth High School graduate said.
“Along with our counter IDF (indirect fire) operations we were putting up the posters to be proactive in getting the community involved in eliminating the insurgents who are placing IED’s (improvised explosive devices) and shooting mortars,” said Jenkins, a Twin City, Ga. native explained.
Medeiros began the patrol as point man for his squad, searching the roads and ditches ahead for improvised explosive devices. He scanned the area for anything suspicious while checking his global positioning system to make sure he was taking the squad in the right direction.
The locals played a large part in feeling out the area to see if there were any indications of insurgent activity in the area.
“It’s like a see-saw, some days it’s good and then the insurgents will get to the people and intimidate them and we go back out passing candy and medical supplies to them, attempting to get them to work with us again,” Medeiros explained.
Though this is Medeiros’ first deployment supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom, this is not the first time he’s deployed. He has a short deployment to Haiti under his belt. In Haiti, he worked in the streets conducting raids, ambushes and regular patrols on a daily basis.
“Haiti was a good stepping stone for us coming here,” he explained. “There’s a lot of good experiences we brought with us, helping us be more prepared for what was to come here.”
Company I, and the rest of the battalion work as much as possible with the Iraqi Security Forces and the local public to help work toward a free Iraq.
“We are working with the local public to stop the everyday attacks that injure civilians and our Marines in an attempt to one day make this country free,” Jenkins explained.
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...ght=2,insurgent
1/5 battles insurgents with spray paint, stencils
Submitted by: 2nd Marine Division
Story Identification #: 200541743757
Story by Cpl. Tom Sloan
AR RAMADI, Iraq (April 11, 2005) -- Marines with Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, engaged insurgents during a patrol through the city here April 11.
It wasn’t a firefight, however. The Marines used words instead of M-16’s to fight their enemy during the three-hour patrol.
“Our mission is to find and identify all anti-coalition and pro-insurgency propaganda painted on the walls along the streets that we’re patrolling here,” said Navy Lt. Mike A. Quaresimo, the information officer with Headquarters and Service Company. “We’re replacing it with positive propaganda by spray painting our message over it.”
The 32-year-old from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., explained insurgents are writing graffiti messages on walls throughout the city that promote terrorism. “Insurgents are trying to influence the local Iraqis with their propaganda,” he added.
With help from Lance Cpl. Manuel Valle Jr., a team leader with 2nd Squad, and other Marines with 1st Platoon, providing security, Quaresimo walked the streets armed with aerosol cans and stencils searching and destroying the insurgents’ messages.
Valle, who’s in Iraq for a third time supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom, and his fellow Marines went ahead of Quaresimo to ensure his route was clear of threats so he could safely accomplish his mission of countering insurgent propaganda.
An interpreter accompanied Quaresimo to help him determine what writings were from the insurgency. He also posted pro-Iraqi Security Force fliers on light poles and walls during the war on words.
“We want the Iraqi people to know there is a viable alternative to the terrorists,” he said while stenciling 1st Battalion, 5th Marines’ motto, “Peace brings prosperity,” in green paint on a wall. “We’re informing the Iraqis that we’re offering peace and prosperity. We want them to have stability and security; the insurgents are promoting instability and destruction. The Iraqi people have a choice, and they need to know they do. That’s what we’re hoping to accomplish.”
Quaresimo posted more than 20 pro-ISF fliers and stenciled numerous positive and anti-insurgent messages on walls in a section of the city here. When their mission was accomplished, he and Marines with 1st Platoon, Company A, safely returned to their base at Camp Hurricane Point.
“The Iraqi people can become more prosperous,” Quaresimo said. “We are here to help them, and that’s the message we want to get across.”
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...c1?OpenDocument
Submitted by: 2nd Marine Division
Story Identification #: 200541743757
Story by Cpl. Tom Sloan
AR RAMADI, Iraq (April 11, 2005) -- Marines with Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, engaged insurgents during a patrol through the city here April 11.
It wasn’t a firefight, however. The Marines used words instead of M-16’s to fight their enemy during the three-hour patrol.
“Our mission is to find and identify all anti-coalition and pro-insurgency propaganda painted on the walls along the streets that we’re patrolling here,” said Navy Lt. Mike A. Quaresimo, the information officer with Headquarters and Service Company. “We’re replacing it with positive propaganda by spray painting our message over it.”
The 32-year-old from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., explained insurgents are writing graffiti messages on walls throughout the city that promote terrorism. “Insurgents are trying to influence the local Iraqis with their propaganda,” he added.
With help from Lance Cpl. Manuel Valle Jr., a team leader with 2nd Squad, and other Marines with 1st Platoon, providing security, Quaresimo walked the streets armed with aerosol cans and stencils searching and destroying the insurgents’ messages.
Valle, who’s in Iraq for a third time supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom, and his fellow Marines went ahead of Quaresimo to ensure his route was clear of threats so he could safely accomplish his mission of countering insurgent propaganda.
An interpreter accompanied Quaresimo to help him determine what writings were from the insurgency. He also posted pro-Iraqi Security Force fliers on light poles and walls during the war on words.
“We want the Iraqi people to know there is a viable alternative to the terrorists,” he said while stenciling 1st Battalion, 5th Marines’ motto, “Peace brings prosperity,” in green paint on a wall. “We’re informing the Iraqis that we’re offering peace and prosperity. We want them to have stability and security; the insurgents are promoting instability and destruction. The Iraqi people have a choice, and they need to know they do. That’s what we’re hoping to accomplish.”
Quaresimo posted more than 20 pro-ISF fliers and stenciled numerous positive and anti-insurgent messages on walls in a section of the city here. When their mission was accomplished, he and Marines with 1st Platoon, Company A, safely returned to their base at Camp Hurricane Point.
“The Iraqi people can become more prosperous,” Quaresimo said. “We are here to help them, and that’s the message we want to get across.”
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...c1?OpenDocument
MPs stay step ahead of insurgency’s efforts
Submitted by: 2nd Force Service Support Group
Story Identification #: 200592593415
Story by Sgt. Josh H. Hauser
CAMP TAQADDUM, Iraq (Sept. 22, 2005) -- “Is everybody in condition one?”
“Yes sergeant!”
“Alright, let’s move.”
And with that simple exchange the Marines of Alpha Company, Combat Logistics Regiment 25, 2nd Force Service Support Group (Forward), roll past the final entry control point of Camp Taqaddum for yet another security patrol on Iraq’s dangerous and sometimes deadly roadways.
These Marines are tasked with traveling and clearing the various routes surrounding Taqaddum and searching for improvised explosive devices, insurgents and any suspicious activity.
Sergeant Kevin E. Brock, 3rd platoon squad leader, has been on these missions before. He’s currently on his second tour here. His experience extends back to a seven-month tour he pulled here a year ago. With no Little Tennessee River or rolling hills of lush, green forest, the Iraqi desert is a far cry from the Monroe County, Tenn., native’s roots. Instead of a glimpse of the Appalachian Mountains to the west, Brock’s senses take in a much different landscape: one littered with sand, garbage and the constant threat of danger on the horizon.
“You got a vehicle on the right,” Brock yells to his gunner and then again into the radio for the rest of the convoy.
The vehicle is stopped a safe distance from an upcoming intersection and waiting for the patrol to pass before proceeding.
“Most vehicles will pull off the road when they see us coming,” Brock says. “The ones that don’t are usually the VBIEDS [vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices].”
The patrol continues on to the first of many checkpoints. Finally, the military police come to a halt.
Brock’s driver, Lance Cpl. Joseph J. Clinton, peers through the vehicles bulletproof glass for any signs of danger before stepping out. Clinton, Brock and the rest of the patrol dismount and search the area for any unusual objects, a difficult task with the large amount of trash lying about. Clinton, a military policeman and 20-year-old Phoenix native, is the fifth generation of his family to serve the United States in a time of war and commented that spotting danger in Iraq is a constant learning experience.
“I ask questions,” Clinton says pointedly. “It’s important to have someone like Sergeant Brock to learn from and help mold your senses. You get to the point where you notice if something is unusual or just doesn’t seem right.”
After scouring the area, their search turns up nothing but a beetle which hurries from their footsteps as they return to their vehicles. The Marines mount up and continue on down a desolate stretch of road. As they proceed to the next checkpoint, Brock tries to describe the knack he has developed for seeing what most people would consider nothing.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Brock says, referring to the task of searching for IEDs. “You just get to know what you’re looking for.”
The Marines take in everything around them, constantly communicating and looking for trouble.
“You notice something different today Clinton?,” Brock quizzes his driver.
“Traffic’s not as busy today, sergeant,” he replied.
Even the volume of traffic is a noted sign that trouble could be just around the bend.
The Marines repeat the process at the next checkpoint. This time Brock’s gunner shouts, “Three Iraqi males in a black Ford Taurus, sergeant; they’re being checked.”
After a few moments, the gunner yells, “They’ve been searched and let go, sergeant.”
“Alright. Let’s go,” Brock shouts to Clinton.
“We have good gunners,” Brock said. “They’re about the busiest guys on the convoy.”
Private First Class Chris L. Clark is the gunner aboard Brock’s vehicle. He stands for the entire patrol, his head just barely breaching the top of the turret, a Browning M2 .50-caliber machine gun at his fingertips. His eyes continuously scan the roadsides and horizon for movement and ensures the distance between the convoy’s vehicles doesn’t change without his knowing. He knows the reality of his situation.
“When I’m up there I see threats,” the 22-year-old Cape Coral, Fla., native said. “There are people out here who want to kill me and my fellow Marines. You’re always in a combat zone, even when you’re sleeping in your rack. Anything can happen.”
Even still, Clark hopes to return to Iraq after his tour is complete in order to pass his knowledge on to future military policeman deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
“This is what I joined the Marines to do,” he said. “I want to come back and be the experienced guy. It’s a good feeling.”
After reaching and clearing the final checkpoint the Marines head back to base, their mission complete only after everyone returns safely. Today they found no IED’s and the roads are clear, no cause for alarm, but that doesn’t change their dedicated vigilance.
“Some days are busy, some days are slow,” Brock says. “But you gotta’ treat every day like it’s busy. Because the day you don’t is the day they get you.”
Submitted by: 2nd Force Service Support Group
Story Identification #: 200592593415
Story by Sgt. Josh H. Hauser
CAMP TAQADDUM, Iraq (Sept. 22, 2005) -- “Is everybody in condition one?”
“Yes sergeant!”
“Alright, let’s move.”
And with that simple exchange the Marines of Alpha Company, Combat Logistics Regiment 25, 2nd Force Service Support Group (Forward), roll past the final entry control point of Camp Taqaddum for yet another security patrol on Iraq’s dangerous and sometimes deadly roadways.
These Marines are tasked with traveling and clearing the various routes surrounding Taqaddum and searching for improvised explosive devices, insurgents and any suspicious activity.
Sergeant Kevin E. Brock, 3rd platoon squad leader, has been on these missions before. He’s currently on his second tour here. His experience extends back to a seven-month tour he pulled here a year ago. With no Little Tennessee River or rolling hills of lush, green forest, the Iraqi desert is a far cry from the Monroe County, Tenn., native’s roots. Instead of a glimpse of the Appalachian Mountains to the west, Brock’s senses take in a much different landscape: one littered with sand, garbage and the constant threat of danger on the horizon.
“You got a vehicle on the right,” Brock yells to his gunner and then again into the radio for the rest of the convoy.
The vehicle is stopped a safe distance from an upcoming intersection and waiting for the patrol to pass before proceeding.
“Most vehicles will pull off the road when they see us coming,” Brock says. “The ones that don’t are usually the VBIEDS [vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices].”
The patrol continues on to the first of many checkpoints. Finally, the military police come to a halt.
Brock’s driver, Lance Cpl. Joseph J. Clinton, peers through the vehicles bulletproof glass for any signs of danger before stepping out. Clinton, Brock and the rest of the patrol dismount and search the area for any unusual objects, a difficult task with the large amount of trash lying about. Clinton, a military policeman and 20-year-old Phoenix native, is the fifth generation of his family to serve the United States in a time of war and commented that spotting danger in Iraq is a constant learning experience.
“I ask questions,” Clinton says pointedly. “It’s important to have someone like Sergeant Brock to learn from and help mold your senses. You get to the point where you notice if something is unusual or just doesn’t seem right.”
After scouring the area, their search turns up nothing but a beetle which hurries from their footsteps as they return to their vehicles. The Marines mount up and continue on down a desolate stretch of road. As they proceed to the next checkpoint, Brock tries to describe the knack he has developed for seeing what most people would consider nothing.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Brock says, referring to the task of searching for IEDs. “You just get to know what you’re looking for.”
The Marines take in everything around them, constantly communicating and looking for trouble.
“You notice something different today Clinton?,” Brock quizzes his driver.
“Traffic’s not as busy today, sergeant,” he replied.
Even the volume of traffic is a noted sign that trouble could be just around the bend.
The Marines repeat the process at the next checkpoint. This time Brock’s gunner shouts, “Three Iraqi males in a black Ford Taurus, sergeant; they’re being checked.”
After a few moments, the gunner yells, “They’ve been searched and let go, sergeant.”
“Alright. Let’s go,” Brock shouts to Clinton.
“We have good gunners,” Brock said. “They’re about the busiest guys on the convoy.”
Private First Class Chris L. Clark is the gunner aboard Brock’s vehicle. He stands for the entire patrol, his head just barely breaching the top of the turret, a Browning M2 .50-caliber machine gun at his fingertips. His eyes continuously scan the roadsides and horizon for movement and ensures the distance between the convoy’s vehicles doesn’t change without his knowing. He knows the reality of his situation.
“When I’m up there I see threats,” the 22-year-old Cape Coral, Fla., native said. “There are people out here who want to kill me and my fellow Marines. You’re always in a combat zone, even when you’re sleeping in your rack. Anything can happen.”
Even still, Clark hopes to return to Iraq after his tour is complete in order to pass his knowledge on to future military policeman deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
“This is what I joined the Marines to do,” he said. “I want to come back and be the experienced guy. It’s a good feeling.”
After reaching and clearing the final checkpoint the Marines head back to base, their mission complete only after everyone returns safely. Today they found no IED’s and the roads are clear, no cause for alarm, but that doesn’t change their dedicated vigilance.
“Some days are busy, some days are slow,” Brock says. “But you gotta’ treat every day like it’s busy. Because the day you don’t is the day they get you.”
Seabees, Local Residents Establish Temporary Housing for Hurricane VictimsStory Number: NNS050930-05
Release Date: 9/30/2005 3:00:00 PM
By Journalist 1st Class (SCW/SS) James G. Pinsky, Navy News Service
PLAQUEMINE PARISH, La. (NNS) -- Seabees of Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (NMCB) 40 and local Plaquemines Parish residents teamed up in September to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) expedite establishing housing for hundreds of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
One of FEMA’s plans for relocating evacuees involved Plaquemines Parish landowners like Ray Tolar, who volunteered his land to host trailers for local families to stay in.
In Tolar’s case, FEMA placed 19 trailers in his front yard, and Seabees are installing water, sewage and electrical connections for the trailers.
“The faster and better we can install these lines,” said Construction Electrician 3rd Class (SCW) Matthew Huston, “the sooner the evacuees can get into these trailers.”
The plumbing and electrical work is a welcome change to Seabees who have seen more than their fair share of debris clearing throughout the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast.
“I love a job like this trailer park,” said Huston, “because we’re actually doing something for the hurricane victims directly.”
In addition to making sure the 19 trailers have safe sewage, water, and electrical connections, the Seabees are helping volunteers like Tolar with their own concerns as well.
“The Seabees are doing good,” said Tolar, who is a contracted plumber by trade. “They helped me change my tractor’s tire. We’re friendly to each other, bring them coffee and iced tea. They’ve been very courteous, and I’m just glad to see them here to help us.”
For the latest Navy news on hurricane relief efforts, visit www.news.navy.mil/local/hurricane/.
Release Date: 9/30/2005 3:00:00 PM
By Journalist 1st Class (SCW/SS) James G. Pinsky, Navy News Service
PLAQUEMINE PARISH, La. (NNS) -- Seabees of Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (NMCB) 40 and local Plaquemines Parish residents teamed up in September to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) expedite establishing housing for hundreds of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
One of FEMA’s plans for relocating evacuees involved Plaquemines Parish landowners like Ray Tolar, who volunteered his land to host trailers for local families to stay in.
In Tolar’s case, FEMA placed 19 trailers in his front yard, and Seabees are installing water, sewage and electrical connections for the trailers.
“The faster and better we can install these lines,” said Construction Electrician 3rd Class (SCW) Matthew Huston, “the sooner the evacuees can get into these trailers.”
The plumbing and electrical work is a welcome change to Seabees who have seen more than their fair share of debris clearing throughout the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast.
“I love a job like this trailer park,” said Huston, “because we’re actually doing something for the hurricane victims directly.”
In addition to making sure the 19 trailers have safe sewage, water, and electrical connections, the Seabees are helping volunteers like Tolar with their own concerns as well.
“The Seabees are doing good,” said Tolar, who is a contracted plumber by trade. “They helped me change my tractor’s tire. We’re friendly to each other, bring them coffee and iced tea. They’ve been very courteous, and I’m just glad to see them here to help us.”
For the latest Navy news on hurricane relief efforts, visit www.news.navy.mil/local/hurricane/.
Iraqi Resistance to Freedom:
A Frommian Perspective
CYNTHIA E. AYERS
Iraqi civilians were dancing and singing in the streets of Baghdad on the morning of 9 April 2003, while the American military consolidated efforts to secure the city. On that day it was obvious that Saddam Hussein had been deposed. In spite of the celebrations, however, coalition soldiers continued to meet opposition.
By then the world could clearly see that at least some Iraqis were happy to be free and eager to express their joy at the fall of the regime. But many within the coalition were surprised that these feelings had not been expressed throughout the preceding weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom.1 US forces moving north across Iraq toward Baghdad had been “greeted [by civilians] with violent hostility in some cities, flat indifference in others, and [only later] in some places, with open arms.”2
In the days that followed the initial celebrations in Baghdad, media attention was drawn to Iraqis protesting the American presence as well as those who welcomed the coalition soldiers. A CNN special entitled “Inside the Regime” highlighted Iraqis who worked at, yet lived in poverty next to, the billion-dollar palaces of their former leader.3 Even those with firsthand knowledge of the luxurious life led by Hussein and his family remained skeptical of the benefits of liberation. They wondered if the “security” of the regime was not better than the “lawlessness” of their post-Saddam world. They wanted water, electricity, and an end to rampant criminal activity—and most of all, it seemed, they wanted Americans to leave their country.4
Why were Iraqi citizens—many, if not most, of whom were cognizant of the regime’s atrocities—so reticent to welcome freedom as the coalition forces succeeded in liberating cities and villages? Fear, according to leading Iraqi exiles, was the most probable reason,5 fear of having to face the anger of the regime should the Americans not succeed. Fear of immediate reprisal also played a part. Iraqi POWs told stories of being forced to fight advancing American troops while re-
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gime elements and “Saddam Fedayeen” held guns to their heads and threatened the safety of their families.6 Reports from wounded Iraqi POWs, inspections of Iraqis who had been killed “in battle,” and live CNN coverage of refugees being fired at by Iraqi soldiers as they attempted to flee the cities lend credibility to these assertions. Fear, successful Iraqi propaganda, and a general disbelief in coalition capability to topple the regime and oust Saddam may have kept many from daring to hope for freedom.
These are all valid assertions, but they do not completely explain the willingness of some Iraqi military elements to continue to fight, even when they must have known there was no hope for the survival of the regime. Nor do they explain the enthusiasm displayed by Arab volunteers from other countries in declaring their intent to enter Iraq and fight for a regime that was known throughout the Arab world as abusive and cruel.7 Were they simply responding to the Arab community’s dislike of American intervention and Osama bin Laden’s call for recruits to the jihad?8 And how could the more moderate states of the Arab community claim to find Saddam’s government distasteful and murderous, yet publicize the war as an “imperial American invasion” and treat Saddam and his henchmen as if they were “champions” and potential martyrs?9 Why, when people are faced with a choice between pernicious, seemingly all-powerful dictatorships and liberty, would they fight to retain systems of oppression? Why would there be any question over the desirability of freedom?
Santayana’s famous warning (“those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”) may have been considered by war planners in seeking to predict Iraqi reactions to a liberating force, but the lessons to be learned in this case should not be limited to those gleaned only from conflict between Western elements and the country of Iraq, or even from East-West cultural differences. In September 2002, a group of Iraqi exiles boldly implied10 a comparison between Saddam’s regime and Nazi Germany.11 Certainly, Pan-Arabism is a form of fascism and Saddam shared many qualities with Hitler—the two even had similar experiences in their formative years. If the comparison between the two rulers and regimes is indeed valid, perhaps the answers we seek can be found in an analysis of fascist tendencies in early 20th-century Europe.
Fear of Freedom: Submission and Conformity
German-born social psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm reported a phenomenon he called “fear of freedom” over 60 years ago. When Fromm published his theory (Escape from Freedom, 1941),12 he was living and
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writing in the United States, where European fascism was a predominant thought on the minds of many. Those who fought for freedom in World War I were undoubtedly frustrated by what seemed to be a European readiness to succumb to authoritarian regimes.
In analyzing socioeconomic and sociopolitical problems of Europe during the emergence of fascism, Fromm came to the conclusion that individuals, and therefore societies, have an innate tendency to revert to systems of political and cultural restraint rather than to take advantage of opportunities for freedom or emancipation—and that they may actually seek out governments to control them rather than face the prospect of individual freedom. Fromm’s explanation for this type of reversion was seen in the following assertion:
If the economic, social, and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation13 depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality . . . [and] people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life that lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.14
The basis of Fromm’s theory was his belief that societies, like individuals, progress through a series of feelings of security and insecurity during the process of growing. He likened an individual’s dependence upon the society to which he or she was born to that of a child’s dependence upon its mother. These dependencies are gradually lost, or “the primary ties are cut”15 as independence and freedom is sought. However, even as the desire for freedom encourages this separation, feelings of alienation, weakness, and insecurity are growing simultaneously.16 It is at this point, Fromm believed, that the individual forms a fear of the freedom that is so desired.
During the process of growing and establishing freedom from the ties of initial dependence, attempts are made “to overcome the feeling[s] of aloneness and powerlessness by completely submerging oneself in the world outside.”17 If, however, the individual encounters suppression or oppression, the effective result is submission and fear of the process of achieving individuality and freedom.
Expanding on this assertion, Fromm maintained that the extent to which an individual develops (or individuation occurs) is largely dependent on the type of economic and social structure to which the individual was born. Behavior consistent with self-preservation within an individual’s economic system or society explains the determination of an individual’s character structure, which, in turn, substantiates and magnifies the character structure of the society, according to Fromm.18 In this circuitous manner, an explanation was proposed for societies with a seemingly predisposed willingness to submit to forms of authoritarian rule as opposed to those societies with a much more substantial resistance.
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Fromm stressed the need for an individual to be a part of a larger whole as a factor in the formation of societal character. This need, according to Fromm, is a form of mental self-preservation, similar to the basic need for sustenance. “Even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.”19 Thus, as people gain a measured sense of individualism and freedom, they are pushed by an uncontrollable drive to join with others, thereby obtaining security in society, even at the expense of individual freedom. This was, according to Fromm, “the negative side of freedom” (or “negative freedom”).20
Included in the concept of negative freedom was the societal constraint of conformity. Conformity encompasses all of the conscious and self-conscious actions and feelings experienced in the spirit of social assimilation. The fear of being unique, of thinking or acting differently, of standing out in a crowd, can be a debilitating fear—especially when “standing out” might mean torture or death of self or loved-ones.
For conformity and submission to exist within a society, there must be a corresponding need to find security in authority and power. For example, authority and power might be determined by ownership of land and wealth or by the accumulation of business or political strength. Those without land gain security by belonging to groups, organizations, or cultures, and may obtain a feeling of power by discriminating or oppressing other groups, organizations, or cultures. Those with land act in a manner that displays superiority to those without, but may feel inferior in regard to those with monetary wealth. The cash-rich may, in turn, feel inferior when compared to a high-level business executive, who may feel less than adequate when confronted with political power. The feeling of superiority over other persons or groups becomes the ultimate objective in the search for the security that is found in power. Limitations on power are dependent on societal character structure, which is (as previously noted) determined by behavior consistent with self-preservation within the socio-economic system.
Fromm believed that people live in bipolar societies. His characterizations of the individuals within a society might be anthropomorphically ascribed to sheep and wolves, with the wolves lined up on a spectrum of power lust or madness, from a category of good to bad. Sheep could be classified in categories from acquiescent to willing. All (sheep and wolves), according to Fromm’s the-
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ory, are motivated by feelings of insecurity, alienation, powerlessness, isolation, and fear.21 Fromm’s contention was that:
In any society the spirit of the whole culture is determined by the spirit of those groups that are most powerful in that society . . . partly because these groups have the power to control the educational system, schools, church, press, theater, and thereby to imbue the whole population with their own ideas; furthermore, these powerful groups carry so much prestige that the lower classes are more than ready to accept and imitate their values and to identify themselves psychologically.22
Fromm pictured the masses (the sheep) as being overwhelmed by powerful propaganda (initiated by the wolves), which serves to increase the feeling of insignificance and powerlessness, and increase their willingness to submit.23
In discussing what he considered to be an “escape” into submission to an authoritarian type of leadership, Fromm described the individual as exhibiting masochistic tendencies—an unconscious need to act in a manner that invites external control.24 He depicted the sadistic tendencies of an authoritarian leader as stemming from the same escapist feelings. He postulated that the sadistic leader was attempting to gain strength and identity by creating an image of being bound to a greater whole, such as that of the state. Contrary to popular belief, the sadist and the masochist, according to Fromm, have the same character structure. Both exist in a symbiotic relationship that guarantees escape from freedom—because freedom elicits feelings of alienation and powerlessness.25
Fromm portrayed fascism as a perfect example of the sadomasochistic symbiotic relationship that could be exhibited in the entire character structure of a society. He declared that there were “great parts of the lower middle class in Germany and other European countries [in which] the sadomasochistic character is typical.”26 This type of society, according to Fromm, has a strong desire to submit to an overwhelmingly strong authority, while simultaneously needing to be seen and treated as an authority figure among other social groups, thus sustaining a hierarchy of power.27
Adolf Hitler was seen by Fromm as the embodiment of the sadomasochistic authoritarian.28 Fromm described how Hitler understood and used the need for security and the desire to escape from freedom via submission to a higher authority. He recognized Hitler’s use of the domineering style of oratory as well as the brainwashing techniques that are now known to be used in conjunction with fear, physical exhaustion, alienation, subsequent group assimilation, and the formation of a social structure in which group superiority over others is emphasized.
There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein and his “power-elite” used these techniques with the Iraqi people29 (although perhaps with less sophistication). Fromm would have had no compunction in describing Hussein as a “sadomasochistic authoritarian” on a par with Hitler. Nor would Fromm have had any trouble depicting the Iraqi people as sheepishly submissive and compliant (to
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their wolfish authoritarian leader)—but equally sadomasochistic in their willingness to conform to a social hierarchy in which feelings of superiority over others (such as the Kurdish minority internally or Americans and Israelis externally) were encouraged.30
Fear of Freedom: Destroying That Which Is Feared
According to Fromm, feelings of alienation, isolation, and powerlessness can also result in destructiveness.31 In Iraq, this destructiveness is currently presented as opposition to those who have upset the status quo—those who liberated the Iraqi population from the security of a more-or-less constant (however oppressive) lifestyle. These liberators also upset the hierarchy of superiority—thus increasing feelings of powerlessness. The tendency to resort to destructiveness in order to alleviate unsavory insecure (or “unbearable”) feelings is irrational, can be obsessive, and may ultimately result in a desire for total annihilation.32
Fromm described this simply in the statement, “I can escape the feeling of my own powerlessness in comparison with the world outside of myself by destroying it.”33 After World War II, many imprisoned Nazi officers reported that Hitler’s destructive behavior caused him to pursue targets (regardless of common sense, human decency, and reason) when German military might was not yet up to the task and that “success” reinforced his belief in his own superiority over the general staff.34 This same behavior kept him from obtaining correct information in reference to military matters, since the generals who reported to him feared for their careers (and often, their lives) if Hitler did not receive the information he wanted to hear. In August 1945, German prisoner of war General Lemelsen noted that Hitler “never clearly recognized that Germany alone would eventually . . . have to succumb to the superiority of its enemies and that he did not seek means when this became apparent to end the war, but rather delivered the people to complete destruction.”35
The actions of and decisions made by Saddam Hussein before and during Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom were eerily reminiscent of the reports provided by Hitler’s officers. Although the Iraqi military was well-armed, Saddam obviously had been misinformed about his military’s effectiveness in battle. The cold-blooded killing of Saddam’s sons-in-law—Lieutenant-General Hussain Kamel al-Majid and his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Saddam Kamel—after their return from defection in February 199636 as well as purges instituted by Saddam after his assumption of control in 197937 provide testimony of the fear that was no doubt felt by both military and civilian leaders. Reportedly, long before he took control of Iraq, Saddam’s world was characterized by an obsessively destructive nature. His early childhood of poverty, abuse, and neglect undoubtedly aroused feelings of alienation, isolation, and powerlessness, which were magnified by the culture in which he lived. These circumstances may have been a catalyst for the ruthless behavior he displayed in adulthood38 as well as the deliv-
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ery of his own people to what must have appeared to them to be certain destruction (just as Hitler had done). The intelligence organizations of the coalition obviously had this destructive tendency in mind while planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom’s “race to Baghdad.”39 If Saddam did (as it was believed) have readily available weapons of mass destruction, the use of such would have been in keeping with Saddam’s character profile (as proposed by Fromm).
Fromm delineated a particular type of destructiveness—a pernicious form of continual, subdued, fervent hostility that “waits only for an opportunity to be expressed”40—that could be equated to terrorism.41 This, Fromm believed, evolves from a lack of individual empowerment, the inability of an individual to express self, and the absence of positive freedom.42 Fromm referred to it as a “thwarting of life.”43 Hitler’s Nazi party manipulated and used this type of destructive behavior to further its aims. In utilizing Iraqi people as suicide bombers and front-line martyrs to his own cause, Saddam also was guilty of this practice.
This “thwarting of life” may be the biggest challenge to the new Iraqi government (temporary or permanent). Average citizens of Iraq have been without a sense of individual empowerment for most if not all of their lives.44 Their newly found freedom will give them opportunities to express their destructive tendencies born as a consequence of severe oppression. Ironically, as Fromm noted, the destruction most likely will be aimed at those who offer freedom—the freedom which brings with it feelings of insecurity and powerlessness, the freedom of not knowing what to do or when to do it—fueled by resentment of a new structure that does not possess the power to instill the level of fear that the populous had lived with for many years.
Fear of Freedom: Destroying “Self”
Fromm also discussed a form of mental self-destruction. He noted that an illusory result of the hunt for escape from aloneness and anxiety was the deletion, or at a minimum, a strong suppression of one’s real self and the subsequent replacement with what he called a “pseudo self.”45 This pseudo self or superficial self eases into the security of conformity, submission, and identity with a “larger whole.” Fromm argued that conformity and submission of the pseudo self was evident in the “part of the [European] population [that] bowed to the Nazi regime without any strong resistance, but also without becoming admirers of the Nazi ideology and political practice.”46 This subset was made up “of the working class and the liberal . . . bourgeoisie.”47 These groups, while initially hostile to the Nazi party, collectively dropped their resistance in the interests of hiding within the security found in conformity and submission. Fromm cited a “state of inner tiredness and resignation.”48
Fromm noted that in Germany during the 1930s, the working class developed a strong “feeling of resignation, of disbelief in their leaders, of doubt about the value of any kind of political organization and activity. . . . Deep within themselves many had given up any hope in the effectiveness of political ac-
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tion.”49 Thus they suppressed or destroyed their questioning, rebellious, hopeful selves. It is, perhaps, this feeling of doubt and hopelessness—and the conditioned suppression of self—that keeps much of the Iraqi people from embracing their liberators. In their minds, trading conformity and submission from one form of leadership (with which they are familiar) to another (with which they have no frame of reference) may have an associated cost that they are not willing, or do not have the energy and enthusiasm (or the remaining sense of “self”), to pay. Therefore, it becomes a matter of “better the devil you know”—and in this case, the devil is an authoritarian regime.
But resignation to a devil is one thing—actively fighting for him is another. Fromm observed that an interesting psychological aspect of the suppression of self is the individual’s transference of identity to a larger whole (also noted in Orwell’s 1984).50 Although working-class members of Hitler’s Germany did not self-identify with the Nazi image, they did identify strongly with their country. Hitler and the Nazi party virtually became Germany:51
It can be observed in many instances that persons who are not Nazis nevertheless defend Nazism against criticism of foreigners because they feel that an attack on Nazis is an attack on Germany. . . . This consideration results in an axiom which is important for the problems of political propaganda: any attack on Germany as such, any defamatory propaganda concerning “the Germans” . . . only increases the loyalty of those who are not wholly identified with the Nazi system.52
Consistent with this mindset is the support that Saddam Hussein received from the Arab media and community at large,53 as well as from many of the Iraqi people. They apparently did not see Operation Iraqi Freedom as an attempt to liberate Iraq and the Middle East of a cruel, inhuman dictator—they believed that America was launching an unprovoked attack against Iraq, the Iraqi people, and therefore, the “Arab nation.”54 An attack against Saddam was an attack against the entire Arab community. Saddam (or Saddam’s regime) was therefore able to gain psychological support and regime-sustaining strength in a unifying effect resulting from the focus on a common enmity.55
As combat troops raced through Iraq, most overt anti-leadership sentiment was noted only after a notably conspicuous absence, desertion, or demise of
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regime leaders. Similarly, general dislike for Hitler and the Nazi regime became evident only after the war was lost and Hitler had committed suicide.56 Although the reticence of the oppressed to display distaste for the oppressors is obviously influenced by fear of torture or death, it also can be explained as an attempt by those who have lost their concept of self to gain security by being part of a larger whole—an attempt at unity via nationalism or, in this case, Pan-Arabism and common enmity.57
Fear of Freedom: Survival of the Fittest
Characteristic of the authoritarian sadomasochist, Hitler began his crusade on the heels of and surrounded by those he considered inferior,58 as did Saddam Hussein.59 The achievement of ultimate power was their driving force. This quest for world domination was, to Hitler, justified as the ultimate realization of Darwin’s theory of survival of the strong over the weak:
The love for the powerful and the hatred for the powerless which is so typical for the sado-masochistic character explains a great deal of Hitler’s and his followers’ political actions. While the [Weimar] Republican government thought they could “appease” the Nazis by treating them leniently, they not only failed to appease them but aroused their hatred by the very lack of power and firmness they showed. Hitler hated the Weimar Republic because [italics added] it was weak, and he admired the industrial and military leaders because they had power. He never fought against established strong power but always against groups which he thought to be essentially powerless. Hitler’s—and for that matter Mussolini’s—“revolution” happened under protection of existing power, and their favorite objects were those who could not defend themselves.60
In other words, fascist power (like the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing) has historically been aided and abetted (albeit unconsciously) by the weaker government it eventually replaced. One can see parallels in Saddam’s rise to power. Many who supported him long before he assumed control of Iraq (when he ousted a man of “close family connections” and placed him under house arrest) were later executed.61
The manner in which both Mussolini and Hitler fell from power (in the minds of those who were ruled by them) was consistent with Fromm’s depiction of a mutual sadomasochistic relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor. In Fromm’s descriptions of the authoritarian character, one could extrapolate a tendency of totalitarian societies to implode. The sadomasochistic personality sees “lack of power . . . [as] an unmistakable sign of guilt and inferiority, and if the authority . . . shows signs of weakness, his love and respect change into contempt and hatred.”62 Thus, Fromm explained the basis of Mussolini’s fate at the hands of his followers in 1945, Hitler’s problems with his trusted elite toward the end of the war—and the toppling of statues as well as the plethora of shoes slapping the face of any accessible image of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
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The celebrations of 9 April 2003 and the displays of hatred toward Saddam and his henchmen noted in the days that followed were completely consistent with the sadomasochistic tendencies that were carefully cultured within the Iraqi social structure during Saddam’s reign. As the ruling elite of Saddam’s Iraq hid or ran, they showed themselves to be weak. Weakness in the authority figure, according to Fromm, elicits reactions of confusion, rebellion, and destruction.63 Weakness is seen as submission—as an invitation to a more powerful authority to take control. The result of weakness displayed by the authority figure is either chaos (while others attempt to gain control) or a coup (with authority quickly transferred to another recognized power).
Fear of Freedom: Can Democracy Succeed in Iraq?
Fromm concluded his thesis by insisting that “authoritarian systems cannot do away with the basic conditions that make for the quest for freedom; neither can they exterminate the quest for freedom that springs from these conditions.”64 Based on this conclusion, there may be hope for an Iraqi democracy. But Fromm also asserted that democracy faces the same basic problems as autocracy. The desire to escape freedom, the fear of alienation and powerlessness, the pressure and expectation of conformity, the suppression of individuality, and the loss of the unique self are all noted within the modern democratic society. Individuals join groups (political, social, economic, etc.), thereby individually satisfying the need to escape freedom. These institutions need to be carefully nurtured within the new post-Saddam Iraq.
Fromm argued that the fear of freedom leads to “new bondage.”65 But he also postulated “a state of positive freedom in which the individual exists as an independent self and yet is not isolated but united with the world, with other men, and nature.”66 He believed that positive freedom could be achieved if people are given the opportunity to express themselves as individuals. The ultimate objective is free, action-oriented critical thinking and free emotional reasoning.
“Positive freedom consists in the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality.”67 In equating positive freedom to spontaneous activity, Fromm claimed that the only allowable spontaneous activity in modern society is that which is recognized as successful. Thus, as he described it, the artist who “does not succeed in selling the art . . . remains to his contemporaries a crank, a ‘neurotic.’ [Similarly] the successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.”68 But Fromm emphasized that success is not the point of life, and therefore not the point of positive freedom. Positive freedom must include the empowerment of individuals to contribute to the society in which they reside. The ability to propose and to make unique contributions without fear of suppression or oppression, without the fear of being isolated for reasons of nonconformity, gives an individual strength and confidence, and allows for intellectual and emotional growth.
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Fromm’s concept of the ideal society, in which positive freedom is the only kind of freedom, was tied to his hopes for democracy. He saw the greatest possibilities in democratic socialism, which extolled the virtues of “the individual as . . . altruistic and cooperative. The individual finds meaning in the community, not in the atomized conditions prevailing under capitalism.”69 The aims of democratic socialism are the equality of each individual’s treatment by government in terms of respect and dignity, combined with a politico-economic system that allows substantial participation by every individual (as opposed to a substantial participation by an elite few and a superficial participation by the majority). Fromm’s concept of positive freedom finds voice in this type of “socialist society governed by democratic procedures.”70
Unfortunately, Fromm’s ideal has yet to be achieved. Democracy (social, liberal, or otherwise) has lived a long and prosperous life, but the concept has not yet lived up to the hopes Fromm placed in it. It can be considered the best governmental system known to exist to this point in time, but there are points of contention as to how “free” and “empowered” individuals within the system really are. Much depends on circumstance and on decisions made by fallible individuals (which can have resulting unintended consequences). In general, the major democratic nations of the West appear to be suffering from problems similar to those that Fromm detailed as pre-revolutionary, and even pre-fascist scenarios. The sad fact is that in today’s “Western-style” democratic environment, qualities such as capability, honesty, humility, and foresight are no longer the primary factors that ultimately determine those who will run the country. Politics is now very much a game of popularity, charisma, money, and “spin.” Unfortunately, many of those who win such games concentrate on their own gain, as opposed to the welfare of the nation that elected them.
The freedoms that are shared by those living in a democratic society encourage the process of questioning the government and its leaders. Because questions involving popularity issues and political scandals often are highlighted for the world to see, the negative side of politics, the negative side of democracy, and thus, the negative side of freedom is exposed—especially to those who have been allowed to have knowledge only of that which their leaders deemed appropriate.71
These negative qualities are, perhaps, a large part of the propaganda problem that the United States faces in its efforts to change and befriend the Iraqi
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people. Feelings of dislike, distrust, and fear among the Arab community in general may be based on their perception that democracy, USA-style, is either superficial and decadent nonsense (and therefore weak), or yet another form of rule by wolves clothed as fellow sheep. The questions they ponder might well be: Why should the Iraqi people submit to a weaker form of government? And, in accepting Western dominance, are the Iraqi people simply trading one form of conformity and submission to oppression for another?72
The United States is an unknown factor. And as Fromm noted, fear of the unknown can be unbearable.
Regardless, an Iraqi democracy is essential, at this point. If the country is left to “sort itself out” the wolves will return and the Iraqi people will slide back into the oppressive, fascist structure they are used to. The people who publicly celebrated freedom will die, and they will die in vain.
Fromm wrote,
We fail to see the danger . . . [in] the readiness to accept any ideology and any leader, if only he promises excitement and offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual’s life. The despair of the human automaton is fertile soil for the purposes of Fascism.73
For democracy to take hold, an immense cultural change—a transformation—is needed, and submission and conformity to a framework of change are essential. The “invading superpower” must not show any weakness in resolve, for weakness will serve only to encourage the cultured sadomasochistic tendencies of the Iraqi people, and the new government will have little chance of succeeding.
The fact that democracy (as it exists) is not all that it should or could be may actually be a positive point in building a framework of change and a roadmap to transformation. A tight, strongly controlled democracy may provide critical linkage in the accomplishment of a “more free” society within Iraq. It could be argued that if Iraqis truly are looking for a “new bondage,” providing a social structure that can slowly evolve from one of tight control to one of less control (as in the manner that a child becomes slowly independent from his or her mother) may, in fact, be the only way to make the transformation from oppression to a state of democratic (albeit still limited) freedom.74 Although there will be substantial resistance, as the unknown factors become known there will be less fear; as the unempowered slowly become empowered, there will be less resistance. It worked for postwar Europe—it can work again for Iraq.75
Freedom in “e-Conformity”?
Fromm pointed out that peer pressure is a powerful force in gaining and retaining conformity, which will be a necessary and important tool in establishing a post-Saddam Iraqi democracy. But 21st-century peer pressure is somewhat different from that of the period with which Fromm was familiar. A more recent and powerful instrument in the crusade for conformity is a form of “techno-pressure.”
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The pressure today to conform to information technology is enormous. Every human being in Western society is being immersed in techno-babble so pervasive that hundreds of words can be immediately transformed and understood by simply adding “e” to the beginning. Any individual without an understanding of URLs, e-mail, digital cameras, and webpages has felt the onslaught of alienation. There is an unspoken implication that those who are left behind in this toddler stage of the web-world will be left behind forever. It is hard to imagine a more intense burden of powerlessness.
In a September 2002 conference held in London, a group of Iraqi opposition leaders suggested that educational reform such as that imposed on Nazi Germany would benefit the impending process of “de-Baathification.”76 The current reforms, according to the conference attendees, must include networked computers and encouraged use of the Internet.77 They also called on nongovernment organizations and educational institutions from other (notably Western) nations that had previously assisted the Iraqi people to resume their work within Iraq. Could education and “e-conformity” help the Iraqi people to conquer their fears and make the necessary steps in their transition to freedom?
The oppressed and disenfranchised within the nation of Serbia found the Internet to be the voice of political freedom. On 2 April 1999, the building in which OpenNet.org (Belgrade Radio B92’s Internet center) resided, was seized by Milosevic’s special police.78 Until that time, the Internet was the only constant propaganda-free method of obtaining untarnished news within Serbia. Even after the building was taken, supportive Internet sites were launched, proving that “the democratic nature of the Internet enables the army of anonymous users to sustain the fight for freedom of expression and democracy.”79
Perhaps the Internet—by virtue of being “vast” and “powerful” as well as a source of multicultural information and news—could become the new authority figure, an essential tool of freedom, and initiator of a sense of belonging. Perhaps the approach that is needed with the Iraqi people is not that of imposing a Western-style democracy, but that of an offer of participation in the global society via educated connectedness:
The other side (of masochism) is the attempt to become a part of a bigger and more powerful whole outside of oneself, to submerge and participate in it. . . . By becoming part of a power which is felt as unshakably strong, eternal, and glamorous, one participates in its strength and glory. One surrenders one’s own self and renounces all strength and pride connected with it, one loses one’s integrity as an individual and surrenders freedom; but one gains a new security and a new pride in the participation in the power in which one submerges. . . . The meaning of . . . life and the identity of . . . self are determined by the greater whole into which the self has submerged.80
Dr. Thomas Barnett of the US Naval War College suggests that network connectivity is a significant feature of “stable governments, rising standards of
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living, and more deaths by suicide than murder.”81 Those who are in what he describes as “the Non-Integrating Gap” are not networked and are characterized by “politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.” Barnett views those in “the Gap” as a strategic threat to global security.
Unfortunately, the Internet is not used solely for good or even benign purposes. Terrorist organizations, hate groups, and other criminals use the World Wide Web for recruiting, propaganda, and operational activities. Education provides no guarantee that a populace will reject malevolent or authoritarian ideas found in the “e-world”—but it may provide a basis on which to critique whatever ideas are discovered, with the Internet providing a forum to discuss them, as well as a feeling of freedom to do either without fear of political retribution. Providing educated connectivity to a formerly oppressed people may be a small step, but it will also be a strong one.
Freedom from Fear: Small Steps
Fromm did not despair in the futility of attempts to gain and retain freedom with individuality intact, although he knew only too well of the improbability of a society operating in pure, positive freedom. After World War II, he and his advocates turned to the future, and desperately hoped for a peaceful and unified coexistence. Fromm believed in the possibility of freedom in individual empowerment, obtainable under the auspices of a freedom-friendly, positive form of government. This is, perhaps, the best he could hope for.
In order to maintain a freedom-friendly government, conformity must not only exist, but it must be expected. Conformity is necessary for the maintenance of law and order, educational standards, public resources, and funding for continued governmental functions. Submission (for the same reasons) is considered imperative. However, the degree of freedom that exists within most democratic nations is significantly more than that which is allowed in totalitarian states.
The democratic ideal is that a populace in need of change can vote for a representative of that change. Therefore, feeling empowered enough to voice an opinion, the public should not have reason to feel disenfranchised or oppressed, or feel the need to resort to underground dissidence or violence.82 According to Fromm, there may be hope for those who have been oppressed, and therefore hope for the process of installing a productive form of government. Change may be very difficult for adults who have become ensconced in the authoritarian structure and the sadomasochistic environment83—it is, therefore, the children who will hold the key to a democratic future for Iraq. The children must be raised in a manner that encourages individuation84—breaking the ties of dependence while providing sufficient support to overcome and bear the fear of freedom. This
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will take a long time. It will require resolve. If the post-Saddam coalition government can provide a sustained environment that will act as “mother” and not as a “Big Brother” in the Orwellian sense, the Iraqi people may eventually become assimilated into a new social structure that includes freedom.
Fromm wrote, “The more the drive toward life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness.”85 Small but strong steps may be the key.
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NOTES
1. Michael Dobbs and Mike Allen, “Images of Death, Ruin Inflict Setback in Propaganda War: U.S. Officials Hope for Eventual Success in Swaying Opinion in Iraq, Rest of Arab World,” The Washington Post, 30 March 2003, p. 26.
2. Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks, “Battling for Hearts and Minds,” The Washington Post, 4 April 2003, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/archives/?nav=hpleft1.
3. CNN, “CNN Special: Inside the Regime,” 20 April 2003.
4. Ibid.; Nicholas D. Kristof, “A World Upside Down,” The New York Times, 11 April 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11KRIS.html.
5. Michael Dobbs, “Hussein Scores in Propaganda War: Iraqi President Battling to Win Arab Hearts and Minds, Experts Say,” The Washington Post, 25 March 2003, p. 13; Marc Santora, “A Nation at War: Opposition Groups; Fear Said to Be Keeping Iraqi Dissidents from Rebelling,” The New York Times, 26 March 2003, p. B-3.
6. Dobbs, “Hussein Scores in Propaganda War,” p. 13; David Ignatius, “Hussein’s Enforcers at Work,” The Washington Post, 29 March 2003, p. 17; David Rohde, “On Pain of Death, Iraqi Soldier Kept at It,” The New York Times, 3 April 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/internat...ial/03SOLD.html.
7. Peter Baker, “Arab Volunteers Draw U.S. Scrutiny,” Washingtonpost.com, 8 April 2003, http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/897677.asp; Associated Press, “Martyrdom Seekers Flock to Iraq, Setting Stage for Jihad,” Fox News, 30 March 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,82588,00.html; Associated Press, “Iraq War Sparks Jihad Debate in Saudi Arabia,” Fox News, 1 April 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_st...,82785,00.html; “Arab Volunteers Seek to Join Fight for Iraq,” The New York Times, 2 April 2003.
8. Neil MacFarquhar, “A Nation at War: The Islamic World; For Arabs, New Jihad Is in Iraq,” The New York Times, 2 April 2003; Don Van Natta, Jr., and Desmond Butler, “Threats and Responses: Terror Network; Anger on Iraq Seen as New Qaeda Recruiting Tool,” The New York Times, 16 March 2003.
9. Reuters, “Arabs Watch Hussein’s Demise in Disbelief,” The New York Times, 9 April 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/internation...bs-saddam.html; Todd Richissin, “On Arab TV, View of War Is Different than We See: Al-Jazeera Paints Hussein as Noble, Oil as U.S. Goal,” The Sun (Baltimore), 8 April 2003.
10. As Paul Berman notes, any suggestion that an “Arab country” could be compared to a European country raises tremendous controversy—especially among Arab nations. Paul Berman, “Learning Not to Love Saddam,” The New York Times, 31 March 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/31/opinion/31BERM.html.
11. Ibid.; Conference of the Iraqi Opposition, The Transition to Democracy in Iraq (Washington: Conference of the Iraqi Opposition, November 2002), http://www.iraqfoundation.org/studies/2002/dec/study.pdf.
12. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (rpt.; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1969 [original published in 1941]).
13. Individuation was defined by Fromm as “the growing process of the emergence of the individual from his original ties.” Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 24.
14. Ibid., pp. 35-36.
15. Ibid., p. 28.
16. This could be a root cause of what is currently referred to as “risk aversion.”
17. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 29.
18. Ibid., pp. 15-16.
19. Ibid., p. 18. This sentiment is also expressed within several scenarios noted in Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Fall of Berlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
20. Fromm described negative freedom as basically qualitative, seemingly contradictory elements involved in the acceptance and maintenance of freedom—social constraints that arise to alleviate the negative feelings (fear, isolation, powerlessness, etc.) associated with individuation. For instance, people in the United States are considered to be “free,” but they feel obligated to conform to commonly accepted regulations and laws; are often restrained in their freedom of speech by consideration for the psychological well-being of oth-
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ers; and continue to seek security, unity, and strength by affiliating with groups of people who have common interests, issues, or backgrounds. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 104-08, 255-57.
21. In spite of some missing animals in this philosophy, his theory has an immediately obvious correlation to a subset of individuals who overtly look for the security of external control over their lives. This group might include people who are institutionalized for various reasons (mental, physical, emotional, etc.), some who choose restrictive religious orders, and ex-prisoners who commit acts guaranteed to put them back in prison because prison has become their comfort zone. On a larger scale, reports from the former Soviet Union of large segments of society who desperately want to return to a pre-Gorbachev form of government lend substantial credence to Fromm’s theory.
22. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 112-13.
23. Ibid., p. 131.
24. Ibid., pp. 140-51.
25. Additionally, with freedom, the individual must accept responsibility for his or her own actions. The sadomasochistic symbiotic relationship provides a convenient escape from any sense of responsibility.
26. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 162. German psychoanalyst Alice Miller, in For Your Own Good, expanded on Fromm’s thesis in regard to pre-World War II Germany. Her belief, however, was that the strict and (according to her) largely abusive manner in which Germans had been taught to raise children for many centuries was the primary reason for the sadomasochistic authoritarian structure of German society. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (Toronto, Canada: Collins Publishers, 1984).
27. Hitler used the Jewish people to satisfy the German populace’s sadomasochistic desire to project power over a weaker opponent. Hussein used the Kurdish population in the same manner.
28. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 215.
29. Samir Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990).
30. The difference between the two (Hitler’s Germany and Saddam’s Iraq) is that when confronted by an invading force, the Iraqi military did not provide anywhere near the same level of resistance that was common of the German military. There are, of course, many reasons for this (differences in training, organizational sophistication, deception, etc.), but the most devastating blow to the Iraqi regime was the early loss of leadership—the elite (apparently) ran away. The resulting lack of authority or “freedom” (to which lower levels were completely unaccustomed) resulted in chaos.
31. Again, Alice Miller (For Your Own Good) describes destructiveness as an almost inevitable consequence of unresolved issues of child abuse. The victim ultimately gains strength and authority over others who are weaker, and victimizes them as an unconscious symbolic response to the original aggressor.
32. Fromm, Escape from Freedom.
33. Ibid., p. 177.
34. Headquarters, US Army Air Forces, Office of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Defeat (Washington: US Army Air Forces, January 1946.)
35. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 41.
36. Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 1997: Iraq, http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/aireport/ar97/MDE14.htm.
37. Samir Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear.
38. Ibid.; John F. Burns, “When the Enemy Is a Liberator,” The New York Times, 16 February 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/weekinreview/16BURN.html; CNN, “CNN Special: Inside the Regime”; Miller, For Your Own Good.
39. John H. Cushman, “A Nation at War: ‘Decisive Points’ in a Race to Baghdad,” The New York Times, 6 April 2003, p. B-16.
40. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 178.
41. This also could explain the looting and lawlessness that followed the liberation of Baghdad.
42. “Positive freedom” (Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 108) is what we, as individuals, all strive for. Fromm described this as “a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life” (p. 106); and as “the growth of an active, critical, responsible self” (p. 108). He stated that the only productive way to avoid collective feelings of powerlessness, alienation, and unworthiness—and the conflict situations that inevitably arise from those feelings—is to encourage connection of each individual to the world without eliminating individuality (p. 29). This will be the task of those who take on the responsibility of rebuilding a “free” Iraq.
43. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 179.
44. Conference of the Iraqi Opposition, The Transition to Democracy in Iraq.
45. The idea of self-suppression was later depicted in George Orwell’s 1984. Fromm discussed the suppression of self in an “Afterword” written for the Plume and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition of 1984. Fromm, “Afterword,” in George Orwell, 1984 (London: Plume, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955 [1983 Edition]), pp. 257-67; Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 202.
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46. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 207.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 208.
50. Orwell, 1984.
51. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 208-09. This sentiment is also noted in Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Fall of Berlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 159.
52. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 208-09.
53. Reuters, “Arabs Watch Hussein’s Demise in Disbelief,” The New York Times, 9 April 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/internation...bs-saddam.html; Richissin, “On Arab TV.”
54. Reuters, “Arabs Watch Hussein’s Demise in Disbelief,” The New York Times; Richissin, “On Arab TV”; Susan Sachs, “A Nation at War: Cairo: Egyptian Intellectual Speaks of the Arab World’s Despair,” The New York Times, 8 April 2003.
55. David P. Barash, Beloved Enemies: Our Need for Opponents (New York: Prometheus Books, 1994); Fromm, Escape from Freedom. Although the “Arab community” did not unite (militarily speaking) at the national level to actively resist the US and coalition forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the threat of terrorism and subsequent acts of terrorism have proven the effect of “unity through common enmity.”
56. Interviews with several German prisoners-of-war indicated that popular support for Hitler continued until the people discovered that they had been “deceived” and “misled”—after atrocities had been exposed. Headquarters, US Army Air Forces, Office of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Defeat.
57. Ibid.
58. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 229.
59. Samir Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear.
60. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 230-31.
61. Samir Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear.
62. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 170.
63. Ibid., p. 213.
64. Ibid., p. 248.
65. Ibid., p. 256.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., p. 257.
68. Ibid., p. 258.
69. Charles F. Andrain and David E. Apter, Political Protest and Social Change: Analyzing Politics (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York Univ. Press, 1995), p. 40.
70. Ibid.
71. Hollywood’s portrayal of US society and politics has not helped in this regard.
72. Indeed, this is what they will be told by authoritarian factions attempting to take control.
73. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 255.
74. The Iraqi people are still looking to someone of authority to provide for them. Whatever it is they need, they expect the incoming authority to give them. When the incoming authority does not provide, it is seen as weak, and the masses turn on the authority. As a group, the Iraqi people have yet to see what they can do to help themselves. If the authority figure provides, while simultaneously nurturing individual development, systemic change could become reality.
75. Berman, “Learning Not to Love Saddam.” It could be argued that Germany did not have the outside religious pressure to overthrow the victor and to install a theocracy. Because of this factor in regard to Iraq, more time and effort will be needed to ensure the existence of a stable democratic government before the interim governing system begins to pull up stakes.
76. Berman, “Learning Not to Love Saddam.”
77. Ibid.; Conference of the Iraqi Opposition, The Transition to Democracy in Iraq.
78. Drazen Pantic, “B92 of Belgrade: Free Voices on the Airwaves and the Internet,” Media Studies Journal, 13 (No. 3, 1999), 176-81.
79. Ibid., p. 181.
80. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 154-55.
81. Thomas P. M. Barnett, “The Pentagon’s New Map,” Esquire, March 2003, http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm.
82. Forrest Chisman and Alan Pifer, Government for the People; The Federal Social Role: What It Is – What It Should Be (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).
83. Miller, For Your Own Good.
84. Ibid.; Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 35-36.
85. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 182.
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Cynthia E. Ayers is the National Security Agency’s Visiting Professor of Information Superiority at the US Army War College. She has B.S. and M.P.A. degrees from Troy State University and is currently working on a Ph.D. from Walden University in criminal justice, focusing on counterterrorism.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...utumn/ayers.htm
A Frommian Perspective
CYNTHIA E. AYERS
Iraqi civilians were dancing and singing in the streets of Baghdad on the morning of 9 April 2003, while the American military consolidated efforts to secure the city. On that day it was obvious that Saddam Hussein had been deposed. In spite of the celebrations, however, coalition soldiers continued to meet opposition.
By then the world could clearly see that at least some Iraqis were happy to be free and eager to express their joy at the fall of the regime. But many within the coalition were surprised that these feelings had not been expressed throughout the preceding weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom.1 US forces moving north across Iraq toward Baghdad had been “greeted [by civilians] with violent hostility in some cities, flat indifference in others, and [only later] in some places, with open arms.”2
In the days that followed the initial celebrations in Baghdad, media attention was drawn to Iraqis protesting the American presence as well as those who welcomed the coalition soldiers. A CNN special entitled “Inside the Regime” highlighted Iraqis who worked at, yet lived in poverty next to, the billion-dollar palaces of their former leader.3 Even those with firsthand knowledge of the luxurious life led by Hussein and his family remained skeptical of the benefits of liberation. They wondered if the “security” of the regime was not better than the “lawlessness” of their post-Saddam world. They wanted water, electricity, and an end to rampant criminal activity—and most of all, it seemed, they wanted Americans to leave their country.4
Why were Iraqi citizens—many, if not most, of whom were cognizant of the regime’s atrocities—so reticent to welcome freedom as the coalition forces succeeded in liberating cities and villages? Fear, according to leading Iraqi exiles, was the most probable reason,5 fear of having to face the anger of the regime should the Americans not succeed. Fear of immediate reprisal also played a part. Iraqi POWs told stories of being forced to fight advancing American troops while re-
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gime elements and “Saddam Fedayeen” held guns to their heads and threatened the safety of their families.6 Reports from wounded Iraqi POWs, inspections of Iraqis who had been killed “in battle,” and live CNN coverage of refugees being fired at by Iraqi soldiers as they attempted to flee the cities lend credibility to these assertions. Fear, successful Iraqi propaganda, and a general disbelief in coalition capability to topple the regime and oust Saddam may have kept many from daring to hope for freedom.
These are all valid assertions, but they do not completely explain the willingness of some Iraqi military elements to continue to fight, even when they must have known there was no hope for the survival of the regime. Nor do they explain the enthusiasm displayed by Arab volunteers from other countries in declaring their intent to enter Iraq and fight for a regime that was known throughout the Arab world as abusive and cruel.7 Were they simply responding to the Arab community’s dislike of American intervention and Osama bin Laden’s call for recruits to the jihad?8 And how could the more moderate states of the Arab community claim to find Saddam’s government distasteful and murderous, yet publicize the war as an “imperial American invasion” and treat Saddam and his henchmen as if they were “champions” and potential martyrs?9 Why, when people are faced with a choice between pernicious, seemingly all-powerful dictatorships and liberty, would they fight to retain systems of oppression? Why would there be any question over the desirability of freedom?
Santayana’s famous warning (“those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”) may have been considered by war planners in seeking to predict Iraqi reactions to a liberating force, but the lessons to be learned in this case should not be limited to those gleaned only from conflict between Western elements and the country of Iraq, or even from East-West cultural differences. In September 2002, a group of Iraqi exiles boldly implied10 a comparison between Saddam’s regime and Nazi Germany.11 Certainly, Pan-Arabism is a form of fascism and Saddam shared many qualities with Hitler—the two even had similar experiences in their formative years. If the comparison between the two rulers and regimes is indeed valid, perhaps the answers we seek can be found in an analysis of fascist tendencies in early 20th-century Europe.
Fear of Freedom: Submission and Conformity
German-born social psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm reported a phenomenon he called “fear of freedom” over 60 years ago. When Fromm published his theory (Escape from Freedom, 1941),12 he was living and
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writing in the United States, where European fascism was a predominant thought on the minds of many. Those who fought for freedom in World War I were undoubtedly frustrated by what seemed to be a European readiness to succumb to authoritarian regimes.
In analyzing socioeconomic and sociopolitical problems of Europe during the emergence of fascism, Fromm came to the conclusion that individuals, and therefore societies, have an innate tendency to revert to systems of political and cultural restraint rather than to take advantage of opportunities for freedom or emancipation—and that they may actually seek out governments to control them rather than face the prospect of individual freedom. Fromm’s explanation for this type of reversion was seen in the following assertion:
If the economic, social, and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation13 depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality . . . [and] people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life that lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.14
The basis of Fromm’s theory was his belief that societies, like individuals, progress through a series of feelings of security and insecurity during the process of growing. He likened an individual’s dependence upon the society to which he or she was born to that of a child’s dependence upon its mother. These dependencies are gradually lost, or “the primary ties are cut”15 as independence and freedom is sought. However, even as the desire for freedom encourages this separation, feelings of alienation, weakness, and insecurity are growing simultaneously.16 It is at this point, Fromm believed, that the individual forms a fear of the freedom that is so desired.
During the process of growing and establishing freedom from the ties of initial dependence, attempts are made “to overcome the feeling[s] of aloneness and powerlessness by completely submerging oneself in the world outside.”17 If, however, the individual encounters suppression or oppression, the effective result is submission and fear of the process of achieving individuality and freedom.
Expanding on this assertion, Fromm maintained that the extent to which an individual develops (or individuation occurs) is largely dependent on the type of economic and social structure to which the individual was born. Behavior consistent with self-preservation within an individual’s economic system or society explains the determination of an individual’s character structure, which, in turn, substantiates and magnifies the character structure of the society, according to Fromm.18 In this circuitous manner, an explanation was proposed for societies with a seemingly predisposed willingness to submit to forms of authoritarian rule as opposed to those societies with a much more substantial resistance.
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Fromm stressed the need for an individual to be a part of a larger whole as a factor in the formation of societal character. This need, according to Fromm, is a form of mental self-preservation, similar to the basic need for sustenance. “Even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.”19 Thus, as people gain a measured sense of individualism and freedom, they are pushed by an uncontrollable drive to join with others, thereby obtaining security in society, even at the expense of individual freedom. This was, according to Fromm, “the negative side of freedom” (or “negative freedom”).20
Included in the concept of negative freedom was the societal constraint of conformity. Conformity encompasses all of the conscious and self-conscious actions and feelings experienced in the spirit of social assimilation. The fear of being unique, of thinking or acting differently, of standing out in a crowd, can be a debilitating fear—especially when “standing out” might mean torture or death of self or loved-ones.
For conformity and submission to exist within a society, there must be a corresponding need to find security in authority and power. For example, authority and power might be determined by ownership of land and wealth or by the accumulation of business or political strength. Those without land gain security by belonging to groups, organizations, or cultures, and may obtain a feeling of power by discriminating or oppressing other groups, organizations, or cultures. Those with land act in a manner that displays superiority to those without, but may feel inferior in regard to those with monetary wealth. The cash-rich may, in turn, feel inferior when compared to a high-level business executive, who may feel less than adequate when confronted with political power. The feeling of superiority over other persons or groups becomes the ultimate objective in the search for the security that is found in power. Limitations on power are dependent on societal character structure, which is (as previously noted) determined by behavior consistent with self-preservation within the socio-economic system.
Fromm believed that people live in bipolar societies. His characterizations of the individuals within a society might be anthropomorphically ascribed to sheep and wolves, with the wolves lined up on a spectrum of power lust or madness, from a category of good to bad. Sheep could be classified in categories from acquiescent to willing. All (sheep and wolves), according to Fromm’s the-
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ory, are motivated by feelings of insecurity, alienation, powerlessness, isolation, and fear.21 Fromm’s contention was that:
In any society the spirit of the whole culture is determined by the spirit of those groups that are most powerful in that society . . . partly because these groups have the power to control the educational system, schools, church, press, theater, and thereby to imbue the whole population with their own ideas; furthermore, these powerful groups carry so much prestige that the lower classes are more than ready to accept and imitate their values and to identify themselves psychologically.22
Fromm pictured the masses (the sheep) as being overwhelmed by powerful propaganda (initiated by the wolves), which serves to increase the feeling of insignificance and powerlessness, and increase their willingness to submit.23
In discussing what he considered to be an “escape” into submission to an authoritarian type of leadership, Fromm described the individual as exhibiting masochistic tendencies—an unconscious need to act in a manner that invites external control.24 He depicted the sadistic tendencies of an authoritarian leader as stemming from the same escapist feelings. He postulated that the sadistic leader was attempting to gain strength and identity by creating an image of being bound to a greater whole, such as that of the state. Contrary to popular belief, the sadist and the masochist, according to Fromm, have the same character structure. Both exist in a symbiotic relationship that guarantees escape from freedom—because freedom elicits feelings of alienation and powerlessness.25
Fromm portrayed fascism as a perfect example of the sadomasochistic symbiotic relationship that could be exhibited in the entire character structure of a society. He declared that there were “great parts of the lower middle class in Germany and other European countries [in which] the sadomasochistic character is typical.”26 This type of society, according to Fromm, has a strong desire to submit to an overwhelmingly strong authority, while simultaneously needing to be seen and treated as an authority figure among other social groups, thus sustaining a hierarchy of power.27
Adolf Hitler was seen by Fromm as the embodiment of the sadomasochistic authoritarian.28 Fromm described how Hitler understood and used the need for security and the desire to escape from freedom via submission to a higher authority. He recognized Hitler’s use of the domineering style of oratory as well as the brainwashing techniques that are now known to be used in conjunction with fear, physical exhaustion, alienation, subsequent group assimilation, and the formation of a social structure in which group superiority over others is emphasized.
There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein and his “power-elite” used these techniques with the Iraqi people29 (although perhaps with less sophistication). Fromm would have had no compunction in describing Hussein as a “sadomasochistic authoritarian” on a par with Hitler. Nor would Fromm have had any trouble depicting the Iraqi people as sheepishly submissive and compliant (to
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their wolfish authoritarian leader)—but equally sadomasochistic in their willingness to conform to a social hierarchy in which feelings of superiority over others (such as the Kurdish minority internally or Americans and Israelis externally) were encouraged.30
Fear of Freedom: Destroying That Which Is Feared
According to Fromm, feelings of alienation, isolation, and powerlessness can also result in destructiveness.31 In Iraq, this destructiveness is currently presented as opposition to those who have upset the status quo—those who liberated the Iraqi population from the security of a more-or-less constant (however oppressive) lifestyle. These liberators also upset the hierarchy of superiority—thus increasing feelings of powerlessness. The tendency to resort to destructiveness in order to alleviate unsavory insecure (or “unbearable”) feelings is irrational, can be obsessive, and may ultimately result in a desire for total annihilation.32
Fromm described this simply in the statement, “I can escape the feeling of my own powerlessness in comparison with the world outside of myself by destroying it.”33 After World War II, many imprisoned Nazi officers reported that Hitler’s destructive behavior caused him to pursue targets (regardless of common sense, human decency, and reason) when German military might was not yet up to the task and that “success” reinforced his belief in his own superiority over the general staff.34 This same behavior kept him from obtaining correct information in reference to military matters, since the generals who reported to him feared for their careers (and often, their lives) if Hitler did not receive the information he wanted to hear. In August 1945, German prisoner of war General Lemelsen noted that Hitler “never clearly recognized that Germany alone would eventually . . . have to succumb to the superiority of its enemies and that he did not seek means when this became apparent to end the war, but rather delivered the people to complete destruction.”35
The actions of and decisions made by Saddam Hussein before and during Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom were eerily reminiscent of the reports provided by Hitler’s officers. Although the Iraqi military was well-armed, Saddam obviously had been misinformed about his military’s effectiveness in battle. The cold-blooded killing of Saddam’s sons-in-law—Lieutenant-General Hussain Kamel al-Majid and his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Saddam Kamel—after their return from defection in February 199636 as well as purges instituted by Saddam after his assumption of control in 197937 provide testimony of the fear that was no doubt felt by both military and civilian leaders. Reportedly, long before he took control of Iraq, Saddam’s world was characterized by an obsessively destructive nature. His early childhood of poverty, abuse, and neglect undoubtedly aroused feelings of alienation, isolation, and powerlessness, which were magnified by the culture in which he lived. These circumstances may have been a catalyst for the ruthless behavior he displayed in adulthood38 as well as the deliv-
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ery of his own people to what must have appeared to them to be certain destruction (just as Hitler had done). The intelligence organizations of the coalition obviously had this destructive tendency in mind while planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom’s “race to Baghdad.”39 If Saddam did (as it was believed) have readily available weapons of mass destruction, the use of such would have been in keeping with Saddam’s character profile (as proposed by Fromm).
Fromm delineated a particular type of destructiveness—a pernicious form of continual, subdued, fervent hostility that “waits only for an opportunity to be expressed”40—that could be equated to terrorism.41 This, Fromm believed, evolves from a lack of individual empowerment, the inability of an individual to express self, and the absence of positive freedom.42 Fromm referred to it as a “thwarting of life.”43 Hitler’s Nazi party manipulated and used this type of destructive behavior to further its aims. In utilizing Iraqi people as suicide bombers and front-line martyrs to his own cause, Saddam also was guilty of this practice.
This “thwarting of life” may be the biggest challenge to the new Iraqi government (temporary or permanent). Average citizens of Iraq have been without a sense of individual empowerment for most if not all of their lives.44 Their newly found freedom will give them opportunities to express their destructive tendencies born as a consequence of severe oppression. Ironically, as Fromm noted, the destruction most likely will be aimed at those who offer freedom—the freedom which brings with it feelings of insecurity and powerlessness, the freedom of not knowing what to do or when to do it—fueled by resentment of a new structure that does not possess the power to instill the level of fear that the populous had lived with for many years.
Fear of Freedom: Destroying “Self”
Fromm also discussed a form of mental self-destruction. He noted that an illusory result of the hunt for escape from aloneness and anxiety was the deletion, or at a minimum, a strong suppression of one’s real self and the subsequent replacement with what he called a “pseudo self.”45 This pseudo self or superficial self eases into the security of conformity, submission, and identity with a “larger whole.” Fromm argued that conformity and submission of the pseudo self was evident in the “part of the [European] population [that] bowed to the Nazi regime without any strong resistance, but also without becoming admirers of the Nazi ideology and political practice.”46 This subset was made up “of the working class and the liberal . . . bourgeoisie.”47 These groups, while initially hostile to the Nazi party, collectively dropped their resistance in the interests of hiding within the security found in conformity and submission. Fromm cited a “state of inner tiredness and resignation.”48
Fromm noted that in Germany during the 1930s, the working class developed a strong “feeling of resignation, of disbelief in their leaders, of doubt about the value of any kind of political organization and activity. . . . Deep within themselves many had given up any hope in the effectiveness of political ac-
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tion.”49 Thus they suppressed or destroyed their questioning, rebellious, hopeful selves. It is, perhaps, this feeling of doubt and hopelessness—and the conditioned suppression of self—that keeps much of the Iraqi people from embracing their liberators. In their minds, trading conformity and submission from one form of leadership (with which they are familiar) to another (with which they have no frame of reference) may have an associated cost that they are not willing, or do not have the energy and enthusiasm (or the remaining sense of “self”), to pay. Therefore, it becomes a matter of “better the devil you know”—and in this case, the devil is an authoritarian regime.
But resignation to a devil is one thing—actively fighting for him is another. Fromm observed that an interesting psychological aspect of the suppression of self is the individual’s transference of identity to a larger whole (also noted in Orwell’s 1984).50 Although working-class members of Hitler’s Germany did not self-identify with the Nazi image, they did identify strongly with their country. Hitler and the Nazi party virtually became Germany:51
It can be observed in many instances that persons who are not Nazis nevertheless defend Nazism against criticism of foreigners because they feel that an attack on Nazis is an attack on Germany. . . . This consideration results in an axiom which is important for the problems of political propaganda: any attack on Germany as such, any defamatory propaganda concerning “the Germans” . . . only increases the loyalty of those who are not wholly identified with the Nazi system.52
Consistent with this mindset is the support that Saddam Hussein received from the Arab media and community at large,53 as well as from many of the Iraqi people. They apparently did not see Operation Iraqi Freedom as an attempt to liberate Iraq and the Middle East of a cruel, inhuman dictator—they believed that America was launching an unprovoked attack against Iraq, the Iraqi people, and therefore, the “Arab nation.”54 An attack against Saddam was an attack against the entire Arab community. Saddam (or Saddam’s regime) was therefore able to gain psychological support and regime-sustaining strength in a unifying effect resulting from the focus on a common enmity.55
As combat troops raced through Iraq, most overt anti-leadership sentiment was noted only after a notably conspicuous absence, desertion, or demise of
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regime leaders. Similarly, general dislike for Hitler and the Nazi regime became evident only after the war was lost and Hitler had committed suicide.56 Although the reticence of the oppressed to display distaste for the oppressors is obviously influenced by fear of torture or death, it also can be explained as an attempt by those who have lost their concept of self to gain security by being part of a larger whole—an attempt at unity via nationalism or, in this case, Pan-Arabism and common enmity.57
Fear of Freedom: Survival of the Fittest
Characteristic of the authoritarian sadomasochist, Hitler began his crusade on the heels of and surrounded by those he considered inferior,58 as did Saddam Hussein.59 The achievement of ultimate power was their driving force. This quest for world domination was, to Hitler, justified as the ultimate realization of Darwin’s theory of survival of the strong over the weak:
The love for the powerful and the hatred for the powerless which is so typical for the sado-masochistic character explains a great deal of Hitler’s and his followers’ political actions. While the [Weimar] Republican government thought they could “appease” the Nazis by treating them leniently, they not only failed to appease them but aroused their hatred by the very lack of power and firmness they showed. Hitler hated the Weimar Republic because [italics added] it was weak, and he admired the industrial and military leaders because they had power. He never fought against established strong power but always against groups which he thought to be essentially powerless. Hitler’s—and for that matter Mussolini’s—“revolution” happened under protection of existing power, and their favorite objects were those who could not defend themselves.60
In other words, fascist power (like the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing) has historically been aided and abetted (albeit unconsciously) by the weaker government it eventually replaced. One can see parallels in Saddam’s rise to power. Many who supported him long before he assumed control of Iraq (when he ousted a man of “close family connections” and placed him under house arrest) were later executed.61
The manner in which both Mussolini and Hitler fell from power (in the minds of those who were ruled by them) was consistent with Fromm’s depiction of a mutual sadomasochistic relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor. In Fromm’s descriptions of the authoritarian character, one could extrapolate a tendency of totalitarian societies to implode. The sadomasochistic personality sees “lack of power . . . [as] an unmistakable sign of guilt and inferiority, and if the authority . . . shows signs of weakness, his love and respect change into contempt and hatred.”62 Thus, Fromm explained the basis of Mussolini’s fate at the hands of his followers in 1945, Hitler’s problems with his trusted elite toward the end of the war—and the toppling of statues as well as the plethora of shoes slapping the face of any accessible image of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
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The celebrations of 9 April 2003 and the displays of hatred toward Saddam and his henchmen noted in the days that followed were completely consistent with the sadomasochistic tendencies that were carefully cultured within the Iraqi social structure during Saddam’s reign. As the ruling elite of Saddam’s Iraq hid or ran, they showed themselves to be weak. Weakness in the authority figure, according to Fromm, elicits reactions of confusion, rebellion, and destruction.63 Weakness is seen as submission—as an invitation to a more powerful authority to take control. The result of weakness displayed by the authority figure is either chaos (while others attempt to gain control) or a coup (with authority quickly transferred to another recognized power).
Fear of Freedom: Can Democracy Succeed in Iraq?
Fromm concluded his thesis by insisting that “authoritarian systems cannot do away with the basic conditions that make for the quest for freedom; neither can they exterminate the quest for freedom that springs from these conditions.”64 Based on this conclusion, there may be hope for an Iraqi democracy. But Fromm also asserted that democracy faces the same basic problems as autocracy. The desire to escape freedom, the fear of alienation and powerlessness, the pressure and expectation of conformity, the suppression of individuality, and the loss of the unique self are all noted within the modern democratic society. Individuals join groups (political, social, economic, etc.), thereby individually satisfying the need to escape freedom. These institutions need to be carefully nurtured within the new post-Saddam Iraq.
Fromm argued that the fear of freedom leads to “new bondage.”65 But he also postulated “a state of positive freedom in which the individual exists as an independent self and yet is not isolated but united with the world, with other men, and nature.”66 He believed that positive freedom could be achieved if people are given the opportunity to express themselves as individuals. The ultimate objective is free, action-oriented critical thinking and free emotional reasoning.
“Positive freedom consists in the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality.”67 In equating positive freedom to spontaneous activity, Fromm claimed that the only allowable spontaneous activity in modern society is that which is recognized as successful. Thus, as he described it, the artist who “does not succeed in selling the art . . . remains to his contemporaries a crank, a ‘neurotic.’ [Similarly] the successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.”68 But Fromm emphasized that success is not the point of life, and therefore not the point of positive freedom. Positive freedom must include the empowerment of individuals to contribute to the society in which they reside. The ability to propose and to make unique contributions without fear of suppression or oppression, without the fear of being isolated for reasons of nonconformity, gives an individual strength and confidence, and allows for intellectual and emotional growth.
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Fromm’s concept of the ideal society, in which positive freedom is the only kind of freedom, was tied to his hopes for democracy. He saw the greatest possibilities in democratic socialism, which extolled the virtues of “the individual as . . . altruistic and cooperative. The individual finds meaning in the community, not in the atomized conditions prevailing under capitalism.”69 The aims of democratic socialism are the equality of each individual’s treatment by government in terms of respect and dignity, combined with a politico-economic system that allows substantial participation by every individual (as opposed to a substantial participation by an elite few and a superficial participation by the majority). Fromm’s concept of positive freedom finds voice in this type of “socialist society governed by democratic procedures.”70
Unfortunately, Fromm’s ideal has yet to be achieved. Democracy (social, liberal, or otherwise) has lived a long and prosperous life, but the concept has not yet lived up to the hopes Fromm placed in it. It can be considered the best governmental system known to exist to this point in time, but there are points of contention as to how “free” and “empowered” individuals within the system really are. Much depends on circumstance and on decisions made by fallible individuals (which can have resulting unintended consequences). In general, the major democratic nations of the West appear to be suffering from problems similar to those that Fromm detailed as pre-revolutionary, and even pre-fascist scenarios. The sad fact is that in today’s “Western-style” democratic environment, qualities such as capability, honesty, humility, and foresight are no longer the primary factors that ultimately determine those who will run the country. Politics is now very much a game of popularity, charisma, money, and “spin.” Unfortunately, many of those who win such games concentrate on their own gain, as opposed to the welfare of the nation that elected them.
The freedoms that are shared by those living in a democratic society encourage the process of questioning the government and its leaders. Because questions involving popularity issues and political scandals often are highlighted for the world to see, the negative side of politics, the negative side of democracy, and thus, the negative side of freedom is exposed—especially to those who have been allowed to have knowledge only of that which their leaders deemed appropriate.71
These negative qualities are, perhaps, a large part of the propaganda problem that the United States faces in its efforts to change and befriend the Iraqi
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people. Feelings of dislike, distrust, and fear among the Arab community in general may be based on their perception that democracy, USA-style, is either superficial and decadent nonsense (and therefore weak), or yet another form of rule by wolves clothed as fellow sheep. The questions they ponder might well be: Why should the Iraqi people submit to a weaker form of government? And, in accepting Western dominance, are the Iraqi people simply trading one form of conformity and submission to oppression for another?72
The United States is an unknown factor. And as Fromm noted, fear of the unknown can be unbearable.
Regardless, an Iraqi democracy is essential, at this point. If the country is left to “sort itself out” the wolves will return and the Iraqi people will slide back into the oppressive, fascist structure they are used to. The people who publicly celebrated freedom will die, and they will die in vain.
Fromm wrote,
We fail to see the danger . . . [in] the readiness to accept any ideology and any leader, if only he promises excitement and offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual’s life. The despair of the human automaton is fertile soil for the purposes of Fascism.73
For democracy to take hold, an immense cultural change—a transformation—is needed, and submission and conformity to a framework of change are essential. The “invading superpower” must not show any weakness in resolve, for weakness will serve only to encourage the cultured sadomasochistic tendencies of the Iraqi people, and the new government will have little chance of succeeding.
The fact that democracy (as it exists) is not all that it should or could be may actually be a positive point in building a framework of change and a roadmap to transformation. A tight, strongly controlled democracy may provide critical linkage in the accomplishment of a “more free” society within Iraq. It could be argued that if Iraqis truly are looking for a “new bondage,” providing a social structure that can slowly evolve from one of tight control to one of less control (as in the manner that a child becomes slowly independent from his or her mother) may, in fact, be the only way to make the transformation from oppression to a state of democratic (albeit still limited) freedom.74 Although there will be substantial resistance, as the unknown factors become known there will be less fear; as the unempowered slowly become empowered, there will be less resistance. It worked for postwar Europe—it can work again for Iraq.75
Freedom in “e-Conformity”?
Fromm pointed out that peer pressure is a powerful force in gaining and retaining conformity, which will be a necessary and important tool in establishing a post-Saddam Iraqi democracy. But 21st-century peer pressure is somewhat different from that of the period with which Fromm was familiar. A more recent and powerful instrument in the crusade for conformity is a form of “techno-pressure.”
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The pressure today to conform to information technology is enormous. Every human being in Western society is being immersed in techno-babble so pervasive that hundreds of words can be immediately transformed and understood by simply adding “e” to the beginning. Any individual without an understanding of URLs, e-mail, digital cameras, and webpages has felt the onslaught of alienation. There is an unspoken implication that those who are left behind in this toddler stage of the web-world will be left behind forever. It is hard to imagine a more intense burden of powerlessness.
In a September 2002 conference held in London, a group of Iraqi opposition leaders suggested that educational reform such as that imposed on Nazi Germany would benefit the impending process of “de-Baathification.”76 The current reforms, according to the conference attendees, must include networked computers and encouraged use of the Internet.77 They also called on nongovernment organizations and educational institutions from other (notably Western) nations that had previously assisted the Iraqi people to resume their work within Iraq. Could education and “e-conformity” help the Iraqi people to conquer their fears and make the necessary steps in their transition to freedom?
The oppressed and disenfranchised within the nation of Serbia found the Internet to be the voice of political freedom. On 2 April 1999, the building in which OpenNet.org (Belgrade Radio B92’s Internet center) resided, was seized by Milosevic’s special police.78 Until that time, the Internet was the only constant propaganda-free method of obtaining untarnished news within Serbia. Even after the building was taken, supportive Internet sites were launched, proving that “the democratic nature of the Internet enables the army of anonymous users to sustain the fight for freedom of expression and democracy.”79
Perhaps the Internet—by virtue of being “vast” and “powerful” as well as a source of multicultural information and news—could become the new authority figure, an essential tool of freedom, and initiator of a sense of belonging. Perhaps the approach that is needed with the Iraqi people is not that of imposing a Western-style democracy, but that of an offer of participation in the global society via educated connectedness:
The other side (of masochism) is the attempt to become a part of a bigger and more powerful whole outside of oneself, to submerge and participate in it. . . . By becoming part of a power which is felt as unshakably strong, eternal, and glamorous, one participates in its strength and glory. One surrenders one’s own self and renounces all strength and pride connected with it, one loses one’s integrity as an individual and surrenders freedom; but one gains a new security and a new pride in the participation in the power in which one submerges. . . . The meaning of . . . life and the identity of . . . self are determined by the greater whole into which the self has submerged.80
Dr. Thomas Barnett of the US Naval War College suggests that network connectivity is a significant feature of “stable governments, rising standards of
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living, and more deaths by suicide than murder.”81 Those who are in what he describes as “the Non-Integrating Gap” are not networked and are characterized by “politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.” Barnett views those in “the Gap” as a strategic threat to global security.
Unfortunately, the Internet is not used solely for good or even benign purposes. Terrorist organizations, hate groups, and other criminals use the World Wide Web for recruiting, propaganda, and operational activities. Education provides no guarantee that a populace will reject malevolent or authoritarian ideas found in the “e-world”—but it may provide a basis on which to critique whatever ideas are discovered, with the Internet providing a forum to discuss them, as well as a feeling of freedom to do either without fear of political retribution. Providing educated connectivity to a formerly oppressed people may be a small step, but it will also be a strong one.
Freedom from Fear: Small Steps
Fromm did not despair in the futility of attempts to gain and retain freedom with individuality intact, although he knew only too well of the improbability of a society operating in pure, positive freedom. After World War II, he and his advocates turned to the future, and desperately hoped for a peaceful and unified coexistence. Fromm believed in the possibility of freedom in individual empowerment, obtainable under the auspices of a freedom-friendly, positive form of government. This is, perhaps, the best he could hope for.
In order to maintain a freedom-friendly government, conformity must not only exist, but it must be expected. Conformity is necessary for the maintenance of law and order, educational standards, public resources, and funding for continued governmental functions. Submission (for the same reasons) is considered imperative. However, the degree of freedom that exists within most democratic nations is significantly more than that which is allowed in totalitarian states.
The democratic ideal is that a populace in need of change can vote for a representative of that change. Therefore, feeling empowered enough to voice an opinion, the public should not have reason to feel disenfranchised or oppressed, or feel the need to resort to underground dissidence or violence.82 According to Fromm, there may be hope for those who have been oppressed, and therefore hope for the process of installing a productive form of government. Change may be very difficult for adults who have become ensconced in the authoritarian structure and the sadomasochistic environment83—it is, therefore, the children who will hold the key to a democratic future for Iraq. The children must be raised in a manner that encourages individuation84—breaking the ties of dependence while providing sufficient support to overcome and bear the fear of freedom. This
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will take a long time. It will require resolve. If the post-Saddam coalition government can provide a sustained environment that will act as “mother” and not as a “Big Brother” in the Orwellian sense, the Iraqi people may eventually become assimilated into a new social structure that includes freedom.
Fromm wrote, “The more the drive toward life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness.”85 Small but strong steps may be the key.
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NOTES
1. Michael Dobbs and Mike Allen, “Images of Death, Ruin Inflict Setback in Propaganda War: U.S. Officials Hope for Eventual Success in Swaying Opinion in Iraq, Rest of Arab World,” The Washington Post, 30 March 2003, p. 26.
2. Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks, “Battling for Hearts and Minds,” The Washington Post, 4 April 2003, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/archives/?nav=hpleft1.
3. CNN, “CNN Special: Inside the Regime,” 20 April 2003.
4. Ibid.; Nicholas D. Kristof, “A World Upside Down,” The New York Times, 11 April 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11KRIS.html.
5. Michael Dobbs, “Hussein Scores in Propaganda War: Iraqi President Battling to Win Arab Hearts and Minds, Experts Say,” The Washington Post, 25 March 2003, p. 13; Marc Santora, “A Nation at War: Opposition Groups; Fear Said to Be Keeping Iraqi Dissidents from Rebelling,” The New York Times, 26 March 2003, p. B-3.
6. Dobbs, “Hussein Scores in Propaganda War,” p. 13; David Ignatius, “Hussein’s Enforcers at Work,” The Washington Post, 29 March 2003, p. 17; David Rohde, “On Pain of Death, Iraqi Soldier Kept at It,” The New York Times, 3 April 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/internat...ial/03SOLD.html.
7. Peter Baker, “Arab Volunteers Draw U.S. Scrutiny,” Washingtonpost.com, 8 April 2003, http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/897677.asp; Associated Press, “Martyrdom Seekers Flock to Iraq, Setting Stage for Jihad,” Fox News, 30 March 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,82588,00.html; Associated Press, “Iraq War Sparks Jihad Debate in Saudi Arabia,” Fox News, 1 April 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_st...,82785,00.html; “Arab Volunteers Seek to Join Fight for Iraq,” The New York Times, 2 April 2003.
8. Neil MacFarquhar, “A Nation at War: The Islamic World; For Arabs, New Jihad Is in Iraq,” The New York Times, 2 April 2003; Don Van Natta, Jr., and Desmond Butler, “Threats and Responses: Terror Network; Anger on Iraq Seen as New Qaeda Recruiting Tool,” The New York Times, 16 March 2003.
9. Reuters, “Arabs Watch Hussein’s Demise in Disbelief,” The New York Times, 9 April 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/internation...bs-saddam.html; Todd Richissin, “On Arab TV, View of War Is Different than We See: Al-Jazeera Paints Hussein as Noble, Oil as U.S. Goal,” The Sun (Baltimore), 8 April 2003.
10. As Paul Berman notes, any suggestion that an “Arab country” could be compared to a European country raises tremendous controversy—especially among Arab nations. Paul Berman, “Learning Not to Love Saddam,” The New York Times, 31 March 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/31/opinion/31BERM.html.
11. Ibid.; Conference of the Iraqi Opposition, The Transition to Democracy in Iraq (Washington: Conference of the Iraqi Opposition, November 2002), http://www.iraqfoundation.org/studies/2002/dec/study.pdf.
12. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (rpt.; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1969 [original published in 1941]).
13. Individuation was defined by Fromm as “the growing process of the emergence of the individual from his original ties.” Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 24.
14. Ibid., pp. 35-36.
15. Ibid., p. 28.
16. This could be a root cause of what is currently referred to as “risk aversion.”
17. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 29.
18. Ibid., pp. 15-16.
19. Ibid., p. 18. This sentiment is also expressed within several scenarios noted in Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Fall of Berlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
20. Fromm described negative freedom as basically qualitative, seemingly contradictory elements involved in the acceptance and maintenance of freedom—social constraints that arise to alleviate the negative feelings (fear, isolation, powerlessness, etc.) associated with individuation. For instance, people in the United States are considered to be “free,” but they feel obligated to conform to commonly accepted regulations and laws; are often restrained in their freedom of speech by consideration for the psychological well-being of oth-
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ers; and continue to seek security, unity, and strength by affiliating with groups of people who have common interests, issues, or backgrounds. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 104-08, 255-57.
21. In spite of some missing animals in this philosophy, his theory has an immediately obvious correlation to a subset of individuals who overtly look for the security of external control over their lives. This group might include people who are institutionalized for various reasons (mental, physical, emotional, etc.), some who choose restrictive religious orders, and ex-prisoners who commit acts guaranteed to put them back in prison because prison has become their comfort zone. On a larger scale, reports from the former Soviet Union of large segments of society who desperately want to return to a pre-Gorbachev form of government lend substantial credence to Fromm’s theory.
22. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 112-13.
23. Ibid., p. 131.
24. Ibid., pp. 140-51.
25. Additionally, with freedom, the individual must accept responsibility for his or her own actions. The sadomasochistic symbiotic relationship provides a convenient escape from any sense of responsibility.
26. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 162. German psychoanalyst Alice Miller, in For Your Own Good, expanded on Fromm’s thesis in regard to pre-World War II Germany. Her belief, however, was that the strict and (according to her) largely abusive manner in which Germans had been taught to raise children for many centuries was the primary reason for the sadomasochistic authoritarian structure of German society. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (Toronto, Canada: Collins Publishers, 1984).
27. Hitler used the Jewish people to satisfy the German populace’s sadomasochistic desire to project power over a weaker opponent. Hussein used the Kurdish population in the same manner.
28. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 215.
29. Samir Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990).
30. The difference between the two (Hitler’s Germany and Saddam’s Iraq) is that when confronted by an invading force, the Iraqi military did not provide anywhere near the same level of resistance that was common of the German military. There are, of course, many reasons for this (differences in training, organizational sophistication, deception, etc.), but the most devastating blow to the Iraqi regime was the early loss of leadership—the elite (apparently) ran away. The resulting lack of authority or “freedom” (to which lower levels were completely unaccustomed) resulted in chaos.
31. Again, Alice Miller (For Your Own Good) describes destructiveness as an almost inevitable consequence of unresolved issues of child abuse. The victim ultimately gains strength and authority over others who are weaker, and victimizes them as an unconscious symbolic response to the original aggressor.
32. Fromm, Escape from Freedom.
33. Ibid., p. 177.
34. Headquarters, US Army Air Forces, Office of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Defeat (Washington: US Army Air Forces, January 1946.)
35. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 41.
36. Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 1997: Iraq, http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/aireport/ar97/MDE14.htm.
37. Samir Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear.
38. Ibid.; John F. Burns, “When the Enemy Is a Liberator,” The New York Times, 16 February 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/weekinreview/16BURN.html; CNN, “CNN Special: Inside the Regime”; Miller, For Your Own Good.
39. John H. Cushman, “A Nation at War: ‘Decisive Points’ in a Race to Baghdad,” The New York Times, 6 April 2003, p. B-16.
40. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 178.
41. This also could explain the looting and lawlessness that followed the liberation of Baghdad.
42. “Positive freedom” (Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 108) is what we, as individuals, all strive for. Fromm described this as “a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life” (p. 106); and as “the growth of an active, critical, responsible self” (p. 108). He stated that the only productive way to avoid collective feelings of powerlessness, alienation, and unworthiness—and the conflict situations that inevitably arise from those feelings—is to encourage connection of each individual to the world without eliminating individuality (p. 29). This will be the task of those who take on the responsibility of rebuilding a “free” Iraq.
43. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 179.
44. Conference of the Iraqi Opposition, The Transition to Democracy in Iraq.
45. The idea of self-suppression was later depicted in George Orwell’s 1984. Fromm discussed the suppression of self in an “Afterword” written for the Plume and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition of 1984. Fromm, “Afterword,” in George Orwell, 1984 (London: Plume, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955 [1983 Edition]), pp. 257-67; Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 202.
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46. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 207.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 208.
50. Orwell, 1984.
51. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 208-09. This sentiment is also noted in Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Fall of Berlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 159.
52. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 208-09.
53. Reuters, “Arabs Watch Hussein’s Demise in Disbelief,” The New York Times, 9 April 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/internation...bs-saddam.html; Richissin, “On Arab TV.”
54. Reuters, “Arabs Watch Hussein’s Demise in Disbelief,” The New York Times; Richissin, “On Arab TV”; Susan Sachs, “A Nation at War: Cairo: Egyptian Intellectual Speaks of the Arab World’s Despair,” The New York Times, 8 April 2003.
55. David P. Barash, Beloved Enemies: Our Need for Opponents (New York: Prometheus Books, 1994); Fromm, Escape from Freedom. Although the “Arab community” did not unite (militarily speaking) at the national level to actively resist the US and coalition forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the threat of terrorism and subsequent acts of terrorism have proven the effect of “unity through common enmity.”
56. Interviews with several German prisoners-of-war indicated that popular support for Hitler continued until the people discovered that they had been “deceived” and “misled”—after atrocities had been exposed. Headquarters, US Army Air Forces, Office of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Defeat.
57. Ibid.
58. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 229.
59. Samir Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear.
60. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 230-31.
61. Samir Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear.
62. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 170.
63. Ibid., p. 213.
64. Ibid., p. 248.
65. Ibid., p. 256.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., p. 257.
68. Ibid., p. 258.
69. Charles F. Andrain and David E. Apter, Political Protest and Social Change: Analyzing Politics (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York Univ. Press, 1995), p. 40.
70. Ibid.
71. Hollywood’s portrayal of US society and politics has not helped in this regard.
72. Indeed, this is what they will be told by authoritarian factions attempting to take control.
73. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 255.
74. The Iraqi people are still looking to someone of authority to provide for them. Whatever it is they need, they expect the incoming authority to give them. When the incoming authority does not provide, it is seen as weak, and the masses turn on the authority. As a group, the Iraqi people have yet to see what they can do to help themselves. If the authority figure provides, while simultaneously nurturing individual development, systemic change could become reality.
75. Berman, “Learning Not to Love Saddam.” It could be argued that Germany did not have the outside religious pressure to overthrow the victor and to install a theocracy. Because of this factor in regard to Iraq, more time and effort will be needed to ensure the existence of a stable democratic government before the interim governing system begins to pull up stakes.
76. Berman, “Learning Not to Love Saddam.”
77. Ibid.; Conference of the Iraqi Opposition, The Transition to Democracy in Iraq.
78. Drazen Pantic, “B92 of Belgrade: Free Voices on the Airwaves and the Internet,” Media Studies Journal, 13 (No. 3, 1999), 176-81.
79. Ibid., p. 181.
80. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 154-55.
81. Thomas P. M. Barnett, “The Pentagon’s New Map,” Esquire, March 2003, http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm.
82. Forrest Chisman and Alan Pifer, Government for the People; The Federal Social Role: What It Is – What It Should Be (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).
83. Miller, For Your Own Good.
84. Ibid.; Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 35-36.
85. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 182.
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Cynthia E. Ayers is the National Security Agency’s Visiting Professor of Information Superiority at the US Army War College. She has B.S. and M.P.A. degrees from Troy State University and is currently working on a Ph.D. from Walden University in criminal justice, focusing on counterterrorism.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...utumn/ayers.htm
Threats, Values, and Defense: Does Defense of Values by Force Remain a Moral Possibility?
JAMES TURNER JOHNSON
Two deep and broad streams of moral reflection on war run through Western history. These streams have their thematic origin in a single fundamental question: Is it ever morally allowable to employ force in the protection and preservation of values? The moral tradition of pacifism has resulted from a negative response to this question, given in various ways under various historical circumstances. A positive answer, given in ways no less conditioned by historical circumstance yet with a similar depth of underlying consistency and wholeness, has produced the other moral tradition on force and violence, which it is both convenient and proper to call by a familiar name: just war tradition. We should note two characteristic facts about this tradition.
First, it is a moral response to the question of value and force that is not only historically deep but is a product of reflection and action across the whole breadth of this culture's experience. It is not a moral doctrine in the narrow sense, reflecting the attitudes only of those sectors of the culture, like religion, often conceived as having a specialized function of moralizing cut off from the rest of human existence. This tradition has often found expression, to be sure, in church law and theological reflection; yet it also appears in codifications and theories of international law, in military manuals on how rightly to conduct war, and, as Michael Walzer has shown in Just and Unjust Wars, in the judgments and reactions of common people.[1] In short, this tradition encapsulates something of how we in this culture respond morally to the question of protection of value by force; it is not the only response, for pacifist rejection of force parallels it through history, but it is a fundamental one, revealing how we characteristically think about morality and war and defining the terms for our reflections in new or changing circumstances.
The second characteristic fact about just war tradition is that it preserves two kinds of moral response to the question of value and force, not merely one: limitation always accompanies justification. The response that says, yes, here are some conditions in which it is morally right to use force to protect value goes on to set limits to what may rightly be done toward that end. This second element in the response is determined by the nature of the value or values to be protected; thus the need for limitation is built into the need to protect value as a necessary correlate. This means in general that unlimited or even disproportionately large amounts of force are not what is justified when the use of force to protect values is itself justified. Just war tradition, as recognized by such contemporary commentators as Paul Ramsey, William V. O'Brien, and, as already mentioned, Walzer,[2] is a moral tradition of justifiable and limited war. What has come to be known as the jus ad bellum has to do with the question of justification, while that of limitation is addressed by the jus in bello. These are interconnected areas, but the priority, logical as well as historical, is with the former: only after the fundamental question is answered about the moral justification of employing force to protect values does the second question, about the morally requisite limits governing the use of that force, in turn arise. Problems arising in the jus in bello context may cause us to want to reflect further about the nature of the values we hold, the threat against them, and the means we may use to defend them; yet such further reflection means only that we must again enter the arena of the "war decision"[3] the jus ad bellum.
It is often claimed that the development of nuclear weapons has made this traditional way of thinking about morality and war obsolete and irrelevant.[4] From what I have said, it should be clear that I think this is not the case. Indeed, my claim is that we naturally think in the same terms that are encountered in the tradition, whether we want to or not: a pacifist critic like James Douglass employs one part of the tradition to reject the whole of it,[5] while no sooner has another critic, Stanley Hoffmann, rejected it than he reinvents it point by point.[6] Such phenomena should be instructive. We do not do well to repudiate this tradition of moral reflection from the past; doing so merely isolates us from the wisdom of others surely no less morally or intellectually acute than we, who in their own historical contexts have faced problems analogous to our own about whether and how to employ force in the defense of values. It is thus better to use this tradition consciously, trying to learn from it and with it, even in the nuclear age, than it is to forget it and then have to reinvent it.
Defense of Values by Force as a Moral Possibility
To protect and preserve values is the only justifying cause for the use of force that is admitted in Western moral tradition. Classically the use of force in response to a threat to values was justified in four ways: to protect the innocent, to recover something wrongly taken, to punish evil, and to defend against a wrongful attack in progress. Let us look briefly at each of these and inquire what we may derive from them in our present context.
Defense of the innocent is an idea that can be traced at least as far as Augustine in Christian thought,[7] but it also has a history in military traditions back through the code of chivalry into the customs of pre-medieval Germanic societies.[8] By itself it implies an interventionist model of the justified use of military force and, more broadly, of national power. This not only flies in the face of much contemporary moralizing but also challenges such neo-isolationists as Laurence Beilenson[9] who argue for a retreat from foreign involvement by this country and the creation of a new "fortress America." It is also at odds with the individualistic ethics fostered domestically in our society with the demise of close ties of community,[10] an ethic that implies "not getting involved" perhaps even in extreme cases like mugging or rape. Granted that it is extremely dangerous to throw military power around in a world that has the capability of destroying itself by global war; granted also that national hubris if unrestrained[11] could use defense of others as an unwarranted excuse for a new round of imperialistic conquests; there still, I submit, remain in the contemporary world cases in which a limited and proportionate use of force may be the appropriate means to preserve the value referred to in the phrase "defense of the innocent." The case of Grenada was not morally the same as that of Afghanistan; intervention in Hungary by the West at the time of the 1956 uprising would not have been the moral equivalent of the Soviet invasion that did in fact occur; intervention in Uganda by neighboring Tanzania to depose Idi Amin and put an end to his bloodthirsty and self-aggrandizing rule was not the same as would have been an invasion aimed simply at increasing Tanzanian territory. Clearly not every case where the rights of innocent persons need to be protected should become an occasion for military intervention; the case of Hungary offers a clear instance when following out this line of implication from just war tradition to the exclusion of other considerations would have led to the wrong decision. But my point is that the moral distinctions assumed by the classical formulation of just war tradition still remain, and the necessity to tread warily (which was no less an obligation in any previous age of human history) does not remove either the moral outrage that comes from violation of the innocent,[12] the obligation to prevent or stop such violation if at all possible,[13] and the possibility that among all the means available, military ones may be the best.
The recovery of something wrongly taken is a necessary counterpart to the idea of defense against aggression in progress[14] If such after-the-fact reaction were not allowed, the result would be that expansionist or other aggressive acts would, if speedy and effective, be tacitly accepted. There must be, of course, some consistent and agreed-upon means of identifying what belongs to one society or one polity and what to another, but even in the absence of complete consensus on this it is not necessary to reduce everything to a matter of different ideological or national perspective, so that what is one's own is simply whatever one says is one's own. The Falklands conflict provides an instructive contemporary example of the relevance of such reflection. The Argentine claim to the islands was not without some merit, but this was hardly of sufficient value to justify military invasion and occupation against the will of the inhabitants. The principle of self-determination, often cited to protect weak nations against military and other forms of aggression by stronger ones, while not the only meaningful principle here, was certainly violated by Argentina's action. If only defense against an aggression in progress were justified, then Britain and the British inhabitants of the islands would have had no recourse, after the failure of the intensively pursued negotiations, but to accept the newly established status quo of Argentine military rule. The allowance of after-the-fact use of force to regain something wrongly taken is the source of moral justification for Britain's military actions in the Falklands war.
The punishment of evil is, in my judgment, the least useful of the classic formulations[15] of just cause in the present context. One reason for this is the prevalence of ideological divisions in the contemporary world. This line of justification for the use of force to protect value is all too easily changed into a justification for ideological warfare by one's own "forces of light" against the "forces of darkness" with their different ideological beliefs. This problem is not as acute among the superpowers as it once was, though it still exists and might still be fanned back to its former heat; more pressing immediate instances are to be found in the conflicts of the Middle East and Northern Ireland. Yet classically the punishment of differences of belief was not what was implied by this idea of just cause; what was to be punished was the kind of action identified in the other three kinds of justifying cause.[16] What is unique to this concept of punishment taken alone is that it implicitly allows going beyond what these other concepts justify to further action aimed at insuring that the same thing does not happen again. Such an allowance can easily be pushed too far, and so we should be cautious in citing this reason to justify force for the protection of value in the present age. Nuclear deterrence depends on the threat of punishment above all else; yet the use of current types of strategic nuclear weapons kept for deterrence purposes could itself threaten the very values such use would ostensibly seek to preserve. This is, of course, the heart of the nuclear dilemma, and I will return to it. For the present my only point is that the justification of force as punishment for wrong done must not be allowed to become isolated from the general question of the protection of value or from the other justifying moral reasons for the use of force to protect value. Yet even with this caveat, if the goal of permitted military action is, as another part of just war tradition insists, the end of peace, then it is not proper to rule out the morality of punishment entirely.
If we had begun with 20th century international law and some other aspects of contemporary moral, political, and legal thought, we would have started with the justification of defense against aggression in progress-and perhaps got no further.[17] By keeping this classic idea of justifying cause for the use of force until last, I mean to symbolize that this idea is not as fundamental over the whole history of Western moral reflection on war as it has become in contemporary thought. Indeed, when we set this justification for the use of force alongside the others identified and discussed above, then we discover that the right of self-defense is not in fact a moral absolute. One may oneself be in the wrong in a particular conflict. Rather than to exalt one's own righteousness and well-being over that of others, the better moral course is to deflate somewhat this allowance of self-defense to more appropriate proportions alongside the other jus ad bellum provisions. In short, self-defense may therefore not be unlimited; there are other values to consider than the integrity of the self or one's own national polity. It is this consideration from just war tradition that points to the wrongness of schemes of national defense based on a threat of catastrophic annihilation, even if that threat is mutual. The irony of the present situation is that the very legal and moral efforts that attempt to restrict the incidence of the use of force by allowing only its defensive use--I am thinking of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, as well as current ostensibly moral arguments that the more terrible the deterrent threat, the less likelihood there will be of war--have the effect of insuring that should war come, despite these efforts, it will be of the most immoral and value-destructive kind attainable through military technology. That is, concentrating solely on the rightness of defense against aggression, while admittedly a moral justification for the use of force, has led us to think of strategic nuclear deterrence by threat of catastrophe as morally right, while ruling out lesser levels of force as possible responses to threats to value, even when these latter are more justifiable from the broader perspectives of just war tradition.[18]
In short, we would do well to remember what many in our present debate have either forgotten or systematically ignored: that circumstances may come into being in human history in which the use of force, at appropriate levels and discriminatingly directed, may be the morally preferable means for the protection and preservation of values. In forgetting or ignoring this, sometimes in the name of ostensibly moral considerations, those who would reject such a use of force are in fact choosing a less moral course than the one historically given form in the tradition which says that just war must also be limited war.
The Question of Values
May values ever be defended by forceful means? Answering this question requires us to think, first, about the nature of the values to be protected and the interrelation among values. We do this normally not by reflection but by affirmation. Hence the following from John Stuart Mill:
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse . . . . A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself.[19]
Mill in this context alludes to the values from which he speaks, but the salient fact about this statement is his ranking of relative values. He does not deny the value of personal safety; yet it is not for him the highest value. He does not deny the ugliness of war; he only affirms that in the ranking of priorities it is not the worst evil. Mill was, of course, a utilitarian in ethics; yet such priority ranking of values is not a feature unique to utilitarianism and to be dismissed by all non-utilitarians. Such ranking is indeed a feature of any ethic, for the service of one value often conflicts with the service of another, and there must be some way of deciding among them. Consider the following from Erasmus, a figure who was anything but a utilitarian:
Think . . . of all the crimes that are committed with war as a pretext, while "good lawes fall silent amid the clash of arms"--all the instances of sack and sacrilege, rape, and other shameful acts, such as one hesitates even to name. And even when the war is over, this moral corruption is bound to linger for many years. Now assess for me the cost--a cost so great that, even if you win the war, you will lose much more than you gain. Indeed, what realm . . . can be weighed against, the life, the blood, of so many thousand men?[20]
This passage is replete with priority ranking of values. Erasmus begins by identifying war rhetorically with criminal activity, thus locating it at the bottom of the value scale, then turns explicitly to proportional counting of relative costs: "even if you win the war, you will lose much more than you gain"; "what realm . . . can be weighed against the life, the blood, of so many thousand men?" Such comparative weighting of goods is as central to the ethics of Erasmian humanism as to Mill's utilitarianism; indeed, it appears as a core feature of moral argument as such. There is ultimately no way to get to the truth or falsity of various perceptions of value. This is why, finally, there can be no real argument between absolute pacifists, who reject all possibility of the use of force to protect value, and those who accept some possibility of such use of force.[21] But this is not a problem in most of the current defense debate, which is a debate over ranking of values among persons who weight their values as differently as do Mill and Erasmus.
Recognizing values where they exist and sorting them according to priorities where there are conflicts among them is the function of moral agency, an art learned in one's community of moral discourse.[22] Without going into a full theory of moral agency, which is far beyond the scope of this essay, the most we can say here is that affirmations like those of Mill and Erasmus allow us to glimpse the structure of relative values held by each participant in a moral debate and relate those structures of value both to a larger normative conception of common life and to our own personal rankings of value. For present purposes this is enough.
One interesting thing about Erasmus and Mill on war is how contemporary they sound; by thinking about them we may learn something about ourselves. Erasmus counted costs both great and small in his rejection of war. A glimpse of the latter appears elsewhere in the letter quoted above,[23] where he complains that preparations for war have dried up the sources of patronage on which he depended for support. This was purely personal injury, but the complaint is not unlike contemporary arguments against military spending as subtracting from resources available for feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and--in direct continuity with Erasmus--supporting humanistic scholarship. The value ranking is obvious. The real meat of Erasmus' objection to war was, however, in his idealistic vision of world community,[24] which he conceived as both good in itself beyond the goods of any national community and achievable by the right kind of human cooperative interaction. Again, this way of thinking has parallels in current debate, where rejection of force to protect values associated with the nation-state is coupled to a new vision of world order in which the nation-state system has no place.[25] The preservation of peace among nations, both in Erasmus and in contemporary debate, appears as the highest instrumental value, on which the maintenance of all other values depends. This is a different sort of reasoning from that of the pacifism of absolute principle, but even the latter may engage in priority ranking, as in these words of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder: " 'Thou shalt not kill' . . . is an absolute . . . immeasurably more human, more personalistic, more genuinely responsible than the competitive absolute, 'Thou shalt not let Uncle Sam down' or 'Thou shalt fight for freedom' or 'Never give up the ship.'"[26] What we may note here is the tendency to diminish rhetorically the values being downgraded; similarly, Erasmus in all his works against war represents warmaking as nothing more than the result of frivolous and misguided rivalry among sovereigns. War, Yoder and Erasmus alike suggest, may never be anything more than frivolous and misguided; the possibility that it might be an instrumental means of protecting value is dismissed out of hand. Contemporary examples of such reasoning abound, centering around the dismissal of any form of military preparedness as "militarism" and rejection of "war-fighting" strategic planning as opposed to deterrence strategy.[27]
The influence of Erasmian humanistic pacifism on contemporary debate runs deep, and I cannot here chart its full extent, but one more example of this presence must be noted for what it is. Erasmus rejects war as the summum malum, assimilating it to criminality; in contemporary debate the counterpart is the assimilation of all war to the evil of catastrophic nuclear holocaust. Erasmus cites "sack, sacrilege, and rape"; Jonathan Schell, in the idiom of our own age, cites "the biologic effects of ultraviolet radiation with emphasis on the skin"[28] while piling up evidence of "the likely consequences of a holocaust for the earth"[29]--as if anyone had to be reminded that a holocaust is, by definition, evil.
It should be clear that Erasmus, Schell, and Yoder are simply moving in a different sphere from Mill and the main line of just war thinking (which I also share). It is simply impossible, given the assimilation of war to criminality and holocaust, for Erasmus and Schell to share Mill's judgment that "war is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things." Neither could Yoder, for whom the use of force is trivialized into the maxim, "Never give up the ship," or persons who regard war as the result of frivolous self-assertion by political leaders or, in the current phrase, "militarism." Between these and the position represented by Mill there would seem to be an impassable gulf. Yet it is possible at least to see across that gulf, if not to bridge it or remove it. And from the perspective of just war tradition there is something fundamentally wrong with the perception of value found on the other side.
First, while there is no need to deny the charm of an idealistic vision of world community, such a conception of an ideal that is not yet a reality (and may never become one) should not subtract from the quite genuine value to be found in the nation-state system or, more particularly, in a national community like our own. Historically the roots of the nation-state system are in the need to organize human affairs so as to minimize conflict while preserving the unique cultural identities of different peoples. It can be argued plausibly that it still fulfills these functions-imperfectly, to be sure, but with nothing better currently at hand. Likewise, the personal security, justice, freedom, and domestic peace provided in a liberal democratic nation-state like the United States are not to be dismissed lightly by reference to a utopian vision in which these and other values would all be present in greater measure. We must always, as moral beings, measure reality against our ideals; yet to reject the penultimate goods secured by the real because they do not measure up to the ultimate goods envisioned in the ideal is to ensure the loss of even the penultimate goods that we now enjoy. The ultimate would certainly be better; yet in the meantime, we have the obligation to hold as fast as possible to the value at hand, even though doing so must inevitably incur costs. A positive response to the original just war question recognizes this. as did Mill; Erasmus and his contemporary idealistic descendants have not.
Second, if force is to be used to protect values, it is not trivia that are to be protected but values of fundamental worth. Mill's allusion to the value of "being free" is on a quite different level from Yoder's maxim, "Never give up the ship," or Erasmus' collapsing of all reasons for war into the venality of princes. Equally, I believe, not to be reduced to the trivial or frivolous is Walzer's perception, expressed throughout Just and Unjust Wars, that the justification for fighting lies in the recognition of evil and revulsion against it.[30] Walzer's negative way of putting the matter is important for another reason: it reminds us that we do not have to be able to give an extensive and comprehensive listing of all values that may be protected and in what ranking in order to know that there are such values; they will be apparent when they are violated or threatened with violation.
Third, knowing that some wars have resulted from the aggressively self-assertive characters of rulers does not mean that war may never be anything else. It is doubtful that Erasmus was right even about the rulers of his own time. In our own age we must surely make a distinction between, for example, the war made by Hitler and that made by Churchill; nor is it particularly useful to reduce the rise and fall of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union to the personalities of a Carter and a Brezhnev, an Andropov or Chernenko and a Reagan. A manichaean dismissal of everything military as "militaristic" is also an uncalled-for reductionism that makes military preparedness itself an evil, not an instrument for good or ill in ways to be determined by human choices.
Finally, neither in Erasmus' time nor in our own is it right to represent war as the irreducible summum malum. I have already suggested why I think Erasmus was wrong in making this claim; more important for our current context is the wrongness of assimilating all contemporary war to catastrophic nuclear war. Let us dwell on this for a moment .
Who could want a nuclear holocaust? Yet the effort to avoid such a catastrophe is not itself justification for rejection of the possibility that lower levels of force may justifiably be employed to protect value. This is, nonetheless, the clear import of the argument when limited conventional war is collapsed into limited nuclear war by reference to the threat of escalation and nuclear war of any extent is collapsed into catastrophic holocaust on a global scale. 31 Such an argument has the effect of making any contemporary advocate of the use of force to protect values an advocate instead of the total destruction of humankind or even of all life on earth. It should hardly need to be said that such rhetorical hyperbole is unjustified; no one who argues from just war tradition, with its strong emphasis on counting the costs and estimating the probability of success of any projected military action, should be represented as guilty of befriending the idea of nuclear holocaust.
Yet this collapsing of categories is also wrong historically. War in the nuclear age has not been global catastrophe but a continuation of conventional warfare limited in one or several ways--by geography, goals, targets, means. This arena of contemporary limited warfare is one in which traditional moral categories for judging war are very much at home, as such different writers as William V. O'Brien and Michael Walzer have, in their respective ways, both recognized. The issue, then, is not of the prohibition of all means of defense in the nuclear age, because the assimilation of all contemporary war to the summum malum of nuclear holocaust is invalid; it is rather the perennial question of when and how force may be used for the defense of values.[32] We will return to this question below.
The Problem of Threats to Values
For there to be a need to defend values, there must be a threat to those values. To anyone with a modicum of objectivity, though, it must be apparent that in the current defense debate there is no agreement about the nature of the threat, and so there can be little hope of agreement about the means of preserving values in the face of the menace identified. Speaking broadly, I find in the present debate three distinctively different identifications of the threat to values that must be met. For some, there is no danger worth mentioning beyond that of nuclear holocaust, which is defined as threatening everything that is of value; for others the principal challenge to the values that matter for them is the arms race as such, with its diversion of resources to military ends and a perceived transformation of values toward those of "militarism"; finally, a third perspective identifies the principal threat to values in the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, West and East, two different and competing social, economic, political, and moral systems. This last is the most easily identifiable in terms of traditional interstate political analysis and in terms of just war tradition. All three perspectives have many forms and are somewhat fluid, so that in painting them with broad strokes of the brush I cannot render the inner details of each. Yet the broadly painted pictures of these different perspectives are themselves interesting morally, and it is on these that I will focus in this brief context.
Let us begin by exploring what is distinctive about each of the first two positions I have identified. These clearly overlap, but their emphases are importantly different, as are their respective histories and implicit value commitments. One way of recognizing this quickly is by noting that the anti-nuclear-holocaust position can be expressed in a commitment to increased military spending for an enhanced deterrent, quite contrary to the anti-arms-race position, which finds typical expression in the nuclear freeze movement and support for disarmament programs. Similarly, part of the historical case for tactical and theater nuclear weapons has been that they cost less to provide than equivalent conventional forces, thus tending to free economic and manpower resources for non-military purposes; yet many from the anti-nuclear-holocaust position view such "war-fighting' weapons as inherently destabilizing and dangerously likely to lead to catastrophic nuclear war.[33] Within the anti-nuclear-holocaust position opposition to the arms race and military spending is but an instrumentality, while within the anti-arms-race position opposition to nuclear arms is only an instrumentality; when there is convergence between these two positions (as there has been in the most recent stage of the defense debate), it is a mixed marriage that is as likely to end in divorce as in conversion of one or both partners.
These two positions also have different historical and ideological roots. The anti-nuclear-holocaust position is, of course, a product of the nuclear age and specifically of the period when the United States and the Soviet Union have practiced strategic nuclear deterrence against each other. It is thus the child of nuclear deterrence theory and finds a characteristic expression in one such theory, the "deterrence only" position. Clearly, though, there has been a transformation of values from parent to offspring. Thus when Philip Green wrote Deadly Logic in the mid-1960s, he cited "resistance to Communism" as the fundamental "ethical root of deterrence theory,"[34] but the ethical root of the contemporary "deterrence only" position is the perception of nuclear warfare, not the menace to values posed by a totalitarian political system, as the evil to be avoided by the possession of a nuclear deterrent.[35]
The historical roots of the anti-arms-race position are at least a century old; they lie in opposition to the increasing practice in 19th-century European states of sustaining a standing army built up by universal or nearly universal conscription, and in opposition to the social and economic costs of sustaining such armies. Religious groups have been the chief enunciators of this position; they are so today. A direct line runs between the Postulata on war prepared for Vatican Council I in 1870, which deplored the "intolerable burden" of defense spending and the social costs of "huge standing and conscript armies,"[36] and the 1983 pastoral of the American Catholic bishops with its deploring of the economic distortion of priorities" due to the "billions readily spent for destructive instruments"[37] or, to take a Protestant example, the 1980 statement on the arms race by the Reformed Church in America decrying "the devastating social and personal consequences of the arms race."[38] Two ethical roots of this position are visible in the sources cited: an opposition to war and weapons as contrary to the biblical vision of peace and an identification with the needs of the poor as best expressing Christian conformity to Christ. Both themes have secular counterparts in contemporary debate, and the first obviously parallels the utopian vision of Erasmian humanism.
If nuclear holocaust is the danger against which values must be protected, then deterrence theory is one rational response, but so would be general nuclear disarmament. If the arms race itself is the menace to values that must be defended against, then a freeze on military expenditures followed by a general scaling down of military establishments is the clear implication. Both these perspectives on the contemporary threat to values incorporate truths about the present historical situation; both are rooted in important perceptions of moral value; each offers, in its own way, a response to the problem of threat to values as it perceives that threat. Yet neither of these perspectives' is really about the question with which we began this paper, the fundamental question that is at the root of our moral tradition on war: when and how may force justifiably be employed for the defense of values. Rather than approaching seriously the problem of possible moral justification of force, each of these perspectives has, in its own way, defined that possibility out of existence in the search of a general rejection of the use of force as a moral option in the contemporary age. The reason is that neither of these perspectives is able to comprehend the possibility of significant threats to value alongside the one on which each of them is fixed.
The problem, however, is that what is thus ignored does not for this reason cease to exist. International rivalries persist, as they did in the pre-nuclear era: ideologies and realistic perceptions of national interest continue to influence the actions of nations, and these actions are often played out through projections of force. Terrorism, civil war, and international war continue to be plain realities of our present era, and there is no reason to suppose either that aggression will no longer take place in human history or that it can effectively be opposed by means other than military ones.[39] Indeed, prospective victims of aggression today might reflect with Clausewitz: "The aggressor is always peace-loving; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed."[40] The just war perspective, the third perspective in the contemporary debate, views the problem of threats to value in this light, in continuity with the main line of statecraft over history, and conceives the problem of defense against such threats also in terms continuous with that historical experience.
Let it be clear: the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States is not the only source of danger to American values; yet it would be blindness to wish away the existence of this rivalry, which is rooted in more than common possession of mutual annihilative power, more than competing ideologies, more than national interest, more than global competition for friends, allies, and trading partners-and yet all of these. And this rivalry is more than simply a product of adverse perceptions; it is real. Where it takes military form, as for example most unambiguously along the NATO-Warsaw Pact border, thinking about the menace to values must go beyond efforts to avoid catastrophic nuclear war and to end the arms race to include efforts to define and mount a credible, effective, and moral defense against the particular military threat manifest there.
At the same time, though, potential military defense of values is not limited to this confrontation nor to the global East-West rivalry; it may be a matter of attempting to secure a weak third-world nation against the power of a nearby predator, deterring or responding to terrorist attacks, or maintaining the traffic of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. All these possible uses of force involve the defense of value; all are, in general terms, the kind of resort to force regarded as justified in just war tradition. This third perspective on the threat to values, then, is the one I wish to address in my concluding section.
The Problem of Defense Against Threats to Value
I wish now to take us back to a reflection with which this essay began, that in general the nature of values to be protected and the threats against them are such that unlimited or even disproportionate amounts of force are not what is justified when the use of force to defend values is justified. When defense of values by force appears to require transgressing the boundaries set by the jus in bello concepts of proportionality and discrimination, this necessitates that we look again to see whether this is an occasion when the defense of values by force is morally justified. The answer may be no; yet it may also be yes, and this is the possibility I wish to explore in this section.
In fact there are two directions of thought, not one, which lead toward a renewal of the justification of value-protection by force in such a situation. The first drives toward restructuring the application of force and beyond that to the creation of new kinds of force capabilities suited to limited application in the defense of value. The second leads into the far more dangerous consideration whether values may ever be protected by means that themselves violate important values. I will discuss these in turn.
Clausewitz in his time understood well the difference between "absolute war," war pushed to the limits of the destructive capacities of the belligerents, and "real" wars carried on by less than absolute means for limited purposes as an extension of politics; in the 20th century many others have forgotten or ignored this difference.[41] Typically the values threatened by war are less than ultimate, and so is the threat; it is wrong to defend these values against such challenges by totalistic means disproportionate to both the values to be defended and the evil that menaces them. When we add that total war implies also the indiscriminate targeting of noncombatants, a violation of the fundamental idea of protection of the innocent, the indictment of such use of force in response to threats against values grows yet more damning. But the problem of limitation of force in contemporary warfare is different from that which existed earlier. Today limitation must be accomplished first and foremost by human choice; in previous ages such limitation was also a product of the nature of weapons available, the restraints imposed by the seasons of the year, and the economic and social bases on which war was waged. Limitation in the use of force was relatively easy when the means were battle-axes or smoothbore muskets, when three-quarters of the year was closed to military actions, and when soldiers were themselves units of economic production who could not be in arms year-round. Today the problem is more complex: the structuring of force capabilities to defend against possible menaces to value must at the same time provide an effective deterrent and an effective means of active defense while still honoring the moral identity manifest in the society or culture in which the threatened values are known and maintained. Among recent nuclear strategies which did not meet this dual test is massive retaliation, conceived as a strategy for use, since it allowed "brush-fire wars" to erupt unchecked and threatened disproportionate and indiscriminate nuclear devastation as a response to aggression on a much lower scale. Nor does contemporary mutual assured destruction doctrine, for reasons already given above. But the issue is not simply one of the disproportionateness of nuclear arms. The same moral problems exist with the strategic conventional air strikes against population centers of World War II, for example; similarly, in the context of current history one of the most acute problems is how to frame a moral response against terrorist activity without oneself being forced into the characteristic patterns of terrorism.
Complicated this problem is; yet it is not insoluble. If the use of force is justified in response to threats against value, but the only means of force available are such that they contravene important values themselves, then the preferred moral alternative is the development of different means of force. If tactical and theater nuclear weapons are judged too destructive to use or deemed too likely to result in escalation to all-out nuclear war if employed, then the moral choice is to devise non-nuclear defenses to replace them and pay the costs, economic and social, of such defenses.[42] If the strategic nuclear deterrent is deemed immoral to employ, the right response is not to engage in the self-deception of "deterrence-only" reasoning but to explore possible means of defense against nuclear strikes that would not require a preemptive first strike by this nation or a possibly indiscriminate and disproportionate punitive second strike.[43] The justification of using force to defend value certainly means, as I have said earlier, more than "defense" in its narrow sense, the warding off of attacks in progress; yet it certainly also means at least that, and to claim the moral high ground for a rejection of steps toward creating such defense is simply to twist moral reasoning out of shape.
Finally, though, there remains the possibility that protection and preservation of values must be by force, and must be by force that itself contravenes at least some of the values it intends to protect and preserve. This is the possibility that, at the extreme, has been called by the term "supreme emergency,"[44] and it is only at this extreme that it is a morally unique case. Must one fight honorably and die, even when knowing that one's ultimate moral values will thus die also? Or may one sin for the moment in order to defeat the evil that threatens, hoping for time to repent later and making the commitment to pass on undiluted to future generations the values that have in the emergency been transgressed?[45] Some of the lines of argument already advanced bear on this dilemma. I have suggested that ideological claims ought not to be inflated to the point of seeming to justify unlimited warfare; I have argued against disproportionate and indiscriminate warfare as morally evil in themselves; and I have suggested that part of the trouble in responding to an immoral form of warfare like terrorism is that in making such a response one's own humanity may be diminished to the level of that of the terrorist. In short, I tend to be dubious of "supreme emergency" claims and am inclined to hold the moral line for preservation of value in the means chosen as well as in the decision to offer a defense. Even so there remains a possibility of a genuine "supreme emergency" situation. What is to be said about this?
First, it is not a newly recognized kind of situation. In the early Middle Ages Christian soldiers were required to do penance after participating in war because of the possibility that they might have acted sinfully in that war, killing perhaps out of malice toward the enemy rather than with feeling of regretful duty in the service of justice. Here we encounter a case in which the possibility is admitted that protection of values may involve violation of values. When in the 16th century Victoria considered what might be done in a just war, he allowed that a militarily necessary storming of a city could be undertaken even though this would inevitably result in violations of the rights of noncombatants in the city.[46] Such historical evidence suggests a moral acceptance of the possibility of preserving value by wrong means; yet this evidence also implies the limits on that acceptance.
Second, the transgression of value in the service of value must be approached through the general recognition that value conflicts are the stuff with which human moral agency has to deal. Every moral system provides means for handling such conflicts, and that a genuine "supreme emergency" might come to exist is by definition such a conflict, in which higher values must in the last analysis be favored over lower ones. The values constituting the jus ad bellum, having priority over those of the jus in bello, would on my reasoning have to be honored in such a case, even at some expense to the latter.
I have thus brought this discussion to the brink of morally admissible possibility so that we might look over and see what lies below. The view is not a pretty one. Having seen it, though, we may the more purposefully return to the other line of implication sketched before: the development of military capabilities suited to our moral commitments. We may still yearn--and work--for a world without war, for an end to the menace of catastrophic nuclear war, for an end to the arms race; yet with such military capabilities we would be the better prepared to meet morally the threats to value that may be expected to be inevitable so long as these ideals are not achieved.
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NOTES
This article is a revised version of a paper presented by the author at the conference "Justice and War in the Nuclear Age" at Georgetown University.
1. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
2. See Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1961) and The Just War (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968); William V. O'Brien, The Conduct of Just and Limited War (New York: Praeger, 1981).
3. The term is O'Brien's and is meant by him to emphasize the difference in order of priority between the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello, which has to do with "war-fighting" once the initial decision to make war has been made. See O'Brien, especially chaps. 1-3.
4. Compare Stanley Hoffmann, Duties Beyond Borders (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 46-55, and James Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
5. Compare Ramsey's criticism in The Just War, pp. 259-78.
6. Hoffmann, pp. 59ff.
7. For an example of such tracing in contemporary argument see Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, pp. 34-37.
8. For discussion see my Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 13150.
9. See Laurence Beilenson, Survival and Peace in the Nuclear Age (Chicago: Regnery and Company, 1980).
10. On the loss of community and its implications see lames Sellers, Warming Fires (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), and Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
11. This is a familiar theme in the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. Compare his Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940) and The Structure of Nations and Empires (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959).
12. Compare Walzer, pp. 13335.
13. Compare Ramsey, The Just War, pp. 14147.
14. This concept, taken over from Roman law by Augustine and Isidore of Seville, was central to the definition of just war given in medieval canon law. See Corpus Juris Canonici, Pars Prior, Decretum Magistri Gratiani, Pars Secunda, Causa XXIII, Quaest. II. Can. II.
15. This is another jus ad bellum criterion that came from Roman law through Augustine into church law: see ibid. But it had a more central place in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, who connected it to the words of Paul in Romans 13:4: "[The prince] is the minister of God to execute his vengeance against the evildoer." See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II/II, Quest. XL, Art. 1.
16. I make this judgment cognizant of the minority tradition in Christian just war theory from Augustine forward that allowed some forms of war for religion; in Augustine's words, repeated for canon law by Gratian, "The enemies of the church are to be coerced even by war" (Decretum Magistri Gratiani, Quaest. VIII, Can. XLVIII). But in fact efforts to justify wars in Western cultural history, even those clearly involving some benefit or detriment to religion, have generally been justified by appeal to the other reasons already given: protection of the innocent, retaking of something lost, punishment of evil. For discussion of this issue of religious war-and by extension ideological war-see my Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), chaps. I-III.
17. See ibid., pp. 266-70.
18. An early version of this kind of argument undergirded massive retaliation strategy, which Robert W. Tucker in The Just War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1960) regards as an expression of a general American moral attitude justifying all-out responses to injustice received rather than limited uses of force proportionate to harm done to American interests. But suppose that this opposition to limited warfare is retained while all-out retaliation is itself denied as immoral (though the use of deterrence as a threat continues to be accepted); then the argument changes shape, though its fundamentals remain. Such a new version of the moral argument for deterrence and against limited warfare can be found in the 1983 pastoral letter of the American Catholic bishops (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace [Washington: United States Catholic Conference, 1983]). The purpose of deterrence, as defined here, is "only to prevent the use of nuclear weapons by others" (paragraph 188, emphasis in text). "War-fighting strategies," including even planning for fighting nuclear war at a limited level over a protracted period, are explicitly rejected (paragraphs 184, 188, 189). The reason is the prudential judgment that limited nuclear warfare can be expected to escalate to "mass destruction" (paragraphs 15161, 184). Though this suggests heavier reliance on conventional weapons (paragraph 155), even a conventional war "could escalate to the nuclear level" (paragraph 156). While the resultant position is not explicitly a "deterrence-only" one, it is difficult to find in the pessimism toward limited war and "war-fighting strategies" expressed in the bishops' letter any room for limited and proportionate responses to limited levels of harm done, such as the traditional jus in bello implies.
19. John Stuart Mill, "The Contest in America," pp. 208-09, in John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions (Boston: William V. Spencer, 1867). The full text of the passage in question, written to oppose England's siding with the Confederacy in the American Civil War, is as follows: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice--is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other."
20. Desiderius Erasmus, Letter to Antoon van Bergen, Abbot of St. Bertin, dated London, 14 March 1514; number 288 in The Correspondence of Erasmus, Letters 142 to 297, tr. by R. A. B. Minors and D. F. S. Thomson, annotated by Wallace K. Ferguson (Toronto and Buffalo: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1975), lines 4763.
21. That is, for such pacifists the rejection of force has itself become a value or it is necessarily implied by some other value (e.g. Christian love in some forms of religious pacifism); in either case it is unassailable from outside the moral system in which this value is held. Other forms of pacifism, of course, reach their judgment against the use of force by argument based not on the evil of force as such but on the harm to some higher good that the use of force may entail. The contemporary position sometimes called "just-war pacifism," which is based on a prudential calculation of proportionality, is such a form of pacifism.
22. See further my "On Keeping Faith: The Uses of History for Religious Ethics," The Journal of Religious Ethics, 7 (Spring 1979), 98-116.
23. Erasmus, lines 17-24.
24. See further Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace (New York and Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1960), p. 131, and Lester K. Born, The Education of a Christian Prince by Desiderius Erasmus (New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1965), pp. 126.
25. See, for example, Richard A. Falk, A Study of Future Worlds (New York: Macmillan/The Free Press, 1975).
26. John Howard Yoder, Nevertheless (Scottdale, Pa., and Kitchener, Ont.: Herald Press, 1976), p. 33.
27. Condemnation of "militarism" has become a common feature of the public policy statements of many Protestant denominations. See, for example, the statements by The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the Reformed Church in America in Robert Heyer, ed., Nuclear Disarmament (New York and Ramsey, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1982), pp. 245-46, 251-52, and 267. A prominent example of condemnation of "war-fighting" strategic planning is the American Catholic bishops' pastoral; see National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraphs 184-90. Such thinking is far more like the traditional pacifism represented by Yoder and Erasmus than it is like the reasoning of just war tradition.
28. Jonathan Schell. The Fate of the Earth (New York: Avon Books, 1982), p. 85.
29. Ibid., p. 78.
30. See, for example, the discussions of noncombatant immunity found in Walzer, chaps. 8-10. Despite the criticisms I have earlier directed at the American Catholic bishops' letter, it clearly embodies an understanding that the values that might be endangered by an enemy are not trivial; they include "those key values of justice, freedom and independence which are necessary for personal dignity and national integrity'' (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraph 175).
31. See, for example, Louis Rene Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus (Lexington, Mass. and Toronto: Lexington Books, 1983), pp. 1524; compare the argument of the American Catholic bishops, note 18 above.
32. O'Brien, chap. 1.
33. Compare National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraphs 188, 190.
34. Philip Green, Deadly Logic (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 24951.
35. Compare National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraphs 175, 188. This document, on my reading, is only a whisker away from the "deterrence only" position on nuclear weapons; that whisker is the ambiguity maintained in the threat of strategic nuclear retaliation, specifically in the possible difference between "declaratory policy" and "action policy" (paragraph 164). Paragraph 148 denies counterpopulation retaliation; paragraph 184 repeats this and also undercuts the possibility of counterforce strategic retaliation. These themes recur elsewhere in Section II of the document as well. Is the "conditional acceptance of nuclear deterrence" (paragraph 198) in this pastoral letter then anything more than a "conditional acceptance" of the possession of such weapons (not making any distinctions among types, purposes, or relative destructive power but treating all nuclear weapons the same), and does not the "no first use" position taken in the letter (paragraph 150 and passim) in practical terms collapse into a policy of "no use at all"?
36. See John Eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations (Washington: Catholic Association for International Peace, 1935), p. 132.
37. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraph 134.
38. Heyer, p. 266.
39. Compare Walzer, pp. 32935.
40. Carl von Clausewitz, On War ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), p. 370.
41. See, for example, Paul Fussell's argument in his The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), passim, that modern war is inevitably totalistic, chaotic, beyond human control, and disproportionately destructive of values.
42. Compare National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraphs 155, 21516.
43. See further Sam Cohen, "Rethinking Strategic Defense," pp. 99122 in Robert W. Poole, Jr., ed., Defending a Free Society (Lexington, Mass. and Toronto: Lexington Books, 1984).
44. Walzer, chap . 16.
45. See further my discussion of Walzer on this matter in Just War Tradition, pp. 24-28.
46. Franciscus de Victoria, De Jure Belli, section 37, in Franciscus de Victoria, De Indis et De Jure Belli Relectiones, ed. by Ernest Nys (Washington: Carnegie Institute, 1917). Victoria makes clear, however, that he thought few wars meet the test of an unambiguous conflict of justice against in justice.
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Dr. James T. Johnson (Ph.D., Princeton) is a professor in the Department of Religion and the Graduate Department of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. He is the author of three books on Western moral thought on war, including the recently published Can Modern War Be Just? (Yale Univ. Press, 1984). His edited books include The Bible and Politics in America (Fortress Press, 1984). He also edits The Journal of Religious Ethics and has served on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals. He has been a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellow and has received two study grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Currently he holds a Guggenheim Fellowship and is writing a book on the development of pacifist thought in relation to just war tradition in Western history.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...985/johnson.htm
JAMES TURNER JOHNSON
Two deep and broad streams of moral reflection on war run through Western history. These streams have their thematic origin in a single fundamental question: Is it ever morally allowable to employ force in the protection and preservation of values? The moral tradition of pacifism has resulted from a negative response to this question, given in various ways under various historical circumstances. A positive answer, given in ways no less conditioned by historical circumstance yet with a similar depth of underlying consistency and wholeness, has produced the other moral tradition on force and violence, which it is both convenient and proper to call by a familiar name: just war tradition. We should note two characteristic facts about this tradition.
First, it is a moral response to the question of value and force that is not only historically deep but is a product of reflection and action across the whole breadth of this culture's experience. It is not a moral doctrine in the narrow sense, reflecting the attitudes only of those sectors of the culture, like religion, often conceived as having a specialized function of moralizing cut off from the rest of human existence. This tradition has often found expression, to be sure, in church law and theological reflection; yet it also appears in codifications and theories of international law, in military manuals on how rightly to conduct war, and, as Michael Walzer has shown in Just and Unjust Wars, in the judgments and reactions of common people.[1] In short, this tradition encapsulates something of how we in this culture respond morally to the question of protection of value by force; it is not the only response, for pacifist rejection of force parallels it through history, but it is a fundamental one, revealing how we characteristically think about morality and war and defining the terms for our reflections in new or changing circumstances.
The second characteristic fact about just war tradition is that it preserves two kinds of moral response to the question of value and force, not merely one: limitation always accompanies justification. The response that says, yes, here are some conditions in which it is morally right to use force to protect value goes on to set limits to what may rightly be done toward that end. This second element in the response is determined by the nature of the value or values to be protected; thus the need for limitation is built into the need to protect value as a necessary correlate. This means in general that unlimited or even disproportionately large amounts of force are not what is justified when the use of force to protect values is itself justified. Just war tradition, as recognized by such contemporary commentators as Paul Ramsey, William V. O'Brien, and, as already mentioned, Walzer,[2] is a moral tradition of justifiable and limited war. What has come to be known as the jus ad bellum has to do with the question of justification, while that of limitation is addressed by the jus in bello. These are interconnected areas, but the priority, logical as well as historical, is with the former: only after the fundamental question is answered about the moral justification of employing force to protect values does the second question, about the morally requisite limits governing the use of that force, in turn arise. Problems arising in the jus in bello context may cause us to want to reflect further about the nature of the values we hold, the threat against them, and the means we may use to defend them; yet such further reflection means only that we must again enter the arena of the "war decision"[3] the jus ad bellum.
It is often claimed that the development of nuclear weapons has made this traditional way of thinking about morality and war obsolete and irrelevant.[4] From what I have said, it should be clear that I think this is not the case. Indeed, my claim is that we naturally think in the same terms that are encountered in the tradition, whether we want to or not: a pacifist critic like James Douglass employs one part of the tradition to reject the whole of it,[5] while no sooner has another critic, Stanley Hoffmann, rejected it than he reinvents it point by point.[6] Such phenomena should be instructive. We do not do well to repudiate this tradition of moral reflection from the past; doing so merely isolates us from the wisdom of others surely no less morally or intellectually acute than we, who in their own historical contexts have faced problems analogous to our own about whether and how to employ force in the defense of values. It is thus better to use this tradition consciously, trying to learn from it and with it, even in the nuclear age, than it is to forget it and then have to reinvent it.
Defense of Values by Force as a Moral Possibility
To protect and preserve values is the only justifying cause for the use of force that is admitted in Western moral tradition. Classically the use of force in response to a threat to values was justified in four ways: to protect the innocent, to recover something wrongly taken, to punish evil, and to defend against a wrongful attack in progress. Let us look briefly at each of these and inquire what we may derive from them in our present context.
Defense of the innocent is an idea that can be traced at least as far as Augustine in Christian thought,[7] but it also has a history in military traditions back through the code of chivalry into the customs of pre-medieval Germanic societies.[8] By itself it implies an interventionist model of the justified use of military force and, more broadly, of national power. This not only flies in the face of much contemporary moralizing but also challenges such neo-isolationists as Laurence Beilenson[9] who argue for a retreat from foreign involvement by this country and the creation of a new "fortress America." It is also at odds with the individualistic ethics fostered domestically in our society with the demise of close ties of community,[10] an ethic that implies "not getting involved" perhaps even in extreme cases like mugging or rape. Granted that it is extremely dangerous to throw military power around in a world that has the capability of destroying itself by global war; granted also that national hubris if unrestrained[11] could use defense of others as an unwarranted excuse for a new round of imperialistic conquests; there still, I submit, remain in the contemporary world cases in which a limited and proportionate use of force may be the appropriate means to preserve the value referred to in the phrase "defense of the innocent." The case of Grenada was not morally the same as that of Afghanistan; intervention in Hungary by the West at the time of the 1956 uprising would not have been the moral equivalent of the Soviet invasion that did in fact occur; intervention in Uganda by neighboring Tanzania to depose Idi Amin and put an end to his bloodthirsty and self-aggrandizing rule was not the same as would have been an invasion aimed simply at increasing Tanzanian territory. Clearly not every case where the rights of innocent persons need to be protected should become an occasion for military intervention; the case of Hungary offers a clear instance when following out this line of implication from just war tradition to the exclusion of other considerations would have led to the wrong decision. But my point is that the moral distinctions assumed by the classical formulation of just war tradition still remain, and the necessity to tread warily (which was no less an obligation in any previous age of human history) does not remove either the moral outrage that comes from violation of the innocent,[12] the obligation to prevent or stop such violation if at all possible,[13] and the possibility that among all the means available, military ones may be the best.
The recovery of something wrongly taken is a necessary counterpart to the idea of defense against aggression in progress[14] If such after-the-fact reaction were not allowed, the result would be that expansionist or other aggressive acts would, if speedy and effective, be tacitly accepted. There must be, of course, some consistent and agreed-upon means of identifying what belongs to one society or one polity and what to another, but even in the absence of complete consensus on this it is not necessary to reduce everything to a matter of different ideological or national perspective, so that what is one's own is simply whatever one says is one's own. The Falklands conflict provides an instructive contemporary example of the relevance of such reflection. The Argentine claim to the islands was not without some merit, but this was hardly of sufficient value to justify military invasion and occupation against the will of the inhabitants. The principle of self-determination, often cited to protect weak nations against military and other forms of aggression by stronger ones, while not the only meaningful principle here, was certainly violated by Argentina's action. If only defense against an aggression in progress were justified, then Britain and the British inhabitants of the islands would have had no recourse, after the failure of the intensively pursued negotiations, but to accept the newly established status quo of Argentine military rule. The allowance of after-the-fact use of force to regain something wrongly taken is the source of moral justification for Britain's military actions in the Falklands war.
The punishment of evil is, in my judgment, the least useful of the classic formulations[15] of just cause in the present context. One reason for this is the prevalence of ideological divisions in the contemporary world. This line of justification for the use of force to protect value is all too easily changed into a justification for ideological warfare by one's own "forces of light" against the "forces of darkness" with their different ideological beliefs. This problem is not as acute among the superpowers as it once was, though it still exists and might still be fanned back to its former heat; more pressing immediate instances are to be found in the conflicts of the Middle East and Northern Ireland. Yet classically the punishment of differences of belief was not what was implied by this idea of just cause; what was to be punished was the kind of action identified in the other three kinds of justifying cause.[16] What is unique to this concept of punishment taken alone is that it implicitly allows going beyond what these other concepts justify to further action aimed at insuring that the same thing does not happen again. Such an allowance can easily be pushed too far, and so we should be cautious in citing this reason to justify force for the protection of value in the present age. Nuclear deterrence depends on the threat of punishment above all else; yet the use of current types of strategic nuclear weapons kept for deterrence purposes could itself threaten the very values such use would ostensibly seek to preserve. This is, of course, the heart of the nuclear dilemma, and I will return to it. For the present my only point is that the justification of force as punishment for wrong done must not be allowed to become isolated from the general question of the protection of value or from the other justifying moral reasons for the use of force to protect value. Yet even with this caveat, if the goal of permitted military action is, as another part of just war tradition insists, the end of peace, then it is not proper to rule out the morality of punishment entirely.
If we had begun with 20th century international law and some other aspects of contemporary moral, political, and legal thought, we would have started with the justification of defense against aggression in progress-and perhaps got no further.[17] By keeping this classic idea of justifying cause for the use of force until last, I mean to symbolize that this idea is not as fundamental over the whole history of Western moral reflection on war as it has become in contemporary thought. Indeed, when we set this justification for the use of force alongside the others identified and discussed above, then we discover that the right of self-defense is not in fact a moral absolute. One may oneself be in the wrong in a particular conflict. Rather than to exalt one's own righteousness and well-being over that of others, the better moral course is to deflate somewhat this allowance of self-defense to more appropriate proportions alongside the other jus ad bellum provisions. In short, self-defense may therefore not be unlimited; there are other values to consider than the integrity of the self or one's own national polity. It is this consideration from just war tradition that points to the wrongness of schemes of national defense based on a threat of catastrophic annihilation, even if that threat is mutual. The irony of the present situation is that the very legal and moral efforts that attempt to restrict the incidence of the use of force by allowing only its defensive use--I am thinking of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, as well as current ostensibly moral arguments that the more terrible the deterrent threat, the less likelihood there will be of war--have the effect of insuring that should war come, despite these efforts, it will be of the most immoral and value-destructive kind attainable through military technology. That is, concentrating solely on the rightness of defense against aggression, while admittedly a moral justification for the use of force, has led us to think of strategic nuclear deterrence by threat of catastrophe as morally right, while ruling out lesser levels of force as possible responses to threats to value, even when these latter are more justifiable from the broader perspectives of just war tradition.[18]
In short, we would do well to remember what many in our present debate have either forgotten or systematically ignored: that circumstances may come into being in human history in which the use of force, at appropriate levels and discriminatingly directed, may be the morally preferable means for the protection and preservation of values. In forgetting or ignoring this, sometimes in the name of ostensibly moral considerations, those who would reject such a use of force are in fact choosing a less moral course than the one historically given form in the tradition which says that just war must also be limited war.
The Question of Values
May values ever be defended by forceful means? Answering this question requires us to think, first, about the nature of the values to be protected and the interrelation among values. We do this normally not by reflection but by affirmation. Hence the following from John Stuart Mill:
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse . . . . A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself.[19]
Mill in this context alludes to the values from which he speaks, but the salient fact about this statement is his ranking of relative values. He does not deny the value of personal safety; yet it is not for him the highest value. He does not deny the ugliness of war; he only affirms that in the ranking of priorities it is not the worst evil. Mill was, of course, a utilitarian in ethics; yet such priority ranking of values is not a feature unique to utilitarianism and to be dismissed by all non-utilitarians. Such ranking is indeed a feature of any ethic, for the service of one value often conflicts with the service of another, and there must be some way of deciding among them. Consider the following from Erasmus, a figure who was anything but a utilitarian:
Think . . . of all the crimes that are committed with war as a pretext, while "good lawes fall silent amid the clash of arms"--all the instances of sack and sacrilege, rape, and other shameful acts, such as one hesitates even to name. And even when the war is over, this moral corruption is bound to linger for many years. Now assess for me the cost--a cost so great that, even if you win the war, you will lose much more than you gain. Indeed, what realm . . . can be weighed against, the life, the blood, of so many thousand men?[20]
This passage is replete with priority ranking of values. Erasmus begins by identifying war rhetorically with criminal activity, thus locating it at the bottom of the value scale, then turns explicitly to proportional counting of relative costs: "even if you win the war, you will lose much more than you gain"; "what realm . . . can be weighed against the life, the blood, of so many thousand men?" Such comparative weighting of goods is as central to the ethics of Erasmian humanism as to Mill's utilitarianism; indeed, it appears as a core feature of moral argument as such. There is ultimately no way to get to the truth or falsity of various perceptions of value. This is why, finally, there can be no real argument between absolute pacifists, who reject all possibility of the use of force to protect value, and those who accept some possibility of such use of force.[21] But this is not a problem in most of the current defense debate, which is a debate over ranking of values among persons who weight their values as differently as do Mill and Erasmus.
Recognizing values where they exist and sorting them according to priorities where there are conflicts among them is the function of moral agency, an art learned in one's community of moral discourse.[22] Without going into a full theory of moral agency, which is far beyond the scope of this essay, the most we can say here is that affirmations like those of Mill and Erasmus allow us to glimpse the structure of relative values held by each participant in a moral debate and relate those structures of value both to a larger normative conception of common life and to our own personal rankings of value. For present purposes this is enough.
One interesting thing about Erasmus and Mill on war is how contemporary they sound; by thinking about them we may learn something about ourselves. Erasmus counted costs both great and small in his rejection of war. A glimpse of the latter appears elsewhere in the letter quoted above,[23] where he complains that preparations for war have dried up the sources of patronage on which he depended for support. This was purely personal injury, but the complaint is not unlike contemporary arguments against military spending as subtracting from resources available for feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and--in direct continuity with Erasmus--supporting humanistic scholarship. The value ranking is obvious. The real meat of Erasmus' objection to war was, however, in his idealistic vision of world community,[24] which he conceived as both good in itself beyond the goods of any national community and achievable by the right kind of human cooperative interaction. Again, this way of thinking has parallels in current debate, where rejection of force to protect values associated with the nation-state is coupled to a new vision of world order in which the nation-state system has no place.[25] The preservation of peace among nations, both in Erasmus and in contemporary debate, appears as the highest instrumental value, on which the maintenance of all other values depends. This is a different sort of reasoning from that of the pacifism of absolute principle, but even the latter may engage in priority ranking, as in these words of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder: " 'Thou shalt not kill' . . . is an absolute . . . immeasurably more human, more personalistic, more genuinely responsible than the competitive absolute, 'Thou shalt not let Uncle Sam down' or 'Thou shalt fight for freedom' or 'Never give up the ship.'"[26] What we may note here is the tendency to diminish rhetorically the values being downgraded; similarly, Erasmus in all his works against war represents warmaking as nothing more than the result of frivolous and misguided rivalry among sovereigns. War, Yoder and Erasmus alike suggest, may never be anything more than frivolous and misguided; the possibility that it might be an instrumental means of protecting value is dismissed out of hand. Contemporary examples of such reasoning abound, centering around the dismissal of any form of military preparedness as "militarism" and rejection of "war-fighting" strategic planning as opposed to deterrence strategy.[27]
The influence of Erasmian humanistic pacifism on contemporary debate runs deep, and I cannot here chart its full extent, but one more example of this presence must be noted for what it is. Erasmus rejects war as the summum malum, assimilating it to criminality; in contemporary debate the counterpart is the assimilation of all war to the evil of catastrophic nuclear holocaust. Erasmus cites "sack, sacrilege, and rape"; Jonathan Schell, in the idiom of our own age, cites "the biologic effects of ultraviolet radiation with emphasis on the skin"[28] while piling up evidence of "the likely consequences of a holocaust for the earth"[29]--as if anyone had to be reminded that a holocaust is, by definition, evil.
It should be clear that Erasmus, Schell, and Yoder are simply moving in a different sphere from Mill and the main line of just war thinking (which I also share). It is simply impossible, given the assimilation of war to criminality and holocaust, for Erasmus and Schell to share Mill's judgment that "war is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things." Neither could Yoder, for whom the use of force is trivialized into the maxim, "Never give up the ship," or persons who regard war as the result of frivolous self-assertion by political leaders or, in the current phrase, "militarism." Between these and the position represented by Mill there would seem to be an impassable gulf. Yet it is possible at least to see across that gulf, if not to bridge it or remove it. And from the perspective of just war tradition there is something fundamentally wrong with the perception of value found on the other side.
First, while there is no need to deny the charm of an idealistic vision of world community, such a conception of an ideal that is not yet a reality (and may never become one) should not subtract from the quite genuine value to be found in the nation-state system or, more particularly, in a national community like our own. Historically the roots of the nation-state system are in the need to organize human affairs so as to minimize conflict while preserving the unique cultural identities of different peoples. It can be argued plausibly that it still fulfills these functions-imperfectly, to be sure, but with nothing better currently at hand. Likewise, the personal security, justice, freedom, and domestic peace provided in a liberal democratic nation-state like the United States are not to be dismissed lightly by reference to a utopian vision in which these and other values would all be present in greater measure. We must always, as moral beings, measure reality against our ideals; yet to reject the penultimate goods secured by the real because they do not measure up to the ultimate goods envisioned in the ideal is to ensure the loss of even the penultimate goods that we now enjoy. The ultimate would certainly be better; yet in the meantime, we have the obligation to hold as fast as possible to the value at hand, even though doing so must inevitably incur costs. A positive response to the original just war question recognizes this. as did Mill; Erasmus and his contemporary idealistic descendants have not.
Second, if force is to be used to protect values, it is not trivia that are to be protected but values of fundamental worth. Mill's allusion to the value of "being free" is on a quite different level from Yoder's maxim, "Never give up the ship," or Erasmus' collapsing of all reasons for war into the venality of princes. Equally, I believe, not to be reduced to the trivial or frivolous is Walzer's perception, expressed throughout Just and Unjust Wars, that the justification for fighting lies in the recognition of evil and revulsion against it.[30] Walzer's negative way of putting the matter is important for another reason: it reminds us that we do not have to be able to give an extensive and comprehensive listing of all values that may be protected and in what ranking in order to know that there are such values; they will be apparent when they are violated or threatened with violation.
Third, knowing that some wars have resulted from the aggressively self-assertive characters of rulers does not mean that war may never be anything else. It is doubtful that Erasmus was right even about the rulers of his own time. In our own age we must surely make a distinction between, for example, the war made by Hitler and that made by Churchill; nor is it particularly useful to reduce the rise and fall of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union to the personalities of a Carter and a Brezhnev, an Andropov or Chernenko and a Reagan. A manichaean dismissal of everything military as "militaristic" is also an uncalled-for reductionism that makes military preparedness itself an evil, not an instrument for good or ill in ways to be determined by human choices.
Finally, neither in Erasmus' time nor in our own is it right to represent war as the irreducible summum malum. I have already suggested why I think Erasmus was wrong in making this claim; more important for our current context is the wrongness of assimilating all contemporary war to catastrophic nuclear war. Let us dwell on this for a moment .
Who could want a nuclear holocaust? Yet the effort to avoid such a catastrophe is not itself justification for rejection of the possibility that lower levels of force may justifiably be employed to protect value. This is, nonetheless, the clear import of the argument when limited conventional war is collapsed into limited nuclear war by reference to the threat of escalation and nuclear war of any extent is collapsed into catastrophic holocaust on a global scale. 31 Such an argument has the effect of making any contemporary advocate of the use of force to protect values an advocate instead of the total destruction of humankind or even of all life on earth. It should hardly need to be said that such rhetorical hyperbole is unjustified; no one who argues from just war tradition, with its strong emphasis on counting the costs and estimating the probability of success of any projected military action, should be represented as guilty of befriending the idea of nuclear holocaust.
Yet this collapsing of categories is also wrong historically. War in the nuclear age has not been global catastrophe but a continuation of conventional warfare limited in one or several ways--by geography, goals, targets, means. This arena of contemporary limited warfare is one in which traditional moral categories for judging war are very much at home, as such different writers as William V. O'Brien and Michael Walzer have, in their respective ways, both recognized. The issue, then, is not of the prohibition of all means of defense in the nuclear age, because the assimilation of all contemporary war to the summum malum of nuclear holocaust is invalid; it is rather the perennial question of when and how force may be used for the defense of values.[32] We will return to this question below.
The Problem of Threats to Values
For there to be a need to defend values, there must be a threat to those values. To anyone with a modicum of objectivity, though, it must be apparent that in the current defense debate there is no agreement about the nature of the threat, and so there can be little hope of agreement about the means of preserving values in the face of the menace identified. Speaking broadly, I find in the present debate three distinctively different identifications of the threat to values that must be met. For some, there is no danger worth mentioning beyond that of nuclear holocaust, which is defined as threatening everything that is of value; for others the principal challenge to the values that matter for them is the arms race as such, with its diversion of resources to military ends and a perceived transformation of values toward those of "militarism"; finally, a third perspective identifies the principal threat to values in the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, West and East, two different and competing social, economic, political, and moral systems. This last is the most easily identifiable in terms of traditional interstate political analysis and in terms of just war tradition. All three perspectives have many forms and are somewhat fluid, so that in painting them with broad strokes of the brush I cannot render the inner details of each. Yet the broadly painted pictures of these different perspectives are themselves interesting morally, and it is on these that I will focus in this brief context.
Let us begin by exploring what is distinctive about each of the first two positions I have identified. These clearly overlap, but their emphases are importantly different, as are their respective histories and implicit value commitments. One way of recognizing this quickly is by noting that the anti-nuclear-holocaust position can be expressed in a commitment to increased military spending for an enhanced deterrent, quite contrary to the anti-arms-race position, which finds typical expression in the nuclear freeze movement and support for disarmament programs. Similarly, part of the historical case for tactical and theater nuclear weapons has been that they cost less to provide than equivalent conventional forces, thus tending to free economic and manpower resources for non-military purposes; yet many from the anti-nuclear-holocaust position view such "war-fighting' weapons as inherently destabilizing and dangerously likely to lead to catastrophic nuclear war.[33] Within the anti-nuclear-holocaust position opposition to the arms race and military spending is but an instrumentality, while within the anti-arms-race position opposition to nuclear arms is only an instrumentality; when there is convergence between these two positions (as there has been in the most recent stage of the defense debate), it is a mixed marriage that is as likely to end in divorce as in conversion of one or both partners.
These two positions also have different historical and ideological roots. The anti-nuclear-holocaust position is, of course, a product of the nuclear age and specifically of the period when the United States and the Soviet Union have practiced strategic nuclear deterrence against each other. It is thus the child of nuclear deterrence theory and finds a characteristic expression in one such theory, the "deterrence only" position. Clearly, though, there has been a transformation of values from parent to offspring. Thus when Philip Green wrote Deadly Logic in the mid-1960s, he cited "resistance to Communism" as the fundamental "ethical root of deterrence theory,"[34] but the ethical root of the contemporary "deterrence only" position is the perception of nuclear warfare, not the menace to values posed by a totalitarian political system, as the evil to be avoided by the possession of a nuclear deterrent.[35]
The historical roots of the anti-arms-race position are at least a century old; they lie in opposition to the increasing practice in 19th-century European states of sustaining a standing army built up by universal or nearly universal conscription, and in opposition to the social and economic costs of sustaining such armies. Religious groups have been the chief enunciators of this position; they are so today. A direct line runs between the Postulata on war prepared for Vatican Council I in 1870, which deplored the "intolerable burden" of defense spending and the social costs of "huge standing and conscript armies,"[36] and the 1983 pastoral of the American Catholic bishops with its deploring of the economic distortion of priorities" due to the "billions readily spent for destructive instruments"[37] or, to take a Protestant example, the 1980 statement on the arms race by the Reformed Church in America decrying "the devastating social and personal consequences of the arms race."[38] Two ethical roots of this position are visible in the sources cited: an opposition to war and weapons as contrary to the biblical vision of peace and an identification with the needs of the poor as best expressing Christian conformity to Christ. Both themes have secular counterparts in contemporary debate, and the first obviously parallels the utopian vision of Erasmian humanism.
If nuclear holocaust is the danger against which values must be protected, then deterrence theory is one rational response, but so would be general nuclear disarmament. If the arms race itself is the menace to values that must be defended against, then a freeze on military expenditures followed by a general scaling down of military establishments is the clear implication. Both these perspectives on the contemporary threat to values incorporate truths about the present historical situation; both are rooted in important perceptions of moral value; each offers, in its own way, a response to the problem of threat to values as it perceives that threat. Yet neither of these perspectives' is really about the question with which we began this paper, the fundamental question that is at the root of our moral tradition on war: when and how may force justifiably be employed for the defense of values. Rather than approaching seriously the problem of possible moral justification of force, each of these perspectives has, in its own way, defined that possibility out of existence in the search of a general rejection of the use of force as a moral option in the contemporary age. The reason is that neither of these perspectives is able to comprehend the possibility of significant threats to value alongside the one on which each of them is fixed.
The problem, however, is that what is thus ignored does not for this reason cease to exist. International rivalries persist, as they did in the pre-nuclear era: ideologies and realistic perceptions of national interest continue to influence the actions of nations, and these actions are often played out through projections of force. Terrorism, civil war, and international war continue to be plain realities of our present era, and there is no reason to suppose either that aggression will no longer take place in human history or that it can effectively be opposed by means other than military ones.[39] Indeed, prospective victims of aggression today might reflect with Clausewitz: "The aggressor is always peace-loving; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed."[40] The just war perspective, the third perspective in the contemporary debate, views the problem of threats to value in this light, in continuity with the main line of statecraft over history, and conceives the problem of defense against such threats also in terms continuous with that historical experience.
Let it be clear: the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States is not the only source of danger to American values; yet it would be blindness to wish away the existence of this rivalry, which is rooted in more than common possession of mutual annihilative power, more than competing ideologies, more than national interest, more than global competition for friends, allies, and trading partners-and yet all of these. And this rivalry is more than simply a product of adverse perceptions; it is real. Where it takes military form, as for example most unambiguously along the NATO-Warsaw Pact border, thinking about the menace to values must go beyond efforts to avoid catastrophic nuclear war and to end the arms race to include efforts to define and mount a credible, effective, and moral defense against the particular military threat manifest there.
At the same time, though, potential military defense of values is not limited to this confrontation nor to the global East-West rivalry; it may be a matter of attempting to secure a weak third-world nation against the power of a nearby predator, deterring or responding to terrorist attacks, or maintaining the traffic of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. All these possible uses of force involve the defense of value; all are, in general terms, the kind of resort to force regarded as justified in just war tradition. This third perspective on the threat to values, then, is the one I wish to address in my concluding section.
The Problem of Defense Against Threats to Value
I wish now to take us back to a reflection with which this essay began, that in general the nature of values to be protected and the threats against them are such that unlimited or even disproportionate amounts of force are not what is justified when the use of force to defend values is justified. When defense of values by force appears to require transgressing the boundaries set by the jus in bello concepts of proportionality and discrimination, this necessitates that we look again to see whether this is an occasion when the defense of values by force is morally justified. The answer may be no; yet it may also be yes, and this is the possibility I wish to explore in this section.
In fact there are two directions of thought, not one, which lead toward a renewal of the justification of value-protection by force in such a situation. The first drives toward restructuring the application of force and beyond that to the creation of new kinds of force capabilities suited to limited application in the defense of value. The second leads into the far more dangerous consideration whether values may ever be protected by means that themselves violate important values. I will discuss these in turn.
Clausewitz in his time understood well the difference between "absolute war," war pushed to the limits of the destructive capacities of the belligerents, and "real" wars carried on by less than absolute means for limited purposes as an extension of politics; in the 20th century many others have forgotten or ignored this difference.[41] Typically the values threatened by war are less than ultimate, and so is the threat; it is wrong to defend these values against such challenges by totalistic means disproportionate to both the values to be defended and the evil that menaces them. When we add that total war implies also the indiscriminate targeting of noncombatants, a violation of the fundamental idea of protection of the innocent, the indictment of such use of force in response to threats against values grows yet more damning. But the problem of limitation of force in contemporary warfare is different from that which existed earlier. Today limitation must be accomplished first and foremost by human choice; in previous ages such limitation was also a product of the nature of weapons available, the restraints imposed by the seasons of the year, and the economic and social bases on which war was waged. Limitation in the use of force was relatively easy when the means were battle-axes or smoothbore muskets, when three-quarters of the year was closed to military actions, and when soldiers were themselves units of economic production who could not be in arms year-round. Today the problem is more complex: the structuring of force capabilities to defend against possible menaces to value must at the same time provide an effective deterrent and an effective means of active defense while still honoring the moral identity manifest in the society or culture in which the threatened values are known and maintained. Among recent nuclear strategies which did not meet this dual test is massive retaliation, conceived as a strategy for use, since it allowed "brush-fire wars" to erupt unchecked and threatened disproportionate and indiscriminate nuclear devastation as a response to aggression on a much lower scale. Nor does contemporary mutual assured destruction doctrine, for reasons already given above. But the issue is not simply one of the disproportionateness of nuclear arms. The same moral problems exist with the strategic conventional air strikes against population centers of World War II, for example; similarly, in the context of current history one of the most acute problems is how to frame a moral response against terrorist activity without oneself being forced into the characteristic patterns of terrorism.
Complicated this problem is; yet it is not insoluble. If the use of force is justified in response to threats against value, but the only means of force available are such that they contravene important values themselves, then the preferred moral alternative is the development of different means of force. If tactical and theater nuclear weapons are judged too destructive to use or deemed too likely to result in escalation to all-out nuclear war if employed, then the moral choice is to devise non-nuclear defenses to replace them and pay the costs, economic and social, of such defenses.[42] If the strategic nuclear deterrent is deemed immoral to employ, the right response is not to engage in the self-deception of "deterrence-only" reasoning but to explore possible means of defense against nuclear strikes that would not require a preemptive first strike by this nation or a possibly indiscriminate and disproportionate punitive second strike.[43] The justification of using force to defend value certainly means, as I have said earlier, more than "defense" in its narrow sense, the warding off of attacks in progress; yet it certainly also means at least that, and to claim the moral high ground for a rejection of steps toward creating such defense is simply to twist moral reasoning out of shape.
Finally, though, there remains the possibility that protection and preservation of values must be by force, and must be by force that itself contravenes at least some of the values it intends to protect and preserve. This is the possibility that, at the extreme, has been called by the term "supreme emergency,"[44] and it is only at this extreme that it is a morally unique case. Must one fight honorably and die, even when knowing that one's ultimate moral values will thus die also? Or may one sin for the moment in order to defeat the evil that threatens, hoping for time to repent later and making the commitment to pass on undiluted to future generations the values that have in the emergency been transgressed?[45] Some of the lines of argument already advanced bear on this dilemma. I have suggested that ideological claims ought not to be inflated to the point of seeming to justify unlimited warfare; I have argued against disproportionate and indiscriminate warfare as morally evil in themselves; and I have suggested that part of the trouble in responding to an immoral form of warfare like terrorism is that in making such a response one's own humanity may be diminished to the level of that of the terrorist. In short, I tend to be dubious of "supreme emergency" claims and am inclined to hold the moral line for preservation of value in the means chosen as well as in the decision to offer a defense. Even so there remains a possibility of a genuine "supreme emergency" situation. What is to be said about this?
First, it is not a newly recognized kind of situation. In the early Middle Ages Christian soldiers were required to do penance after participating in war because of the possibility that they might have acted sinfully in that war, killing perhaps out of malice toward the enemy rather than with feeling of regretful duty in the service of justice. Here we encounter a case in which the possibility is admitted that protection of values may involve violation of values. When in the 16th century Victoria considered what might be done in a just war, he allowed that a militarily necessary storming of a city could be undertaken even though this would inevitably result in violations of the rights of noncombatants in the city.[46] Such historical evidence suggests a moral acceptance of the possibility of preserving value by wrong means; yet this evidence also implies the limits on that acceptance.
Second, the transgression of value in the service of value must be approached through the general recognition that value conflicts are the stuff with which human moral agency has to deal. Every moral system provides means for handling such conflicts, and that a genuine "supreme emergency" might come to exist is by definition such a conflict, in which higher values must in the last analysis be favored over lower ones. The values constituting the jus ad bellum, having priority over those of the jus in bello, would on my reasoning have to be honored in such a case, even at some expense to the latter.
I have thus brought this discussion to the brink of morally admissible possibility so that we might look over and see what lies below. The view is not a pretty one. Having seen it, though, we may the more purposefully return to the other line of implication sketched before: the development of military capabilities suited to our moral commitments. We may still yearn--and work--for a world without war, for an end to the menace of catastrophic nuclear war, for an end to the arms race; yet with such military capabilities we would be the better prepared to meet morally the threats to value that may be expected to be inevitable so long as these ideals are not achieved.
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NOTES
This article is a revised version of a paper presented by the author at the conference "Justice and War in the Nuclear Age" at Georgetown University.
1. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
2. See Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1961) and The Just War (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968); William V. O'Brien, The Conduct of Just and Limited War (New York: Praeger, 1981).
3. The term is O'Brien's and is meant by him to emphasize the difference in order of priority between the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello, which has to do with "war-fighting" once the initial decision to make war has been made. See O'Brien, especially chaps. 1-3.
4. Compare Stanley Hoffmann, Duties Beyond Borders (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 46-55, and James Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
5. Compare Ramsey's criticism in The Just War, pp. 259-78.
6. Hoffmann, pp. 59ff.
7. For an example of such tracing in contemporary argument see Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, pp. 34-37.
8. For discussion see my Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 13150.
9. See Laurence Beilenson, Survival and Peace in the Nuclear Age (Chicago: Regnery and Company, 1980).
10. On the loss of community and its implications see lames Sellers, Warming Fires (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), and Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
11. This is a familiar theme in the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. Compare his Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940) and The Structure of Nations and Empires (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959).
12. Compare Walzer, pp. 13335.
13. Compare Ramsey, The Just War, pp. 14147.
14. This concept, taken over from Roman law by Augustine and Isidore of Seville, was central to the definition of just war given in medieval canon law. See Corpus Juris Canonici, Pars Prior, Decretum Magistri Gratiani, Pars Secunda, Causa XXIII, Quaest. II. Can. II.
15. This is another jus ad bellum criterion that came from Roman law through Augustine into church law: see ibid. But it had a more central place in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, who connected it to the words of Paul in Romans 13:4: "[The prince] is the minister of God to execute his vengeance against the evildoer." See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II/II, Quest. XL, Art. 1.
16. I make this judgment cognizant of the minority tradition in Christian just war theory from Augustine forward that allowed some forms of war for religion; in Augustine's words, repeated for canon law by Gratian, "The enemies of the church are to be coerced even by war" (Decretum Magistri Gratiani, Quaest. VIII, Can. XLVIII). But in fact efforts to justify wars in Western cultural history, even those clearly involving some benefit or detriment to religion, have generally been justified by appeal to the other reasons already given: protection of the innocent, retaking of something lost, punishment of evil. For discussion of this issue of religious war-and by extension ideological war-see my Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), chaps. I-III.
17. See ibid., pp. 266-70.
18. An early version of this kind of argument undergirded massive retaliation strategy, which Robert W. Tucker in The Just War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1960) regards as an expression of a general American moral attitude justifying all-out responses to injustice received rather than limited uses of force proportionate to harm done to American interests. But suppose that this opposition to limited warfare is retained while all-out retaliation is itself denied as immoral (though the use of deterrence as a threat continues to be accepted); then the argument changes shape, though its fundamentals remain. Such a new version of the moral argument for deterrence and against limited warfare can be found in the 1983 pastoral letter of the American Catholic bishops (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace [Washington: United States Catholic Conference, 1983]). The purpose of deterrence, as defined here, is "only to prevent the use of nuclear weapons by others" (paragraph 188, emphasis in text). "War-fighting strategies," including even planning for fighting nuclear war at a limited level over a protracted period, are explicitly rejected (paragraphs 184, 188, 189). The reason is the prudential judgment that limited nuclear warfare can be expected to escalate to "mass destruction" (paragraphs 15161, 184). Though this suggests heavier reliance on conventional weapons (paragraph 155), even a conventional war "could escalate to the nuclear level" (paragraph 156). While the resultant position is not explicitly a "deterrence-only" one, it is difficult to find in the pessimism toward limited war and "war-fighting strategies" expressed in the bishops' letter any room for limited and proportionate responses to limited levels of harm done, such as the traditional jus in bello implies.
19. John Stuart Mill, "The Contest in America," pp. 208-09, in John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions (Boston: William V. Spencer, 1867). The full text of the passage in question, written to oppose England's siding with the Confederacy in the American Civil War, is as follows: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice--is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other."
20. Desiderius Erasmus, Letter to Antoon van Bergen, Abbot of St. Bertin, dated London, 14 March 1514; number 288 in The Correspondence of Erasmus, Letters 142 to 297, tr. by R. A. B. Minors and D. F. S. Thomson, annotated by Wallace K. Ferguson (Toronto and Buffalo: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1975), lines 4763.
21. That is, for such pacifists the rejection of force has itself become a value or it is necessarily implied by some other value (e.g. Christian love in some forms of religious pacifism); in either case it is unassailable from outside the moral system in which this value is held. Other forms of pacifism, of course, reach their judgment against the use of force by argument based not on the evil of force as such but on the harm to some higher good that the use of force may entail. The contemporary position sometimes called "just-war pacifism," which is based on a prudential calculation of proportionality, is such a form of pacifism.
22. See further my "On Keeping Faith: The Uses of History for Religious Ethics," The Journal of Religious Ethics, 7 (Spring 1979), 98-116.
23. Erasmus, lines 17-24.
24. See further Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace (New York and Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1960), p. 131, and Lester K. Born, The Education of a Christian Prince by Desiderius Erasmus (New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1965), pp. 126.
25. See, for example, Richard A. Falk, A Study of Future Worlds (New York: Macmillan/The Free Press, 1975).
26. John Howard Yoder, Nevertheless (Scottdale, Pa., and Kitchener, Ont.: Herald Press, 1976), p. 33.
27. Condemnation of "militarism" has become a common feature of the public policy statements of many Protestant denominations. See, for example, the statements by The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the Reformed Church in America in Robert Heyer, ed., Nuclear Disarmament (New York and Ramsey, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1982), pp. 245-46, 251-52, and 267. A prominent example of condemnation of "war-fighting" strategic planning is the American Catholic bishops' pastoral; see National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraphs 184-90. Such thinking is far more like the traditional pacifism represented by Yoder and Erasmus than it is like the reasoning of just war tradition.
28. Jonathan Schell. The Fate of the Earth (New York: Avon Books, 1982), p. 85.
29. Ibid., p. 78.
30. See, for example, the discussions of noncombatant immunity found in Walzer, chaps. 8-10. Despite the criticisms I have earlier directed at the American Catholic bishops' letter, it clearly embodies an understanding that the values that might be endangered by an enemy are not trivial; they include "those key values of justice, freedom and independence which are necessary for personal dignity and national integrity'' (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraph 175).
31. See, for example, Louis Rene Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus (Lexington, Mass. and Toronto: Lexington Books, 1983), pp. 1524; compare the argument of the American Catholic bishops, note 18 above.
32. O'Brien, chap. 1.
33. Compare National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraphs 188, 190.
34. Philip Green, Deadly Logic (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 24951.
35. Compare National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraphs 175, 188. This document, on my reading, is only a whisker away from the "deterrence only" position on nuclear weapons; that whisker is the ambiguity maintained in the threat of strategic nuclear retaliation, specifically in the possible difference between "declaratory policy" and "action policy" (paragraph 164). Paragraph 148 denies counterpopulation retaliation; paragraph 184 repeats this and also undercuts the possibility of counterforce strategic retaliation. These themes recur elsewhere in Section II of the document as well. Is the "conditional acceptance of nuclear deterrence" (paragraph 198) in this pastoral letter then anything more than a "conditional acceptance" of the possession of such weapons (not making any distinctions among types, purposes, or relative destructive power but treating all nuclear weapons the same), and does not the "no first use" position taken in the letter (paragraph 150 and passim) in practical terms collapse into a policy of "no use at all"?
36. See John Eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations (Washington: Catholic Association for International Peace, 1935), p. 132.
37. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraph 134.
38. Heyer, p. 266.
39. Compare Walzer, pp. 32935.
40. Carl von Clausewitz, On War ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), p. 370.
41. See, for example, Paul Fussell's argument in his The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), passim, that modern war is inevitably totalistic, chaotic, beyond human control, and disproportionately destructive of values.
42. Compare National Conference of Catholic Bishops, paragraphs 155, 21516.
43. See further Sam Cohen, "Rethinking Strategic Defense," pp. 99122 in Robert W. Poole, Jr., ed., Defending a Free Society (Lexington, Mass. and Toronto: Lexington Books, 1984).
44. Walzer, chap . 16.
45. See further my discussion of Walzer on this matter in Just War Tradition, pp. 24-28.
46. Franciscus de Victoria, De Jure Belli, section 37, in Franciscus de Victoria, De Indis et De Jure Belli Relectiones, ed. by Ernest Nys (Washington: Carnegie Institute, 1917). Victoria makes clear, however, that he thought few wars meet the test of an unambiguous conflict of justice against in justice.
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Dr. James T. Johnson (Ph.D., Princeton) is a professor in the Department of Religion and the Graduate Department of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. He is the author of three books on Western moral thought on war, including the recently published Can Modern War Be Just? (Yale Univ. Press, 1984). His edited books include The Bible and Politics in America (Fortress Press, 1984). He also edits The Journal of Religious Ethics and has served on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals. He has been a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellow and has received two study grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Currently he holds a Guggenheim Fellowship and is writing a book on the development of pacifist thought in relation to just war tradition in Western history.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...985/johnson.htm
France and NATO: The Image and the Reality
WILLIAM T. JOHNSEN and THOMAS-DURELL YOUNG
French policy toward NATO has long befuddled US policymakers. Bilateral security and defense cooperation between Washington and Paris has long been cordial, if not intimate. Moreover, relations between the respective armed services of these two countries have also been close and mutually supportive of common national objectives.[1] However, this degree of bilateral cooperation has not extended into the multilateral fora of NATO. Paris has long suspected US motives in the Alliance and harbored perceptions of inadequate political control over NATO's military structures.[2] This distrust has resulted in obstructionist, if not counterproductive, French policies toward the Alliance. It is little wonder that US officials have been confused by this seemingly irrational and schizophrenic approach toward an organization which has provided the very bases for French national security.
In its own way, French Cold War policy toward NATO was logical. It was logical because President Charles de Gaulle, the architect of French security policy for the 5th Republic, felt that NATO-defined missions could not ensure civilian control over the military to the degree that nationally defined missions could. De Gaulle's decision to withdraw from NATO's integrated military structure thus served as the basis for Gaullist defense policy, which continues to influence strongly French strategy:[3]
firm civilian control over the military, both within France and NATO
an independent strategic nuclear deterrent
substrategic and conventional forces for deterrence and defense in Central Europe and the Mediterranean
intervention forces for out-of-area operations
a sophisticated and technically advanced industrial base to ensure a high degree of independence in nuclear and conventional force requirements
During the Cold War, the Gaullist legacy offered France the luxury of pursuing a defense policy that supported specific French national interests, while Washington stationed forces in Germany and kept the Soviet Union out of Western Europe. Under these circumstances, France maintained an independent distance from NATO, garrisoned forces in Germany, developed national nuclear forces, and deployed military forces throughout the world in support of French and Western interests. Paris, in short, had all of the political advantages of an aspiring world power without having to pay the full political cost associated with NATO membership.[4]
Regrettably for France, this has all changed as recent events have destroyed the comfortable assumptions that underwrote Gaullist strategy. Pierre Lellouche writes, "The French too are awakening, reluctantly, to a messy Europe, where most of the basic foreign policy and defense guidelines laid out by General Charles de Gaulle 35 years ago are simply no longer relevant."[5] Moreover, recent circumstances have unleashed a series of events that have challenged cherished French political objectives in Europe. German unification ended the long held (indeed, polite) myth of French leadership in the close Franco-German relationship.[6] The French vision for a deeper European Union (EU)[7] has effectively been placed on hold while the EU is widened (expanded in membership) with the inclusion of Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Austria, and, perhaps by the end of the decade, Switzerland and some of the Visegrad states of Central Europe.[8] Finally, the continuing conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and Western Europe's seeming inability to halt hostilities there, let alone bring about a long-term peace, have made French officials realize that their approach to dealing with both the United States and NATO needs to be revised.[9]
While these circumstances may be widely known within the US policymaking community, the effects of these new conditions on French policy toward NATO may be less well understood. The key question about French policy remains whether its reassessment of NATO reflects changes in policy, attitude, or both. This article argues that altered regional security conditions have forced French President François Mitterrand to change aspects of French policy toward NATO. However, lingering atavistic attitudes within certain elements of the French bureaucracy may complicate the implementation and longevity of these new policies. Indeed, one needs to recognize that notwithstanding France's newly found interest in participating in NATO consultative fora, structures, programs, and activities, some French attitudes will not necessarily be all that different, or less difficult for Alliance and US officials to confront.
Consequently, it is quite likely that American perceptions of French "perfidy" toward NATO will continue in some measure to impede closer ties with France. Yet, as recent events have demonstrated, French policy toward NATO is capable of dramatic change (notwithstanding French statements to the contrary) when French national interests so dictate. An appreciation of the subtle differences in policy and attitude will elucidate actual changes in the content of French policy, and will indicate how policy will, or will not, be implemented.
Who's Who in Paris
Before examining the details of how and why French policy toward NATO has changed, one needs to review the elements of the security policymaking community in Paris and consider their complex interactions. For example, even those relatively familiar with Paris may not fully comprehend how strong an influence domestic politics exert over French policy toward NATO. And because of the past content and rhetoric of French security policy, many may not be aware that the United States and NATO enjoy strong support within portions of the French bureaucracy. Few of these individuals and bureaucracies, however, are at the pinnacle of the French decisionmaking structure.
Presidential Palace (Palais de l'Elysée). Under the Constitution of the 5th Republic, the President of the Republic need not take counsel of anyone in matters of defense and security policy. Such matters are his exclusively, his domaine réservé. However, David Yost, a leading expert on French security, has argued that President Mitterrand has taken a selective interest in defense issues (European, nuclear) and largely has left the administration of the French armed forces to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense.[10] The key result of this condition is that unless the President makes a specific personal effort to change security policy, inertia prevails. Concerning NATO, Mitterrand's Gaullist political foes have long painted him as an opponent of the widely popular principles of de Gaulle's defense and security policy. Thus, Mitterrand may oppose rapprochement with NATO--rejoining the integrated military command structure,[11] for example--not because of principled opposition to the idea but because he does not want his legacy to include betrayal of Gaullist security policy.[12]
Foreign Office (Quai d'Orsay). As befits any foreign ministry, the Quai attempts to dominate foreign and security policy. Thus, whenever the President and his advisors are not actively engaged in initiating or overseeing a change in policy, the Quai reigns supreme in the implementation of foreign and security policy. Moreover, the Quai is extremely powerful: it is staffed by graduates of the Grandes Ecoles, whose stature is unequalled by graduates of any other French or European university. Perhaps more important for dominating the security and defense bureaucracy, the Quai is the agency charged with receiving and distributing (or not distributing as the case may be) official communications received from outside of France.
Special internal political considerations also contribute to the Quai's bureaucratic preeminence in security policy. De Gaulle perceived that NATO's integrated command structure lacked sufficient political oversight. Intent on maintaining tight civilian control over the military, de Gaulle and his successors have relied on the Quai to ensure close scrutiny over security policy. Consequently, the Quai traditionally has fought vociferously against French participation in the Alliance's military structures.[13] To put it diplomatically, the Quai is suspicious of NATO, and makes its concern known at every opportunity.
Ministry of Defense (Hôtel de Brienne). As a consequence of the Gaullist objective of ensuring civil control over the military, the Ministry of Defense has long had scant influence in the formulation of national strategy and security policy. As a result, it historically has operated at a disadvantage in the interagency policy formulation process, a situation compounded by the presence of a cadre of politico-military and security affairs experts in the Foreign Ministry. Thus, despite the fact that many military and civilian officials have long wished for closer ties to NATO, change has been precluded by the relative weakness of the Hotel de Brienne.
The situation has recently changed. In 1992 the Minister of Defense, Pierre Joxe, reorganized and strengthened the Délégation aux Etudes Générales with top-flight civilian and military security analysts and renamed it the Délégation aux Affairs Stratégique (DAS). This reorganization better prepared him when he and his ministry sallied forth into the interagency policy-formulation process.[14] Moreover, the elevation of Admiral Jacques Lanxade to Chief of Staff of the armed forces, the French experience in the Gulf War, and the deployment of sizable numbers of French forces to the former Yugoslavia have increased dramatically the Ministry's influence in the interagency formulation of national strategy and security policy. In short, many in the French government, and particularly within the security policy apparatus, recognize that the new European security environment requires input from the Hôtel de Brienne in the policymaking process.
Office of the Prime Minister (Hôtel Matignon). Given the President of the Republic's domaine réservé in defense and security policy, the Prime Minister traditionally has wielded little power in these areas. However, with the return to power of the conservatives (Rassemblement pour la Répubique--RPR, headed by Jacques Chirac, and the Union pour la Démocratie Française--UDF, led by former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing), France confronted a second instance of government divided between a president of a party different from the majority party in parliament. The first period of such cohabitation occurred when Jacques Chirac--President Mitterrand's arch political enemy--was Prime Minister from 1986 to 1988.[15] Because of that tumultuous experience, Mitterrand has gone out of his way to ensure a solid working relationship with the current Prime Minister, Edouard Balladur,[16] a key member of Chirac's RPR.
Evidence of the lengths to which Mitterrand will go to ensure the success of this working relationship with Balladur can be found in the recent release of a Defense White Paper, the first such document published since 1972.[17] French initiatives seeking to end the Yugoslav civil war and the presence of large numbers of French troops there have also necessitated Balladur's support and input into the policymaking process.[18] This cooperative atmosphere (which, not insignificantly, undermines Chirac's chances in the April 1995 presidential elections) has produced a unique situation in which the Prime Minister has regularly been brought into the policymaking circle by the opposition. Despite his early claim that he would not challenge Mitterrand, Balladur has used the opportunity to encroach on the President's security prerogatives and "to gather the strategic community around the prime minister" in preparation for his own run for the presidency in 1995.[19] As result of the Prime Minister's new influence, the domaine réservé is now sometimes referred to as a domaine partagé (shared domain).[20]
General Secretariat of National Defense (Secretariat General de la Défense Nationale--SGDN). Organizationally under the Prime Minister, the SGDN is not a decisionmaking body, but rather a coordinating agency whose principal activities include managing national intelligence efforts and developing net assessments. SGDN is also the principal coordinating agency for crisis management. Since the 1992 establishment of the Délégation aux Affairs Stratégique, the SGDN has lost some influence, particularly in developing net assessments.
The National Assembly and the Senate (Assemblée nationale and Sénat). Apart from providing budgetary input as the important long-term defense program is being developed, these legislative bodies exert little influence on national strategy and security policy. The French Parliament lacks the resources and the extensive organizational support (such as the Congressional Research Service and Congressional Budget Office) that allow the US Congress to influence significantly the formulation of defense and security policy. Notwithstanding the activities of their respective legislative committees, and given the power of the Elysée in defense and security policy, the legislature is relatively unimportant in formulating national defense and security policy.
When attempting to decipher French policy and attitudes toward NATO, one should never forget that their basis is largely founded on domestic, as opposed to external, political rationales.[21] And although there is a large security policymaking community in the French government, key decisions on policy issues are made by the President, in close collaboration with the Foreign Office. Given the high esteem in which the French public continues to hold General de Gaulle, successive Presidents have been loath to veer far from the tenets of Gaullist defense and security policy.[22] Public discord between Mitterrand and Balladur over Gaullist security and defense principles would remove one of the few remaining bipartisan agreements in French domestic politics. Bipartisan announcements notwithstanding, basic policy differences occasionally produce conflicting signals from the French government.
Strains also exist within the policymaking bureaucracies. For example, under the 5th Republic there have always been differences between the Elysée and the Matignon over the respective roles of the President and the Prime Minister in the formulation and conduct of security policy. While this has been true even when both offices have been occupied by members of the same political party, it has been exacerbated during the two periods of cohabitation.[23]
Other domestic political issues continue to shape French policy toward NATO. Most obvious are the differences between the Socialists and their opponents on the right, the RPR and the UDF. Equally important is the jockeying for position for the upcoming presidential election within the right--Giscard (UDF) and Chirac (RPR)--as well as within the RPR (Chirac vs. Balladur). The result of all these competing and conflicting interactions is that they confuse French policymaking and thus confound outside observers of French security policy.
Changes in French NATO Policy
The year 1991 was a difficult one for French officials. According to David Yost, the Gulf War had a chilling effect upon many of the military and political assumptions undergirding French strategy and security policy.[24] The French experience during the Gulf crisis largely explains the emergence of a dual, not always consistent, French approach to NATO. Clinging to the old axiom that the maintenance of bilateral security ties with the United States should be dealt with separately from NATO issues, some French officials--particularly then-Foreign Minister Roland Dumas--argued that the United States, the sole remaining superpower, needed to be balanced by an independent and more deeply integrated European Community.[25] Hence, France opposed efforts to transform NATO from a purely collective defense organization to a body that could participate in collective security missions (e.g., peacekeeping operations) under Article IV of the NATO Treaty.[26] The French government offered an alternative that favored a stronger and revitalized European Union (vice the Atlantic Community) which eventually would undertake collective security responsibilities.[27] These French initiatives, sponsored by the Foreign Minister, failed.
During this same period President Mitterrand and Minister of Defense Pierre Joxe also began quietly reassessing and changing French policy toward NATO. Nine months after NATO started examining its strategy, Joxe surprised many analysts by announcing that France would participate in the Alliance's ongoing strategy review.[28] Given that the divisive debates that led up to the Alliance's adoption of the strategy of Flexible Response in 1966 contributed significantly to de Gaulle's decision to leave NATO, this move by the President and his Defense Minister had both substantive and symbolic meaning. France's subsequent endorsement of the Alliance's New Strategic Concept at the November 1991 Rome Summit further underscored the shift in French policy. At the same time, Paris continued to oppose French participation in the Defense Planning Committee (DPC), much to Joxe's disappointment,[29] and remains suspicious of the lack of sufficient political control over the SACEUR.
Notwithstanding the importance of these developments, the most significant step in France's policy evolution was the French decision at the Oslo NATO foreign ministers meeting, in June 1992, to underwrite NATO participation in Article IV peacekeeping missions under the political auspices of the United Nations and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.[30] Equally important, the French are participating under NATO aegis in missions such as Operation Deny Flight and Sharp Guard.[31]
These decisions have had three key effects. First, by agreeing to these new missions for the Alliance, France retreated from its long-held view that NATO should not be employed for missions other than the collective defense of its members.[32] Second, since April 1993, the Chief of the French Military Mission to the NATO Military Committee has participated in Military Committee discussions dealing with "peacekeeping,"[33] however broadly defined.[34] Third, the recent White Paper leaves the door open for the Minister of Defense and Chief of Staff of the armed forces to participate in the North Atlantic Council and the Military Committee, on a case-by-case basis, as decided by the President and Prime Minister.[35]
There are several reasons for these changes in French policy. The French have recognized that the dramatic changes in the European security environment have made NATO more important, not less so as they originally perceived.[36] Their experience with the Western European Union and the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, for example, have reinforced for the French the importance of NATO.
This may be the case particularly in peace operations, which appears to be the most likely venue in which French forces might be employed. Consequently, the French have insisted on increasing the power and importance of the Military Committee in Article IV missions, at the expense of the Major NATO Commands. This has resulted in the Chief of the French Military Mission to the Military Committee attending its meetings as a participant, rather than as an observer, for the first time since France left the integrated command structure in 1966.
Participation in the Military Committee is certainly more politically palatable within France than allowing the Minister of Defense to attend DPC meetings, because such a symbolic and substantive move would enhance the power and prestige of the defense ministry at the expense of the foreign office. Moreover, if the Minister of Defense attended such meetings, other DPC members might demand that France participate fully in the defense planning process, a policy change the French are unlikely to make any time soon.[37]
Just as the French military has returned to high-level defense discussions in NATO, so, too, the French military now participates in a standing multinational structure in peacetime. Granted, the French have continued as nonintegrated participants in specific NATO functions, such as the integrated air defense systems and certain logistics and infrastructure activities. And agreements to allow cooperation in a crisis between French forces and NATO military commands (e.g., agreements with SACEUR and CINCENT) have existed since 1967.[38] New initiatives, however, indicate the extent of change in French policy.
The first example concerns command and control of the Eurocorps. The Eurocorps, a joint initiative of President Mitterrand and German Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl, emerged from the fall 1991 Franco-German Summit at La Rochelle.[39] The Eurocorps, as proposed, was to be based on an existing Franco-German brigade and provide the foundation for a European Security and Defense Identity. Although the Bush Administration and others in the Alliance strenuously opposed the initiative as another French assault on NATO,[40] the Germans touted the Eurocorps as a means of easing French participation into Alliance military structures.[41] The German view appeared vindicated when, according to press reports, on 21 January 1993 an agreement signed by the Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr, General Klaus Naumann; then-SACEUR, General John Shalikashvili; and Admiral Lanxade placed the Eurocorps under the operational command (vice control) of the SACEUR for the conduct of NATO missions.[42] Thus, not only are French forces assigned to the Eurocorps anchored within a multinational structure, but French forces could be placed under the command of the SACEUR for wartime operations should signatory nations so decide, with all the peacetime implications this entails.[43]
The issues of NATO command and control and French forces in Article IV collective security missions continued their evolution when, at the January 1994 NATO Summit, France agreed to US initiatives for the Partnership for Peace (PfP) and the Combined/Joint Task Force (C/JTF).[44] While Paris agreed in principle to both concepts, implementation of the initiatives has not been without expressions of French reluctance. For example, Paris insisted that the Planning Coordination Cell (the nerve center of PfP), while located at SHAPE in Mons, could not be under the control of SACEUR, but would be answerable to the North Atlantic Council in Brussels. Additionally, Paris manifested its long-held suspicions of the SACEUR during discussions concerning the development of the terms of reference for C/JTF.[45] While the French position was perhaps not precisely what the United States and other Alliance countries would have preferred, the mere fact that Paris did not veto these concepts marks a significant change in French policy.[46]
A final notable change in French policy toward NATO relates to weapons of mass destruction. In recognition of the importance of this issue and the absolute need to coordinate related Western efforts, the French have agreed to participate in the Alliance's political and defense committees dealing with nonproliferation.[47] Within the defense committee, France not only participates in the Senior Defence Group on Proliferation, but cochairs the group with the United States.[48] Paris's participation in this group is one of the few times France has joined in a defense committee project since 1966. Clearly, the potential magnitude of the proliferation problem and the overriding need to coordinate efforts with its allies have prompted this important change in French policy.
Implementing French NATO Policy
If it is important to know how French policy toward NATO has changed, it is equally important to understand the manner in which this change in policy has been carried out. Understanding the process of change will identify sources of new problems; it may also provide key indicators of the probability of further change, as well as the durability of recent French initiatives in NATO.
There are two impediments to recognizing change in French policy toward NATO. First, it seems that whenever senior French officials from the Prime Minister's office or the Ministry of Defense announce an apparent policy change, these declarations are almost inevitably followed by denials from the President's office or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[49] Second, in view of past French policy and attitudes toward the Alliance, some observers and officials find it difficult to accept that Paris has changed its NATO policy. This has been the case not only in a historical sense (during the Cold War) but was reinforced by French rhetoric and actions during 1989-92 as the Alliance developed its new strategy and significantly reduced its force structures.
The choice of Admiral Jacques Lanxade as the primary agent of change has been one of the more remarkable aspects of France's policy toward NATO. Mitterrand chose a military official for this task, as opposed to the Foreign Minister or a professional diplomat, for two reasons. First, as the President's Chief of Military Staff in the Elysée during the Gulf War, Lanxade was well placed to coordinate France's involvement in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, especially in sensitive political discussions with French allies, and particularly with the United States. Following the end of hostilities in April 1991, Admiral Lanxade became Chief of Staff of the armed forces. Because he enjoys Mitterrand's confidence, he has been able to restructure the French armed forces, paying particular attention to joint and combined operations. This reorganization and emphasis on joint issues, in turn, supports Mitterrand's new policy of enhanced selectivity with NATO.
Second, as noted earlier, internal French politics helped drive Lanxade's selection for this task. Since the start of the second period of cohabitation, the issue of NATO has taken on an interesting partisan flavor, beyond its normal levels. Many currently assume that the race in the forthcoming French presidential elections is between Jacques Chirac (the leader of the RPR and mayor of Paris) and RPR Prime Minister Balladur (a previous Chirac supporter). Within this unusual intraparty struggle, Foreign Minister Alain Juppé supports Chirac, while Minister of Defense François Léotard supports Balladur.
As a result of this partisan political morass, Lanxade is the one individual capable of operating above partisan politics while still maintaining close relations with all the major political actors, particularly President Mitterrand. Indeed, French officials readily--albeit privately--acknowledge that Lanxade is probably the most influential and powerful official in the area of defense policymaking and implementation that France has seen in many years.[50]
Conclusion
While the preceding analysis indicates that French policy toward NATO appears to have changed, the depth of that change remains open to question: Do the issues described above constitute a fundamental change in policy, or has policy remained relatively fixed while the French pursue new means to their long-established ends? Even if French policy has changed, have attitudes in key elements of the French policy bureaucracy altered sufficiently to carry out the change, or will bureaucratic foot-dragging forestall full-scale implementation?
On balance, it should be clear that long-standing French policies toward the Alliance have changed. Before asserting that France has "returned" to the Alliance, however, one must understand that Mitterrand's reconsideration of France's relationship with NATO will not result in a return to status quo ante 1966.[51] Indeed, French policymakers--even those who most strongly support NATO--continue to pronounce that France will not return to the Alliance's integrated military structure.[52] Nor do the developments constitute a rapprochement, as suggested by one French journal.[53] Simply put, apparently irreconcilable differences remain between France and NATO. The determined independence of the French nuclear deterrent and strategy, and the French phobia about political oversight of NATO military authorities appear unlikely to be changed regardless of who wins the 1995 presidential election. A reconciliation does not a marriage remake.
While France is drawing closer to NATO, the Alliance should expect France to continue to pursue a policy of NATO à la carte. Certainly, the menu of French choices appears to be expanding, but the Alliance should expect the French to opt only for the perquisites that support French national interests, and to defer selections that would add new--and costly--responsibilities: contributions to infrastructure funding; adherence to NATO planning requirements; meeting NATO training and readiness standards; and supporting NATO standardization, rationalization, and interoperability requirements.
If one accepts the proposition that French policy toward NATO has changed, it is advisable to examine the nature and extent of these changes. The fact that the Quai, traditionally the center of French diplomacy and security policy formulation, effectively has been marginalized in the process--and by the Chief of Staff of the armed forces no less--does not bode well for long-term continuity of policy developed and supported by Admiral Lanxade. Simply put, once Mitterrand and Lanxade pass from the scene (as Mitterrand soon will, with Lanxade likely to follow quickly thereafter), will their successors continue these policies or will the Quai reassert its traditional opposition to French participation in the military structure of the Alliance?
Encouragingly, Balladur, a strong candidate for the presidency, favors this fresh approach to NATO, as evinced in the White Paper. However, whether Balladur, Chirac, or Giscard d'Estaing wins the election, the new President may find it difficult to stray far from the course charted by Mitterrand. Given the political and security situation in Europe, there simply is little other choice.[54]
Thus, even with a surface change in policy, an understanding of the deeper currents of French attitudes toward these changes, particularly within the policy bureaucracy, takes on added importance. Given the past attitude toward NATO by the Quai (as well as by some officials in the Elysée), the absence of strong pressure from the President may allow recidivist officials in the Quai and Elysée to retard, if not sabotage, improvements in relations with NATO. That the Minister of Defense continues to be proscribed from attending NATO DPC meetings (much to the displeasure of Minister of Defense Léotard) underscores the continued institutional power the Foreign Office enjoys over the Defense Minister.[55] And disaffected officials need not openly assault policy to kill it; they can simply let it wither and die from neglect. So while Paris can be expected to support some new NATO initiatives and draw closer to the Alliance, one should also expect standard, time-worn rationales to be trotted out in opposition to others. Despite this qualified reconciliation, therefore, France will continue to befuddle NATO and remain a source of frustration within the Alliance.
So, while French policy toward NATO has changed, attitudes in critical parts of the French government remain unrepentant, largely for bureaucratic and domestic political reasons. Limited change, French demands that even these circumscribed revisions occur on French terms, and residual attitudes in key segments of the French policy bureaucracy emphasize the fact that in effect, if not in principle, France continues to follow a policy of enhanced selectivity when dealing with NATO, which could create as many problems as it solves.
Such an approach should not come as a surprise. Nations are expected to act in their own national interests and pursue policies that further those interests. To assume otherwise is imprudent. But recent French initiatives should be viewed positively. These initial, hesitant steps may eventually lead to fuller French participation in the Alliance; the United States and other NATO partners should encourage France to return to the fold.
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NOTES
The authors express their gratitude to Diego Ruiz Palmer, David Yost, Randy Shelton, Mark Morgan, and Pascalle Combelles for their constructive and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
1. On the surface, the image of French policy is of French independence in defense and security affairs, while maintaining, in public, a distant relationship with NATO. The image and reality are not the same. Following France's ostensible divorce from NATO, Allied commanders and their French counterparts maintained close, if not intimate, working relationships. As Frédéric Bozo documented in his comprehensive study on this "secret" relationship, French independence from NATO has, indeed, been qualified to say the least. See, Frédéric Bozo, La France et l'OTAN; De la guerre froide au nouvel order européen (Paris: Masson, 1991). When considered with France's very close relationship with the United States, to include nuclear research and development cooperation, the French claim of having maintained defense independence has to be assessed with skepticism. Apropos nuclear cooperation see The Washington Post, 29 May 1989 and 2 June 1989.
2. See Michael M. Harrison, The Reluctant Ally: France and Atlantic Security (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981), p. 118.
3. It should be mentioned that one of the reasons for the widespread support in France of tenets of Gaullist defense policy over time is because it encapsulates long-standing French defense traditions. See Diego Ruiz Palmer, "French Strategic Options in the 1990s," Adelphi Papers, No. 260 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, Summer 1991), p. 3. For excellent historical background on the development of Gaullist security policy see Harrison, The Reluctant Ally, pp. 116-34.
4. For an excellent assessment of French strategy and force structure see David S. Yost, "France," in The Defense Policies of Nations: A Comparative Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 233-77.
5. Pierre Lellouche, "France in Search of Security," Foreign Affairs, 72 (Spring 1993), 122. Lellouche is the foreign affairs counsellor to Jacques Chirac, leader of the RPR political party.
6. See Frankfurter Allgemeine, 19 July 1990. For an excellent historical perspective on this important bilateral relationship see Julius W. Friend, The Linchpin: French-German Relations, 1950-1990, The Washington Papers No. 154, The Center for Strategic and International Studies (New York: Praeger, 1991).
7. See Anne-Marie Le Gloannec, "The Implications of German Unification for Western Europe" in The New Germany and the New Europe, ed. Paul B. Stares (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1992), p. 266. "Deeper" integration implies developing a common currency and common political, social, and other programs throughout the EU.
8. The Visegrad states include Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.
9. See Lellouche, p. 128.
10. David Yost, "Mitterrand and Defense and Security Policy," French Politics and Society, 9 (Summer-Fall 1991), 146-47.
11. See Agence France-Presse (Paris), 5 May 1994 in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, FBIS-WEU-94-088, 6 May 1994, p. 26.
12. It is interesting to note that François Mitterrand was for many years de Gaulle's most determined critic, leading the Socialist Party in rejecting de Gaulle's defense policy. Yet, upon taking power in 1981, Mitterrand and the Socialists continued to support the tenets of that policy. For an excellent treatment of this issue, see Philip H. Gordon, A Certain Idea of France: French Security Policy and the Gaullist Legacy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 106-18.
13. See Harrison, The Reluctant Ally, pp. 118-19.
14. In effect, DAS has become the policy cloister in the ministry, which has brought it into conflict, at times, with the Etat-Major des Armées (Joint Staff).
15. For background on this period see Gordon, A Certain Idea of France, pp. 144-57.
16. Indeed, some in his own party have complained that Mitterrand has done this at the expense of destroying politically his successor as leader of the party, Michel Rocard, and in effect, the Socialist Party itself. See The Washington Post, 23 June 1994.
17. See Livre Blanc sur la Défense, Paris, Ministère de la Défense, 1994. Note that another key reason for producing this document was to demonstrate, no matter how illusory, the continuation of bipartisan cooperation in the area of defense.
18. For an excellent assessment of French policy toward the Yugoslav conflict, see Pia Christina Wood, "France and the Post Cold War Order: The Case of Yugoslavia," European Security, 3 (Spring 1994), 129-52.
19. David Buchan, "Paris makes European security ambitions clear," London Financial Times, 24 February 1994, p. 2.
20. See Le Quotidien de Paris, 12-13 February 1994.
21. See, for example, David Buchan's commentary on recent policy formulations in his article, "Paris makes European security ambitions clear," p. 2.
22. Daniel Vernet, "The Dilemmas of French Foreign Policy," International Affairs, 68 (No. 4, 1992), 661.
23. See Buchan, "Paris makes European security ambitions clear," for an example of the current period of cohabitation.
24. See David Yost, "France and the Gulf War of 1990-1991: Political-Military Lessons Learned," The Journal of Strategic Studies, 16 (September 1993), 339-74. The evaluation of Jacques Baumel (former foreign minister and current RPR deputy) of the French security environment bolsters Yost's assessment. See Le Monde (Paris), 1 April 1993, p. 2.
25. Yost, "France and the Gulf War," p. 354.
26. The NATO treaty establishes the Alliance as a collective defense organization--i.e., nations bound together to defend themselves from outside aggression. Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, some have attempted to use the consultative provisions contained in Article IV of the treaty as a justification for increased emphasis on NATO as an agent of reliance on collective security (i.e., maintaining peace and stability among the members of the organization) missions such as peacekeeping or peace enforcement. See Articles IV and V of the Washington Treaty, which can be found in NATO, Facts and Figures (Brussels: NATO Information Service, 1989), Appendix 1, Document 2.
27. This particular policy was seen in Paris's opposition to the German-US initiative to create the North Atlantic Cooperation Council within NATO, and France's spurring the European Community to mediate the growing conflict in Yugoslavia. François Heisbourg, former Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and current vice president of Matra Corporation, argues that the French intended to use these initiatives to destroy NATO. See François Heisbourg, "A French View: Developing a European Identity," The Officer, January 1993, p. 31.
28. See Le Monde (Paris), 19 March 1991.
29. Joxe was particularly upset because he could not attend meetings of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, to which only France in the Alliance did not send a representative. See Le Monde (Paris), 30 September 1992.
30. NATO Press Communique M-NAC-1(92)51, Brussels, NATO Press Service, 4 June 1992, p. 4.
31. For details of Deny Flight see Allied Forces Southern Europe, "Fact Sheet--OPERATION DENY FLIGHT," Naples, 24 March 1994. For details of Operation Sharp Guard see Allied Forces Southern Europe, "Fact Sheet--NATO/WEU OPERATIONAL SHARP GUARD," Naples, 7 July 1994. Interestingly, to account for French sensitivities, Operation Sharp Guard is carried out under the authority of the Councils of NATO and WEU.
32. A sympathetic view would hold that French officials value too highly the Alliance's collective defense provisions to allow NATO to be damaged by participating in politically sensitive collective security operations. A less charitable interpretation holds that following the all-but-debacle by the European Community in the former Yugoslavia, France realized that the only way the United States would actively deal with these crises was through NATO, and therefore Paris had no other choice.
33. See Le Monde (Paris), 14 May 1993.
34. See Le Monde (Paris), 21 December 1993.
35. See Livre Blanc sur la Défense, p. 37.
36. "Les évolutions intervenues depuis 1991 dans l'organisation et les activités de l'Alliance doivent être prolongées et amplifiées," Livre Blanc sur la Défense, p. 35.
37. For a persuasive argument for France to take a more pragmatic view toward participating in the DPC see Bozo, La France et l'OTAN, pp. 206-07.
38. See ibid., pp. 101-04; and, Diego Ruiz Palmer, "France," in European Security Policy After the Revolutions of 1989, ed. Jeffrey Simon (Washington: National Defense Univ. Press, 1991), p. 232.
39. For an excellent description and analysis of the Eurocorps, see Rafael Estrella, "After the NATO Summit: New Structures and Modalities for Military Co-operation," Draft General Report AL 76 DSC(94) 2, Brussels, North Atlantic Assembly, May 1994, pp. 7-12.
40. See for example, Jeane Kirkpatrick's essay, "Is France Trying to Torpedo NATO?" CQ Researcher, 21 August 1992, p. 729.
41. See ADN (Berlin), 28 November 1992, in FBIS-WEU-92-230, 30 November 1992, p. 1; and Le Monde, 12 March 1993, in FBIS-WEU-93-057, 26 March 1993, p. 2.
42. See Daniel Vernet's excellent article in Le Monde (Paris), 12 March 1993; Le Monde (Paris), 7 May 1993; Karl Feldmeyer's essay in, Frankfurter Allgemeine, 5 December 1992; and The New York Times, 1 December 1992.
43. For example, French forces should be subject to NATO training and readiness requirements. They also must be capable of operating with NATO forces, thus obligating the French to ensure adequate interoperability, standardization, and rationalization between their forces and NATO logistics and support activities.
44. See Press Communique M-1(94)3, Brussels, NATO Press Service, 11 January 1994. For details of the Partnership for Peace program see, Press Communique M-1(94)2, Partnership for Peace: Invitation, Brussels, NATO Press Service, 10 January 1994. A solid description and analysis of Combined Joint Task Forces can be found in Stanley R. Sloan, "Combined Joint task Forces (CJTF) and New Missions for NATO," CRS Report for Congress, 94-249S, 17 March 1994.
45. For an excellent and insightful assessment of this debate, see Bruce George, "After the NATO Summit," Draft General Report, AL 88 PC(94) 2, Brussels, North Atlantic Assembly, May 1994, pp. 4-5.
46. The late NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner stated that CJTF should enhance French participation in NATO military activities without its complete reintegration. See Le Monde (Paris), 16 December 1993.
47. For details see Press Release M-NAC-1(94)45, "Alliance Policy Framework on Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction," Brussels, NATO Press Service, 9 June 1994.
48. See George, "After the NATO Summit," p. 6.
49. See The Economist (London), 3 October 1992, p. 34. The numerous experiences of former Minister of Defense Pierre Joxe (Le Monde [Paris], 10-11 November 1991; Le Monde [Paris], 30 September 1992; and Le Monde, 4 December 1992), as well as the late Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy (Le Monde [Paris], 6-7 September 1992), commenting on new policy initiatives toward NATO and subsequent governmental denials, are good cases in point.
50. This is not intended to disparage the efforts of former Minister of Defense Pierre Joxe to realign France's NATO policy. Before cohabitation he contributed significantly.
51. See The Baltimore Sun, 16 January 1994.
52. Of the many examples, see particularly, Le Quotidien de Paris, 20 December 1993, in FBIS-WEU-93-242, 20 December 1993, p. 35; Liberation (Paris), 24 February 1994, in FBIS-WEU-94-037, p. 35; and Agence France-Presse (Paris) 5 May 1994, in FBIS-WEU-94-088, 6 May 1994, p. 26.
53. See Liberation (Paris), 24 February 1994, in FBIS-WEU-94-037, 24 February 1994, pp. 28-30.
54. Interestingly, according to French defense expert Olivier Debouzy, it was during the presidency of Giscard d'Estaing, a Gaullist and not during Mitterrand's "watch," that the most far-reaching conceptual and doctrinal changes in Gaullist defense policy took place. Cf., Debouzy's book review of Gordon, A Certain Idea of France in, Survival, 36 (Spring 1994), 186.
55. See Le Monde (Paris), 21 December 1993.
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Lieutenant Colonel William T. Johnsen has been a Strategic Research Analyst at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, since 1991 and was appointed to the Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies in 1994. He has served in command and staff assignments in the 25th Infantry Division and 7th Infantry Division (Light), taught history at the US Military Academy, and was an arms control analyst at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe. He is a graduate of the US Military Academy and the US Army War College and holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Duke University.
Thomas-Durell Young has held the Henry L. Stimson Chair of Military Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute since 1992. From 1988 to 1992 he was a national security affairs analyst at the Institute. Previously he was a country risk analyst for BERI, S.A., a Swiss-based consulting firm. Dr. Young received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva, Switzerland, and is a 1990 graduate of the US Army War College. He has published extensively on US alliance issues, with particular emphasis on Western Europe and the Southwest Pacific.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/1994/young.htm
WILLIAM T. JOHNSEN and THOMAS-DURELL YOUNG
French policy toward NATO has long befuddled US policymakers. Bilateral security and defense cooperation between Washington and Paris has long been cordial, if not intimate. Moreover, relations between the respective armed services of these two countries have also been close and mutually supportive of common national objectives.[1] However, this degree of bilateral cooperation has not extended into the multilateral fora of NATO. Paris has long suspected US motives in the Alliance and harbored perceptions of inadequate political control over NATO's military structures.[2] This distrust has resulted in obstructionist, if not counterproductive, French policies toward the Alliance. It is little wonder that US officials have been confused by this seemingly irrational and schizophrenic approach toward an organization which has provided the very bases for French national security.
In its own way, French Cold War policy toward NATO was logical. It was logical because President Charles de Gaulle, the architect of French security policy for the 5th Republic, felt that NATO-defined missions could not ensure civilian control over the military to the degree that nationally defined missions could. De Gaulle's decision to withdraw from NATO's integrated military structure thus served as the basis for Gaullist defense policy, which continues to influence strongly French strategy:[3]
firm civilian control over the military, both within France and NATO
an independent strategic nuclear deterrent
substrategic and conventional forces for deterrence and defense in Central Europe and the Mediterranean
intervention forces for out-of-area operations
a sophisticated and technically advanced industrial base to ensure a high degree of independence in nuclear and conventional force requirements
During the Cold War, the Gaullist legacy offered France the luxury of pursuing a defense policy that supported specific French national interests, while Washington stationed forces in Germany and kept the Soviet Union out of Western Europe. Under these circumstances, France maintained an independent distance from NATO, garrisoned forces in Germany, developed national nuclear forces, and deployed military forces throughout the world in support of French and Western interests. Paris, in short, had all of the political advantages of an aspiring world power without having to pay the full political cost associated with NATO membership.[4]
Regrettably for France, this has all changed as recent events have destroyed the comfortable assumptions that underwrote Gaullist strategy. Pierre Lellouche writes, "The French too are awakening, reluctantly, to a messy Europe, where most of the basic foreign policy and defense guidelines laid out by General Charles de Gaulle 35 years ago are simply no longer relevant."[5] Moreover, recent circumstances have unleashed a series of events that have challenged cherished French political objectives in Europe. German unification ended the long held (indeed, polite) myth of French leadership in the close Franco-German relationship.[6] The French vision for a deeper European Union (EU)[7] has effectively been placed on hold while the EU is widened (expanded in membership) with the inclusion of Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Austria, and, perhaps by the end of the decade, Switzerland and some of the Visegrad states of Central Europe.[8] Finally, the continuing conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and Western Europe's seeming inability to halt hostilities there, let alone bring about a long-term peace, have made French officials realize that their approach to dealing with both the United States and NATO needs to be revised.[9]
While these circumstances may be widely known within the US policymaking community, the effects of these new conditions on French policy toward NATO may be less well understood. The key question about French policy remains whether its reassessment of NATO reflects changes in policy, attitude, or both. This article argues that altered regional security conditions have forced French President François Mitterrand to change aspects of French policy toward NATO. However, lingering atavistic attitudes within certain elements of the French bureaucracy may complicate the implementation and longevity of these new policies. Indeed, one needs to recognize that notwithstanding France's newly found interest in participating in NATO consultative fora, structures, programs, and activities, some French attitudes will not necessarily be all that different, or less difficult for Alliance and US officials to confront.
Consequently, it is quite likely that American perceptions of French "perfidy" toward NATO will continue in some measure to impede closer ties with France. Yet, as recent events have demonstrated, French policy toward NATO is capable of dramatic change (notwithstanding French statements to the contrary) when French national interests so dictate. An appreciation of the subtle differences in policy and attitude will elucidate actual changes in the content of French policy, and will indicate how policy will, or will not, be implemented.
Who's Who in Paris
Before examining the details of how and why French policy toward NATO has changed, one needs to review the elements of the security policymaking community in Paris and consider their complex interactions. For example, even those relatively familiar with Paris may not fully comprehend how strong an influence domestic politics exert over French policy toward NATO. And because of the past content and rhetoric of French security policy, many may not be aware that the United States and NATO enjoy strong support within portions of the French bureaucracy. Few of these individuals and bureaucracies, however, are at the pinnacle of the French decisionmaking structure.
Presidential Palace (Palais de l'Elysée). Under the Constitution of the 5th Republic, the President of the Republic need not take counsel of anyone in matters of defense and security policy. Such matters are his exclusively, his domaine réservé. However, David Yost, a leading expert on French security, has argued that President Mitterrand has taken a selective interest in defense issues (European, nuclear) and largely has left the administration of the French armed forces to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense.[10] The key result of this condition is that unless the President makes a specific personal effort to change security policy, inertia prevails. Concerning NATO, Mitterrand's Gaullist political foes have long painted him as an opponent of the widely popular principles of de Gaulle's defense and security policy. Thus, Mitterrand may oppose rapprochement with NATO--rejoining the integrated military command structure,[11] for example--not because of principled opposition to the idea but because he does not want his legacy to include betrayal of Gaullist security policy.[12]
Foreign Office (Quai d'Orsay). As befits any foreign ministry, the Quai attempts to dominate foreign and security policy. Thus, whenever the President and his advisors are not actively engaged in initiating or overseeing a change in policy, the Quai reigns supreme in the implementation of foreign and security policy. Moreover, the Quai is extremely powerful: it is staffed by graduates of the Grandes Ecoles, whose stature is unequalled by graduates of any other French or European university. Perhaps more important for dominating the security and defense bureaucracy, the Quai is the agency charged with receiving and distributing (or not distributing as the case may be) official communications received from outside of France.
Special internal political considerations also contribute to the Quai's bureaucratic preeminence in security policy. De Gaulle perceived that NATO's integrated command structure lacked sufficient political oversight. Intent on maintaining tight civilian control over the military, de Gaulle and his successors have relied on the Quai to ensure close scrutiny over security policy. Consequently, the Quai traditionally has fought vociferously against French participation in the Alliance's military structures.[13] To put it diplomatically, the Quai is suspicious of NATO, and makes its concern known at every opportunity.
Ministry of Defense (Hôtel de Brienne). As a consequence of the Gaullist objective of ensuring civil control over the military, the Ministry of Defense has long had scant influence in the formulation of national strategy and security policy. As a result, it historically has operated at a disadvantage in the interagency policy formulation process, a situation compounded by the presence of a cadre of politico-military and security affairs experts in the Foreign Ministry. Thus, despite the fact that many military and civilian officials have long wished for closer ties to NATO, change has been precluded by the relative weakness of the Hotel de Brienne.
The situation has recently changed. In 1992 the Minister of Defense, Pierre Joxe, reorganized and strengthened the Délégation aux Etudes Générales with top-flight civilian and military security analysts and renamed it the Délégation aux Affairs Stratégique (DAS). This reorganization better prepared him when he and his ministry sallied forth into the interagency policy-formulation process.[14] Moreover, the elevation of Admiral Jacques Lanxade to Chief of Staff of the armed forces, the French experience in the Gulf War, and the deployment of sizable numbers of French forces to the former Yugoslavia have increased dramatically the Ministry's influence in the interagency formulation of national strategy and security policy. In short, many in the French government, and particularly within the security policy apparatus, recognize that the new European security environment requires input from the Hôtel de Brienne in the policymaking process.
Office of the Prime Minister (Hôtel Matignon). Given the President of the Republic's domaine réservé in defense and security policy, the Prime Minister traditionally has wielded little power in these areas. However, with the return to power of the conservatives (Rassemblement pour la Répubique--RPR, headed by Jacques Chirac, and the Union pour la Démocratie Française--UDF, led by former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing), France confronted a second instance of government divided between a president of a party different from the majority party in parliament. The first period of such cohabitation occurred when Jacques Chirac--President Mitterrand's arch political enemy--was Prime Minister from 1986 to 1988.[15] Because of that tumultuous experience, Mitterrand has gone out of his way to ensure a solid working relationship with the current Prime Minister, Edouard Balladur,[16] a key member of Chirac's RPR.
Evidence of the lengths to which Mitterrand will go to ensure the success of this working relationship with Balladur can be found in the recent release of a Defense White Paper, the first such document published since 1972.[17] French initiatives seeking to end the Yugoslav civil war and the presence of large numbers of French troops there have also necessitated Balladur's support and input into the policymaking process.[18] This cooperative atmosphere (which, not insignificantly, undermines Chirac's chances in the April 1995 presidential elections) has produced a unique situation in which the Prime Minister has regularly been brought into the policymaking circle by the opposition. Despite his early claim that he would not challenge Mitterrand, Balladur has used the opportunity to encroach on the President's security prerogatives and "to gather the strategic community around the prime minister" in preparation for his own run for the presidency in 1995.[19] As result of the Prime Minister's new influence, the domaine réservé is now sometimes referred to as a domaine partagé (shared domain).[20]
General Secretariat of National Defense (Secretariat General de la Défense Nationale--SGDN). Organizationally under the Prime Minister, the SGDN is not a decisionmaking body, but rather a coordinating agency whose principal activities include managing national intelligence efforts and developing net assessments. SGDN is also the principal coordinating agency for crisis management. Since the 1992 establishment of the Délégation aux Affairs Stratégique, the SGDN has lost some influence, particularly in developing net assessments.
The National Assembly and the Senate (Assemblée nationale and Sénat). Apart from providing budgetary input as the important long-term defense program is being developed, these legislative bodies exert little influence on national strategy and security policy. The French Parliament lacks the resources and the extensive organizational support (such as the Congressional Research Service and Congressional Budget Office) that allow the US Congress to influence significantly the formulation of defense and security policy. Notwithstanding the activities of their respective legislative committees, and given the power of the Elysée in defense and security policy, the legislature is relatively unimportant in formulating national defense and security policy.
When attempting to decipher French policy and attitudes toward NATO, one should never forget that their basis is largely founded on domestic, as opposed to external, political rationales.[21] And although there is a large security policymaking community in the French government, key decisions on policy issues are made by the President, in close collaboration with the Foreign Office. Given the high esteem in which the French public continues to hold General de Gaulle, successive Presidents have been loath to veer far from the tenets of Gaullist defense and security policy.[22] Public discord between Mitterrand and Balladur over Gaullist security and defense principles would remove one of the few remaining bipartisan agreements in French domestic politics. Bipartisan announcements notwithstanding, basic policy differences occasionally produce conflicting signals from the French government.
Strains also exist within the policymaking bureaucracies. For example, under the 5th Republic there have always been differences between the Elysée and the Matignon over the respective roles of the President and the Prime Minister in the formulation and conduct of security policy. While this has been true even when both offices have been occupied by members of the same political party, it has been exacerbated during the two periods of cohabitation.[23]
Other domestic political issues continue to shape French policy toward NATO. Most obvious are the differences between the Socialists and their opponents on the right, the RPR and the UDF. Equally important is the jockeying for position for the upcoming presidential election within the right--Giscard (UDF) and Chirac (RPR)--as well as within the RPR (Chirac vs. Balladur). The result of all these competing and conflicting interactions is that they confuse French policymaking and thus confound outside observers of French security policy.
Changes in French NATO Policy
The year 1991 was a difficult one for French officials. According to David Yost, the Gulf War had a chilling effect upon many of the military and political assumptions undergirding French strategy and security policy.[24] The French experience during the Gulf crisis largely explains the emergence of a dual, not always consistent, French approach to NATO. Clinging to the old axiom that the maintenance of bilateral security ties with the United States should be dealt with separately from NATO issues, some French officials--particularly then-Foreign Minister Roland Dumas--argued that the United States, the sole remaining superpower, needed to be balanced by an independent and more deeply integrated European Community.[25] Hence, France opposed efforts to transform NATO from a purely collective defense organization to a body that could participate in collective security missions (e.g., peacekeeping operations) under Article IV of the NATO Treaty.[26] The French government offered an alternative that favored a stronger and revitalized European Union (vice the Atlantic Community) which eventually would undertake collective security responsibilities.[27] These French initiatives, sponsored by the Foreign Minister, failed.
During this same period President Mitterrand and Minister of Defense Pierre Joxe also began quietly reassessing and changing French policy toward NATO. Nine months after NATO started examining its strategy, Joxe surprised many analysts by announcing that France would participate in the Alliance's ongoing strategy review.[28] Given that the divisive debates that led up to the Alliance's adoption of the strategy of Flexible Response in 1966 contributed significantly to de Gaulle's decision to leave NATO, this move by the President and his Defense Minister had both substantive and symbolic meaning. France's subsequent endorsement of the Alliance's New Strategic Concept at the November 1991 Rome Summit further underscored the shift in French policy. At the same time, Paris continued to oppose French participation in the Defense Planning Committee (DPC), much to Joxe's disappointment,[29] and remains suspicious of the lack of sufficient political control over the SACEUR.
Notwithstanding the importance of these developments, the most significant step in France's policy evolution was the French decision at the Oslo NATO foreign ministers meeting, in June 1992, to underwrite NATO participation in Article IV peacekeeping missions under the political auspices of the United Nations and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.[30] Equally important, the French are participating under NATO aegis in missions such as Operation Deny Flight and Sharp Guard.[31]
These decisions have had three key effects. First, by agreeing to these new missions for the Alliance, France retreated from its long-held view that NATO should not be employed for missions other than the collective defense of its members.[32] Second, since April 1993, the Chief of the French Military Mission to the NATO Military Committee has participated in Military Committee discussions dealing with "peacekeeping,"[33] however broadly defined.[34] Third, the recent White Paper leaves the door open for the Minister of Defense and Chief of Staff of the armed forces to participate in the North Atlantic Council and the Military Committee, on a case-by-case basis, as decided by the President and Prime Minister.[35]
There are several reasons for these changes in French policy. The French have recognized that the dramatic changes in the European security environment have made NATO more important, not less so as they originally perceived.[36] Their experience with the Western European Union and the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, for example, have reinforced for the French the importance of NATO.
This may be the case particularly in peace operations, which appears to be the most likely venue in which French forces might be employed. Consequently, the French have insisted on increasing the power and importance of the Military Committee in Article IV missions, at the expense of the Major NATO Commands. This has resulted in the Chief of the French Military Mission to the Military Committee attending its meetings as a participant, rather than as an observer, for the first time since France left the integrated command structure in 1966.
Participation in the Military Committee is certainly more politically palatable within France than allowing the Minister of Defense to attend DPC meetings, because such a symbolic and substantive move would enhance the power and prestige of the defense ministry at the expense of the foreign office. Moreover, if the Minister of Defense attended such meetings, other DPC members might demand that France participate fully in the defense planning process, a policy change the French are unlikely to make any time soon.[37]
Just as the French military has returned to high-level defense discussions in NATO, so, too, the French military now participates in a standing multinational structure in peacetime. Granted, the French have continued as nonintegrated participants in specific NATO functions, such as the integrated air defense systems and certain logistics and infrastructure activities. And agreements to allow cooperation in a crisis between French forces and NATO military commands (e.g., agreements with SACEUR and CINCENT) have existed since 1967.[38] New initiatives, however, indicate the extent of change in French policy.
The first example concerns command and control of the Eurocorps. The Eurocorps, a joint initiative of President Mitterrand and German Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl, emerged from the fall 1991 Franco-German Summit at La Rochelle.[39] The Eurocorps, as proposed, was to be based on an existing Franco-German brigade and provide the foundation for a European Security and Defense Identity. Although the Bush Administration and others in the Alliance strenuously opposed the initiative as another French assault on NATO,[40] the Germans touted the Eurocorps as a means of easing French participation into Alliance military structures.[41] The German view appeared vindicated when, according to press reports, on 21 January 1993 an agreement signed by the Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr, General Klaus Naumann; then-SACEUR, General John Shalikashvili; and Admiral Lanxade placed the Eurocorps under the operational command (vice control) of the SACEUR for the conduct of NATO missions.[42] Thus, not only are French forces assigned to the Eurocorps anchored within a multinational structure, but French forces could be placed under the command of the SACEUR for wartime operations should signatory nations so decide, with all the peacetime implications this entails.[43]
The issues of NATO command and control and French forces in Article IV collective security missions continued their evolution when, at the January 1994 NATO Summit, France agreed to US initiatives for the Partnership for Peace (PfP) and the Combined/Joint Task Force (C/JTF).[44] While Paris agreed in principle to both concepts, implementation of the initiatives has not been without expressions of French reluctance. For example, Paris insisted that the Planning Coordination Cell (the nerve center of PfP), while located at SHAPE in Mons, could not be under the control of SACEUR, but would be answerable to the North Atlantic Council in Brussels. Additionally, Paris manifested its long-held suspicions of the SACEUR during discussions concerning the development of the terms of reference for C/JTF.[45] While the French position was perhaps not precisely what the United States and other Alliance countries would have preferred, the mere fact that Paris did not veto these concepts marks a significant change in French policy.[46]
A final notable change in French policy toward NATO relates to weapons of mass destruction. In recognition of the importance of this issue and the absolute need to coordinate related Western efforts, the French have agreed to participate in the Alliance's political and defense committees dealing with nonproliferation.[47] Within the defense committee, France not only participates in the Senior Defence Group on Proliferation, but cochairs the group with the United States.[48] Paris's participation in this group is one of the few times France has joined in a defense committee project since 1966. Clearly, the potential magnitude of the proliferation problem and the overriding need to coordinate efforts with its allies have prompted this important change in French policy.
Implementing French NATO Policy
If it is important to know how French policy toward NATO has changed, it is equally important to understand the manner in which this change in policy has been carried out. Understanding the process of change will identify sources of new problems; it may also provide key indicators of the probability of further change, as well as the durability of recent French initiatives in NATO.
There are two impediments to recognizing change in French policy toward NATO. First, it seems that whenever senior French officials from the Prime Minister's office or the Ministry of Defense announce an apparent policy change, these declarations are almost inevitably followed by denials from the President's office or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[49] Second, in view of past French policy and attitudes toward the Alliance, some observers and officials find it difficult to accept that Paris has changed its NATO policy. This has been the case not only in a historical sense (during the Cold War) but was reinforced by French rhetoric and actions during 1989-92 as the Alliance developed its new strategy and significantly reduced its force structures.
The choice of Admiral Jacques Lanxade as the primary agent of change has been one of the more remarkable aspects of France's policy toward NATO. Mitterrand chose a military official for this task, as opposed to the Foreign Minister or a professional diplomat, for two reasons. First, as the President's Chief of Military Staff in the Elysée during the Gulf War, Lanxade was well placed to coordinate France's involvement in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, especially in sensitive political discussions with French allies, and particularly with the United States. Following the end of hostilities in April 1991, Admiral Lanxade became Chief of Staff of the armed forces. Because he enjoys Mitterrand's confidence, he has been able to restructure the French armed forces, paying particular attention to joint and combined operations. This reorganization and emphasis on joint issues, in turn, supports Mitterrand's new policy of enhanced selectivity with NATO.
Second, as noted earlier, internal French politics helped drive Lanxade's selection for this task. Since the start of the second period of cohabitation, the issue of NATO has taken on an interesting partisan flavor, beyond its normal levels. Many currently assume that the race in the forthcoming French presidential elections is between Jacques Chirac (the leader of the RPR and mayor of Paris) and RPR Prime Minister Balladur (a previous Chirac supporter). Within this unusual intraparty struggle, Foreign Minister Alain Juppé supports Chirac, while Minister of Defense François Léotard supports Balladur.
As a result of this partisan political morass, Lanxade is the one individual capable of operating above partisan politics while still maintaining close relations with all the major political actors, particularly President Mitterrand. Indeed, French officials readily--albeit privately--acknowledge that Lanxade is probably the most influential and powerful official in the area of defense policymaking and implementation that France has seen in many years.[50]
Conclusion
While the preceding analysis indicates that French policy toward NATO appears to have changed, the depth of that change remains open to question: Do the issues described above constitute a fundamental change in policy, or has policy remained relatively fixed while the French pursue new means to their long-established ends? Even if French policy has changed, have attitudes in key elements of the French policy bureaucracy altered sufficiently to carry out the change, or will bureaucratic foot-dragging forestall full-scale implementation?
On balance, it should be clear that long-standing French policies toward the Alliance have changed. Before asserting that France has "returned" to the Alliance, however, one must understand that Mitterrand's reconsideration of France's relationship with NATO will not result in a return to status quo ante 1966.[51] Indeed, French policymakers--even those who most strongly support NATO--continue to pronounce that France will not return to the Alliance's integrated military structure.[52] Nor do the developments constitute a rapprochement, as suggested by one French journal.[53] Simply put, apparently irreconcilable differences remain between France and NATO. The determined independence of the French nuclear deterrent and strategy, and the French phobia about political oversight of NATO military authorities appear unlikely to be changed regardless of who wins the 1995 presidential election. A reconciliation does not a marriage remake.
While France is drawing closer to NATO, the Alliance should expect France to continue to pursue a policy of NATO à la carte. Certainly, the menu of French choices appears to be expanding, but the Alliance should expect the French to opt only for the perquisites that support French national interests, and to defer selections that would add new--and costly--responsibilities: contributions to infrastructure funding; adherence to NATO planning requirements; meeting NATO training and readiness standards; and supporting NATO standardization, rationalization, and interoperability requirements.
If one accepts the proposition that French policy toward NATO has changed, it is advisable to examine the nature and extent of these changes. The fact that the Quai, traditionally the center of French diplomacy and security policy formulation, effectively has been marginalized in the process--and by the Chief of Staff of the armed forces no less--does not bode well for long-term continuity of policy developed and supported by Admiral Lanxade. Simply put, once Mitterrand and Lanxade pass from the scene (as Mitterrand soon will, with Lanxade likely to follow quickly thereafter), will their successors continue these policies or will the Quai reassert its traditional opposition to French participation in the military structure of the Alliance?
Encouragingly, Balladur, a strong candidate for the presidency, favors this fresh approach to NATO, as evinced in the White Paper. However, whether Balladur, Chirac, or Giscard d'Estaing wins the election, the new President may find it difficult to stray far from the course charted by Mitterrand. Given the political and security situation in Europe, there simply is little other choice.[54]
Thus, even with a surface change in policy, an understanding of the deeper currents of French attitudes toward these changes, particularly within the policy bureaucracy, takes on added importance. Given the past attitude toward NATO by the Quai (as well as by some officials in the Elysée), the absence of strong pressure from the President may allow recidivist officials in the Quai and Elysée to retard, if not sabotage, improvements in relations with NATO. That the Minister of Defense continues to be proscribed from attending NATO DPC meetings (much to the displeasure of Minister of Defense Léotard) underscores the continued institutional power the Foreign Office enjoys over the Defense Minister.[55] And disaffected officials need not openly assault policy to kill it; they can simply let it wither and die from neglect. So while Paris can be expected to support some new NATO initiatives and draw closer to the Alliance, one should also expect standard, time-worn rationales to be trotted out in opposition to others. Despite this qualified reconciliation, therefore, France will continue to befuddle NATO and remain a source of frustration within the Alliance.
So, while French policy toward NATO has changed, attitudes in critical parts of the French government remain unrepentant, largely for bureaucratic and domestic political reasons. Limited change, French demands that even these circumscribed revisions occur on French terms, and residual attitudes in key segments of the French policy bureaucracy emphasize the fact that in effect, if not in principle, France continues to follow a policy of enhanced selectivity when dealing with NATO, which could create as many problems as it solves.
Such an approach should not come as a surprise. Nations are expected to act in their own national interests and pursue policies that further those interests. To assume otherwise is imprudent. But recent French initiatives should be viewed positively. These initial, hesitant steps may eventually lead to fuller French participation in the Alliance; the United States and other NATO partners should encourage France to return to the fold.
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NOTES
The authors express their gratitude to Diego Ruiz Palmer, David Yost, Randy Shelton, Mark Morgan, and Pascalle Combelles for their constructive and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
1. On the surface, the image of French policy is of French independence in defense and security affairs, while maintaining, in public, a distant relationship with NATO. The image and reality are not the same. Following France's ostensible divorce from NATO, Allied commanders and their French counterparts maintained close, if not intimate, working relationships. As Frédéric Bozo documented in his comprehensive study on this "secret" relationship, French independence from NATO has, indeed, been qualified to say the least. See, Frédéric Bozo, La France et l'OTAN; De la guerre froide au nouvel order européen (Paris: Masson, 1991). When considered with France's very close relationship with the United States, to include nuclear research and development cooperation, the French claim of having maintained defense independence has to be assessed with skepticism. Apropos nuclear cooperation see The Washington Post, 29 May 1989 and 2 June 1989.
2. See Michael M. Harrison, The Reluctant Ally: France and Atlantic Security (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981), p. 118.
3. It should be mentioned that one of the reasons for the widespread support in France of tenets of Gaullist defense policy over time is because it encapsulates long-standing French defense traditions. See Diego Ruiz Palmer, "French Strategic Options in the 1990s," Adelphi Papers, No. 260 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, Summer 1991), p. 3. For excellent historical background on the development of Gaullist security policy see Harrison, The Reluctant Ally, pp. 116-34.
4. For an excellent assessment of French strategy and force structure see David S. Yost, "France," in The Defense Policies of Nations: A Comparative Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 233-77.
5. Pierre Lellouche, "France in Search of Security," Foreign Affairs, 72 (Spring 1993), 122. Lellouche is the foreign affairs counsellor to Jacques Chirac, leader of the RPR political party.
6. See Frankfurter Allgemeine, 19 July 1990. For an excellent historical perspective on this important bilateral relationship see Julius W. Friend, The Linchpin: French-German Relations, 1950-1990, The Washington Papers No. 154, The Center for Strategic and International Studies (New York: Praeger, 1991).
7. See Anne-Marie Le Gloannec, "The Implications of German Unification for Western Europe" in The New Germany and the New Europe, ed. Paul B. Stares (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1992), p. 266. "Deeper" integration implies developing a common currency and common political, social, and other programs throughout the EU.
8. The Visegrad states include Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.
9. See Lellouche, p. 128.
10. David Yost, "Mitterrand and Defense and Security Policy," French Politics and Society, 9 (Summer-Fall 1991), 146-47.
11. See Agence France-Presse (Paris), 5 May 1994 in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, FBIS-WEU-94-088, 6 May 1994, p. 26.
12. It is interesting to note that François Mitterrand was for many years de Gaulle's most determined critic, leading the Socialist Party in rejecting de Gaulle's defense policy. Yet, upon taking power in 1981, Mitterrand and the Socialists continued to support the tenets of that policy. For an excellent treatment of this issue, see Philip H. Gordon, A Certain Idea of France: French Security Policy and the Gaullist Legacy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 106-18.
13. See Harrison, The Reluctant Ally, pp. 118-19.
14. In effect, DAS has become the policy cloister in the ministry, which has brought it into conflict, at times, with the Etat-Major des Armées (Joint Staff).
15. For background on this period see Gordon, A Certain Idea of France, pp. 144-57.
16. Indeed, some in his own party have complained that Mitterrand has done this at the expense of destroying politically his successor as leader of the party, Michel Rocard, and in effect, the Socialist Party itself. See The Washington Post, 23 June 1994.
17. See Livre Blanc sur la Défense, Paris, Ministère de la Défense, 1994. Note that another key reason for producing this document was to demonstrate, no matter how illusory, the continuation of bipartisan cooperation in the area of defense.
18. For an excellent assessment of French policy toward the Yugoslav conflict, see Pia Christina Wood, "France and the Post Cold War Order: The Case of Yugoslavia," European Security, 3 (Spring 1994), 129-52.
19. David Buchan, "Paris makes European security ambitions clear," London Financial Times, 24 February 1994, p. 2.
20. See Le Quotidien de Paris, 12-13 February 1994.
21. See, for example, David Buchan's commentary on recent policy formulations in his article, "Paris makes European security ambitions clear," p. 2.
22. Daniel Vernet, "The Dilemmas of French Foreign Policy," International Affairs, 68 (No. 4, 1992), 661.
23. See Buchan, "Paris makes European security ambitions clear," for an example of the current period of cohabitation.
24. See David Yost, "France and the Gulf War of 1990-1991: Political-Military Lessons Learned," The Journal of Strategic Studies, 16 (September 1993), 339-74. The evaluation of Jacques Baumel (former foreign minister and current RPR deputy) of the French security environment bolsters Yost's assessment. See Le Monde (Paris), 1 April 1993, p. 2.
25. Yost, "France and the Gulf War," p. 354.
26. The NATO treaty establishes the Alliance as a collective defense organization--i.e., nations bound together to defend themselves from outside aggression. Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, some have attempted to use the consultative provisions contained in Article IV of the treaty as a justification for increased emphasis on NATO as an agent of reliance on collective security (i.e., maintaining peace and stability among the members of the organization) missions such as peacekeeping or peace enforcement. See Articles IV and V of the Washington Treaty, which can be found in NATO, Facts and Figures (Brussels: NATO Information Service, 1989), Appendix 1, Document 2.
27. This particular policy was seen in Paris's opposition to the German-US initiative to create the North Atlantic Cooperation Council within NATO, and France's spurring the European Community to mediate the growing conflict in Yugoslavia. François Heisbourg, former Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and current vice president of Matra Corporation, argues that the French intended to use these initiatives to destroy NATO. See François Heisbourg, "A French View: Developing a European Identity," The Officer, January 1993, p. 31.
28. See Le Monde (Paris), 19 March 1991.
29. Joxe was particularly upset because he could not attend meetings of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, to which only France in the Alliance did not send a representative. See Le Monde (Paris), 30 September 1992.
30. NATO Press Communique M-NAC-1(92)51, Brussels, NATO Press Service, 4 June 1992, p. 4.
31. For details of Deny Flight see Allied Forces Southern Europe, "Fact Sheet--OPERATION DENY FLIGHT," Naples, 24 March 1994. For details of Operation Sharp Guard see Allied Forces Southern Europe, "Fact Sheet--NATO/WEU OPERATIONAL SHARP GUARD," Naples, 7 July 1994. Interestingly, to account for French sensitivities, Operation Sharp Guard is carried out under the authority of the Councils of NATO and WEU.
32. A sympathetic view would hold that French officials value too highly the Alliance's collective defense provisions to allow NATO to be damaged by participating in politically sensitive collective security operations. A less charitable interpretation holds that following the all-but-debacle by the European Community in the former Yugoslavia, France realized that the only way the United States would actively deal with these crises was through NATO, and therefore Paris had no other choice.
33. See Le Monde (Paris), 14 May 1993.
34. See Le Monde (Paris), 21 December 1993.
35. See Livre Blanc sur la Défense, p. 37.
36. "Les évolutions intervenues depuis 1991 dans l'organisation et les activités de l'Alliance doivent être prolongées et amplifiées," Livre Blanc sur la Défense, p. 35.
37. For a persuasive argument for France to take a more pragmatic view toward participating in the DPC see Bozo, La France et l'OTAN, pp. 206-07.
38. See ibid., pp. 101-04; and, Diego Ruiz Palmer, "France," in European Security Policy After the Revolutions of 1989, ed. Jeffrey Simon (Washington: National Defense Univ. Press, 1991), p. 232.
39. For an excellent description and analysis of the Eurocorps, see Rafael Estrella, "After the NATO Summit: New Structures and Modalities for Military Co-operation," Draft General Report AL 76 DSC(94) 2, Brussels, North Atlantic Assembly, May 1994, pp. 7-12.
40. See for example, Jeane Kirkpatrick's essay, "Is France Trying to Torpedo NATO?" CQ Researcher, 21 August 1992, p. 729.
41. See ADN (Berlin), 28 November 1992, in FBIS-WEU-92-230, 30 November 1992, p. 1; and Le Monde, 12 March 1993, in FBIS-WEU-93-057, 26 March 1993, p. 2.
42. See Daniel Vernet's excellent article in Le Monde (Paris), 12 March 1993; Le Monde (Paris), 7 May 1993; Karl Feldmeyer's essay in, Frankfurter Allgemeine, 5 December 1992; and The New York Times, 1 December 1992.
43. For example, French forces should be subject to NATO training and readiness requirements. They also must be capable of operating with NATO forces, thus obligating the French to ensure adequate interoperability, standardization, and rationalization between their forces and NATO logistics and support activities.
44. See Press Communique M-1(94)3, Brussels, NATO Press Service, 11 January 1994. For details of the Partnership for Peace program see, Press Communique M-1(94)2, Partnership for Peace: Invitation, Brussels, NATO Press Service, 10 January 1994. A solid description and analysis of Combined Joint Task Forces can be found in Stanley R. Sloan, "Combined Joint task Forces (CJTF) and New Missions for NATO," CRS Report for Congress, 94-249S, 17 March 1994.
45. For an excellent and insightful assessment of this debate, see Bruce George, "After the NATO Summit," Draft General Report, AL 88 PC(94) 2, Brussels, North Atlantic Assembly, May 1994, pp. 4-5.
46. The late NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner stated that CJTF should enhance French participation in NATO military activities without its complete reintegration. See Le Monde (Paris), 16 December 1993.
47. For details see Press Release M-NAC-1(94)45, "Alliance Policy Framework on Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction," Brussels, NATO Press Service, 9 June 1994.
48. See George, "After the NATO Summit," p. 6.
49. See The Economist (London), 3 October 1992, p. 34. The numerous experiences of former Minister of Defense Pierre Joxe (Le Monde [Paris], 10-11 November 1991; Le Monde [Paris], 30 September 1992; and Le Monde, 4 December 1992), as well as the late Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy (Le Monde [Paris], 6-7 September 1992), commenting on new policy initiatives toward NATO and subsequent governmental denials, are good cases in point.
50. This is not intended to disparage the efforts of former Minister of Defense Pierre Joxe to realign France's NATO policy. Before cohabitation he contributed significantly.
51. See The Baltimore Sun, 16 January 1994.
52. Of the many examples, see particularly, Le Quotidien de Paris, 20 December 1993, in FBIS-WEU-93-242, 20 December 1993, p. 35; Liberation (Paris), 24 February 1994, in FBIS-WEU-94-037, p. 35; and Agence France-Presse (Paris) 5 May 1994, in FBIS-WEU-94-088, 6 May 1994, p. 26.
53. See Liberation (Paris), 24 February 1994, in FBIS-WEU-94-037, 24 February 1994, pp. 28-30.
54. Interestingly, according to French defense expert Olivier Debouzy, it was during the presidency of Giscard d'Estaing, a Gaullist and not during Mitterrand's "watch," that the most far-reaching conceptual and doctrinal changes in Gaullist defense policy took place. Cf., Debouzy's book review of Gordon, A Certain Idea of France in, Survival, 36 (Spring 1994), 186.
55. See Le Monde (Paris), 21 December 1993.
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Lieutenant Colonel William T. Johnsen has been a Strategic Research Analyst at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, since 1991 and was appointed to the Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies in 1994. He has served in command and staff assignments in the 25th Infantry Division and 7th Infantry Division (Light), taught history at the US Military Academy, and was an arms control analyst at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe. He is a graduate of the US Military Academy and the US Army War College and holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Duke University.
Thomas-Durell Young has held the Henry L. Stimson Chair of Military Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute since 1992. From 1988 to 1992 he was a national security affairs analyst at the Institute. Previously he was a country risk analyst for BERI, S.A., a Swiss-based consulting firm. Dr. Young received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva, Switzerland, and is a 1990 graduate of the US Army War College. He has published extensively on US alliance issues, with particular emphasis on Western Europe and the Southwest Pacific.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/1994/young.htm
The Case for the Vietnam War
W. W. ROSTOW
For seven years, Robert McNamara and I were colleagues in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It is difficult to describe the ties that were formed as a result of our facing together the series of crises that confronted the United States in the 1960s. On occasion, my advice to the President differed from McNamara's, most notably on Vietnam and on policy toward Southeast Asia. Such differences among colleagues were inevitable and proper, however, and now, 30 years after we worked together, I continue to hold McNamara's devoted service in high regard.
McNamara's recent book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, begins with a dozen or so interesting but terse pages on the author's background; his schooling; his meeting, and marriage to, Margaret McKinstry Craig, to whose memory the book is dedicated; his wartime service as an air corps statistical control officer; and his postwar service with the Ford Motor Company. He had been president of that company for only seven weeks when John Kennedy made him Secretary of Defense in 1961. The problems of Vietnam from 1961 to early 1968 occupy virtually the rest of the book. Although the war lasted some eight more years, the story ends with McNamara's transition to the World Bank in 1968, as the Tet offensive begins.
In the period 1965-67, Robert McNamara came to believe that Vietnam was "a problem with no solution." This is the theme of his book. His frustration arose because the war was fought under five rules, which, as he saw it, proved incompatible with victory. These rules were: (1) that Southeast Asia as a whole must be kept from communist control; (2) that US troops should not be sent outside the borders of South Vietnam; (3) that the South Vietnamese should achieve political stability and--with US tutelage and military aid--learn to defend themselves; (4) that the United States under no circumstances should initiate the use of nuclear weapons; and (5) that the enemy operated under the assumption that it could win "a long inconclusive war." In the face of these rules, McNamara came to believe that the United States should withdraw from Vietnam, because Rule 3 proved impossible of attainment, and the costs of withdrawal (Rule 1) would be tolerable. To a degree impossible to determine, his conclusion, by his own account, was influenced also by the anti-war sentiment in the country which extended to his immediate family.
As far as the South Vietnamese were concerned, McNamara found President Ngo Dinh Diem inscrutable; was much disturbed by the assassination of Diem and his brother and close collaborator, Ngo Diem Nhu; was rendered almost hopeless by the subsequent period, when one impotent government followed another; and quoted with approval a characterization by an American official that President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky were "the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel."
On the tolerability of pulling out American forces from Vietnam, McNamara relies heavily in arguing his conclusion, already arrived at, on a private memorandum to the President of 12 September 1967, from Richard Helms. This memorandum was recently declassified and released. Written by "an experienced intelligence analyst" in the CIA, it addressed the question, "Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam." The general conclusion of a 33-page analysis was that the risks of withdrawal "are probably more limited and controllable than most previous argument has indicated." The specific conclusion about Southeast Asia was that "the most direct and immediate [implications] would be in the region of Southeast Asia itself." The key country would prove to be Thailand, where the situation would be "perilous and complicated."
On the US domestic scene, the memorandum said:
The worst potential damage would be of the self-inflicted kind: internal dissension which would limit our future ability to use our power and resources wisely and to full effect, and lead to a loss of confidence by others in the American capacity for leadership.
Having concluded, then, that the South Vietnamese would be unable to defend themselves in any time that would not overstretch the patience of American public opinion, and that the costs of pulling out were tolerable, McNamara in retrospect feels we ought to have withdrawn our forces "either in late 1963 amid the turmoil following Diem's assassination or in late 1964 or early 1965 in the face of increasing political weakness in South Vietnam." He adds three other dates when a pull-out would have been possible and desirable: July 1965, December 1965, and December 1967.
At the end of the book McNamara offers a list of 11 major failures in Vietnam policy, which follow closely his point of view in hindsight. There are also eight pages of reflection on post-Cold War military policy and a final word on Vietnam, the heart of which is:
Although we sought to do the right thing--and believed we were doing the right thing--in my judgment, hindsight proves us wrong. We both overestimated the effect of South Vietnam's loss on the security of the West and failed to adhere to the fundamental principle that, in the final analysis, if the South Vietnamese were to be saved, they had to win the war themselves.
This is as accurate a statement as I can muster of the author's present position.
McNamara's argument depends heavily on his view of the importance of Asia to the United States, and the extent to which withdrawal from Vietnam would affect the balance of power in Asia. At one point, referring to the human and material costs of the war, he asks:
Were such high costs justified?
Dean Rusk, Walter Rostow, Lee Kwan Yew, and many other geopoliticians across the globe to this day answer yes. They conclude that without US intervention in Vietnam, communist hegemony--both Soviet and Chinese--would have spread farther through South and East Asia to include control of Indonesia, Thailand, and possibly India. Some would go further and say that the USSR would have been led to take greater risks to extend its influence elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East, where it might well have sought control of the oil-producing nations. They might be correct, but I seriously question such judgments.
What these "geopoliticians" thought did not matter to the outcome. What Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson thought did matter. Each, from a different experience and perspective, had thought deeply about Asia; and they had arrived at similar conclusions about the balance of power in that continent.
Eisenhower had served in the Philippines on General MacArthur's staff. His job required him to think about the strategic shape of Asia. It was he who founded in 1954 the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as a bipartisan effort in the wake of the Korean War, designed to hold the balance of power in Southeast Asia as it was held in Northeast Asia by the outcome of the Korean War. It was he who first applied the phrase "domino theory" to the American engagement in what was French Indo-China. The day before Kennedy's Inaugural, he laid before the new President and his major aides (Rusk, McNamara, and Dillon) the two serious problems he most wished them to understand: the balance of payments issue and Laos. Although there are several versions of what Eisenhower said about Laos, the evidence, on balance, is that he thought it likely that Kennedy would have to invoke the SEATO Treaty and put troops into Laos--if possible, with others, if necessary, alone. Eisenhower, from 1961 to 1968, gave unfailing support to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson on Southeast Asia.
Kennedy's experience of Asia was quite different, although it brought him to similar conclusions. As a member of Congress, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, he was focused on the Soviet threat in Europe, and a repetition by Stalin of Hitler's attack on Western Europe. He did not vote for Truman's Point Four technical assistance program for the developing countries.
In 1951, when it was clear that the communist attack in Korea was not a feint for an attack on Western Europe, and the truce negotiations had begun at Panmunjom, Kennedy went with members of his family on a tour of the Middle East, India, and the Far East, including Vietnam. He returned convinced that the communist threat would come mainly in the underdeveloped regions. He told his colleagues in the House of Representatives that he had been wrong on Point Four and subsequently supported it. And, in time, he believed China would succeed the Soviet Union as the main threat. He led support in the Senate during 1958 for India's Second Five-Year Plan with Senator John Sherman Cooper, a Republican Senator from Kentucky, who had also been Ambassador in India. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he created a special team to work in support of India over the concurrent clash in Ladakh, saying that in the long run this conflict might well be more important than the confrontation with the Soviet Union in the Caribbean.
All this background bears on the much-debated question of whether or not Kennedy would have ended US military involvement in Vietnam. He was clearly frustrated by the political performance of Diem and Nhu. On the other hand, he was against American encouragement of a coup, and was appalled when Diem and Nhu were killed in the coup that took place. That the two were killed in an American-made armored troop-carrier added to his unhappiness.
McNamara writes that it is "highly probable" that Kennedy would have pulled US forces out of Vietnam. But in the autumn of 1963, Kennedy said this to Walter Cronkite, harking back to his Asian trip of 1951:
Our best judgment is that he [Diem] can't be successful on this basis. We hope that he comes to see that, but in the final analysis it is the people and the government [of South Vietnam] itself who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can do is help, and we are making it very clear, but I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. I know people don't like Americans to be engaged in this kind of an effort. Forty-seven Americans have been killed in combat with the enemy, but this is a very important struggle even though it is far away.
We . . . made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate--we may not like it--in the defense of Asia.
A week later, in a similar interview with David Brinkley, he was asked:
"Mr. President, have you had any reason to doubt this so-called `domino theory,' that if South Vietnam falls, the rest of Southeast Asia will go behind it?"
"No, I believe it. I believe it. I think that the struggle is close enough. China is so large, looms so high just beyond the frontiers, that if South Vietnam went, it would not only give them an improved geographic position for a guerrilla assault on Malaya, but would also give the impression that the wave of the future in Southeast Asia was China and the communists. So I believe it."
The main weight of the war fell, of course, on President Johnson. His view of Asia came out of a quite different background. He had been briefly in Australia during the Second World War, and this experience led to a life-long sympathy and affection for that country. In the late 1950s, his view of Asia as a whole crystallized. The turning point was the question of statehood for Hawaii. Johnson spoke of this matter during a speech at the East-West Center in Honolulu on 18 October 1966:
My forebears came from Britain, Ireland, and Germany. People in my section of the country regarded Asia as totally alien in spirit as well as nationality . . . . We therefore looked away from the Pacific, away from its hopes as well as away from its great crises. Even the wars that many of us fought here were often [fought] with leftovers of preparedness, and they did not heal our blindness . . . . One consequence of that blindness was that Hawaii was denied its rightful part in our Union of States for many, many years. Frankly, for two decades I opposed its admission as a State, until at last the undeniable evidence of history, as well as the irresistible persuasiveness of Jack Burns [the non-voting Hawaiian delegate to the Congress], removed the scales from my eyes. Then I began to work and fight for Hawaiian statehood. And I hold that to be one of the proudest achievements of my twenty-five years in Congress.
Later in the speech, he referred to Hawaii as "a model of how men and women of different races and different cultures can come and live and work together; to respect each other in freedom and in hope." The period of an intense and ultimately successful struggle for Hawaiian statehood (achieved in 1959) coincided with the emergence of Johnson as an effective civil rights leader in the Senate--with his critical role in the message of the 1957 legislation, the first formal civil rights action by the Congress since the Civil War. The link in his mind between his positions in civil rights and on Asia remained throughout his life.
In May 1961, Johnson, as Vice President, was plunged still more deeply into the Asian Scene. At Kennedy's request, he visited South Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, India, and Pakistan. Johnson's recommendation to Kennedy was to create an organization of the free nations of the Pacific and Asia which would not only deal with defense issues but issues of social justice, housing, land reform: "The greatest danger Southeast Asia offers to nations like the United States is not the momentary threat of communism itself, rather that danger stems from hunger, ignorance, poverty, and disease." It was this line of thought which led Johnson as President to deliver on 7 April 1965 his speech at John Hopkins University, from which the Asian Development Bank arose.
But a great deal was going on in Asia in 1964-65 which McNamara does not detail. Sukarno left the United Nations on 8 January 1965, and allied with Hanoi and Peking. Within Indonesia, he worked closely with Aidit, head of that country's communist party. He launched the confrontation with Malaysia just as the first North Vietnamese regulars infiltrated South Vietnam. Some 80 ships of the British Commonwealth were mobilized to defend Malaysia. As McNamara said in a joint memorandum to the President with McGeorge Bundy on 27 January 1965: "The underlying difficulties in Saigon arise from the spreading conviction that the future is without hope for anti-communists." From one end of Asia to the other, the local people knew that a dangerous crisis was taking place in 1965 which could go one way or the other.
This was the setting in which McNamara and Bundy wrote their famous "Fork in the Road" memorandum at the end of January 1965. This memorandum told President Johnson that he had to choose between sending more troops to Vietnam or "negotiations aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved with no further addition to our present military risk." Both favored the first course. The memorandum played a significant role in President Johnson's reluctant decision in early 1965 to commit a substantial number of American troops to South Vietnam. It was a late and painful decision to match the escalating activity of the North Vietnamese regulars and Sukarno, an escalation which was, in turn, an opportunistic but understandable response to the disarray of South Vietnamese politics in the wake of the assassination of Diem and Nhu.
Is it credible that the United States would have withdrawn in the aftermath of a coup and assassination which were seen by the world to have been carried out with its acquiescence? Is it credible that any US President would not respond to the communist "nutcracker" of 1965: the simultaneous entrance of North Vietnamese regulars into South Vietnam and the enterprise of Sukarno in joining the supposed communist wave of the future is Asia? I think not.
And so in Vietnam, General Westmoreland set about the slow work of building up an adequate logistical base, dealing with the communist forces as he found them and as they were introduced and supplied via the Ho Chi Minh trails in Laos. By the end of 1965, he had achieved a stalemate; about a million men, women, and children in 1966 were added to those under the protection of the Vietnamese government. And this positive trend continued for most of 1967. The plan for the Tet offensive of 1968, hatched in the summer months of 1967, was Hanoi's reaction to the slowly eroding position in the South.
On 29 September 1967, President Johnson replied in San Antonio both to McNamara and to the "experienced intelligence analyst" who had written the memorandum sent to him a few weeks earlier by Richard Helms, the memorandum whose latter-day release made such a profound impression on McNamara:
I cannot tell you tonight as your President--with certainty--that a communist conquest of South Vietnam would be followed by a communist conquest of Southeast Asia. But I do know there are North Vietnamese troops in Laos. I do know that there are North Vietnamese trained guerrillas tonight in Northeast Thailand. I do know that there are communist-supported guerrilla forces operating in Burma. And a communist coup was barely averted in Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the world.
So your American President cannot tell you with certainty that a Southeast Asia dominated by communist power would bring a third world war much closer to terrible reality. One could hope that this would not be so.
But all that we have learned in this tragic century strongly suggests to me that it would be so. As President of the United States, I am not prepared to gamble on the chance that it is not so. I am not prepared to risk the security--indeed, the survival--of this American Nation on mere hope and wishful thinking. I am convinced that by seeing this struggle through now, we are greatly reducing the chances of a much larger war--perhaps a nuclear war. I would rather stand in Vietnam, in our time, and by meeting this danger now, and facing up to it, thereby reduce the danger for our children and for our grandchildren.
There is no doubt President Johnson was frustrated by his inability to bring the war to a quick conclusion. But he was heartened by the progress of the rest of Asia behind the barrier created by South Vietnam and her allies who were "holding aggression at bay."
From the beginning to the end of his time as President, Johnson was governed by the conclusion he had reached in the late 1950s; namely that Asia--all of Asia--mattered greatly to the future of America and was worth fighting for and nurturing. When he went through Asia for three weeks at the end of 1966, he spoke at least 90 percent of the time about the need for Asia to unite and organize, not about the struggle in Vietnam.
In the end, Johnson left for his successor a good post-Tet situation in the field, both military and political, but a difficult political situation at home. He met Thieu in Honolulu after he had announced, on 31 March, that he would not run in 1968. He refused Thieu's offer to put in the joint communiqué that American forces would be reduced over the next year. He chose to leave that decision to his successor.
The Malaysian foreign minister, speaking retrospectively in Boston on 11 November 1981, first recalled the early days of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) between 1968 and 1975:
They were very useful years to further bind the member countries together . . . . In 1975 North Vietnamese tanks rolled past Danang, Cam Ranh Bay, and Tan Son Nhut into Saigon. The United States withdrew their last soldiers from Vietnam, and the worst of ASEAN's fears which underscored the Bangkok Declaration of 1967 came to pass. But ASEAN by then had seven solid years of living in neighborly cooperation. Call it foresight, or what you will, the fact remains that with ASEAN solidarity there were no falling dominoes in Southeast Asia following the fall of Saigon to the communists, and the United States withdrawal from Southeast Asia.
Both the NICs (New Industrial Countries) and the ASEAN members roughly quadrupled their real GNP between 1960 and 1981. They were, socially and politically as well as economically, quite different countries than they had been when Southeast Asia went through the crisis of 1965. McNamara does not deal with the importance of Southeast Asia or its dynamics in these critical years.
Another weakness of McNamara's book is his failure to discuss systematically the gift of sanctuary which rendered the war inevitably "long and inconclusive." There have been no examples in which a guerrilla war (or a war dependent on external supply) has been won in which one side was granted sanctuary by the other. The guerrilla wars in the Philippines under Magsaysay and the British effort in Malaysia were successful because one was a group of islands, while the other had a narrow neck of land to the north and sea supply for the guerrillas in Malaysia was denied. On the other hand, Napoleon met his first setback in the Peninsular War when the British helped the guerrillas; the guerrillas in Algeria were helped through Morocco and Tunisia; and the United States and others helped the Afghan defenders against the Russians through Pakistan.
South Vietnam was explicitly protected, by the Laos Accords of 1962, from the North Vietnamese transiting of Laos and Cambodia, via the Ho Chi Minh Trails and the Cambodian ports. This was not an understanding whispered in the corridors of the Palais des Nations, but a formal agreement between Ambassador Pushkin of the Soviet Union and Averell Harriman, who negotiated the treaty. It called for the Soviet Union to guarantee that no third party be transited by Hanoi in supply to the guerrillas in the South.
The North Vietnamese did not obey the Laos Accords for a single day after they came into force in early October 1962, nor did the Soviet government ever act on its freely taken responsibilities. October 1962 was the month of the Cuban missile crisis; and it led to a visit to Washington by Anastas Mikoyan, fresh from a rather miserable experience in Havana. There were those who urged President Kennedy to confront the Soviet Union immediately over its failure to act on its Laos Treaty commitments. They were turned down. It was not difficult to explain President Kennedy's reluctance to act in the wake of the traumatic confrontation in the Caribbean; but the alternative put to President Kennedy was to act decisively now or face a crisis "in a waning situation."
General Maxwell Taylor had all this in mind when he sent a long cable at the end of 1964 that included this passage:
[Hanoi] enjoys the priceless asset of a protected logistic sanctuary in the DRV and in Laos. I do not recall in history a successful anti-guerrilla campaign with less than a 10 to 1 numerical superiority over the guerrillas and without the elimination of assistance from outside the country.
Senator John Stennis echoed this point in August 1967: "The question is growing in the Congress as to whether it is wise to send more men if we are going to just leave them at the mercy of the guerrilla war without trying to cut off the enemy's supplies more effectively."
And McNamara himself quotes General DuPuy, General Westmoreland's planner, in a 1986 interview: "It turned out that [search and destroy] was a faulty concept, given the sanctuaries, given the fact that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never closed. It was a losing concept of operation." Thus, the sanctuary granted Hanoi was historically incompatible with American and South Vietnamese victory in a time-span consistent with American patience as a nation; and the bombing of the supply trails or other devices to reduce the flow from North Vietnam were demonstrably inadequate.
Those who advocated blocking the trails on the ground believed that action would force a concentration of North Vietnamese troops to keep the trails open, and two or three reinforced US divisions together with air supremacy could deal with them. This happened, incidentally, at Khe Sanh, where Hanoi concentrated during the Tet offensive several divisions (some think five) which were defeated by some 6000 US and Vietnamese forces plus air power intelligently directed by General Momyer. This reversed at Khe Sanh the normal proportions of guerrillas versus the defending force.
This proposal was definitively turned down on 27 April 1967 by President Johnson and Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, presumably on the grounds that any movement of American troops to block infiltration on the trails would bring the Russians and Chinese into the war.
On this matter General William Westmoreland (whom McNamara quotes) may have the last word:
The geographic restraints on the ground war were very real, and understandable.
Yet if you'll look at the situation as it's turned out, we basically attained our strategic objectives. We stopped the flow of communism . . . . I conclude that by strength, awkwardness, and good luck, most of our strategic objectives have been reached. I also say that we have to give President Johnson credit for not allowing the war to expand geographically . . . he was quite fearful that this was going to escalate into a world war. One of his main strategic objectives was to confine the war. He did not want it to spread . . . . Having said that, that's not the way I felt at the time. I felt that our hands were tied.
Historians will have to decide in the light of President Johnson's conclusion at San Antonio whether that price was worth paying. Clearly, if the alternative might have been a larger war or the risk of nuclear war, it was worth paying. In any case, Johnson was following the rules governing the policy of containment: block the extension of communist rule while minimizing the likelihood of nuclear war. McNamara refers to, but does not discuss, this central issue.
Considering that he is writing in the 1990s, McNamara's view of the Vietnamese is remarkably static. It stops in early 1968, if not earlier. In fact, the whole period 1954-75 was highly dynamic in South Vietnam. Vietnam was an underdeveloped, post-colonial country. Like Syngman Rhee in Korea, its first nationalist ruler earned his legitimacy by having nothing to do with the occupying power. Diem was also a mandarin to whom the sharing of power outside the family was extremely awkward. Each president was followed by a series of weak rulers, and then their countries found relative stability with men of the next generation--in Korea under Park, in Vietnam under Thieu and Ky from 1965.
Starting in September 1966, a political process was started. A Constituent Assembly was elected to draft a constitution. Despite communist intimidation, 81 percent of the population voted, out of 5.3 million registered. On 3 September 1967, a well-inspected presidential election was held. The Thieu-Ky ticket won with 34.8 percent of the votes. Typical of an underdeveloped country, there were ten civilian candidates. Registration had increased 11 percent since the vote of the previous year. Fifty-seven percent of the population of the country of voting age took part. Ambassador Dobrynin of the Soviet Union was almost precisely accurate when he said before the election that the Popular Front candidate commended by the communists would get 16 percent of the vote. The rest were explicitly anti-communist.
The Tet offensive is not dealt with in McNamara's book, except for one reference at the end to the attack on the US Embassy compound. Thieu was in the Delta when the Tet offensive struck late in January 1968; but Ky and Robert Komer, Westmoreland's deputy for civilian affairs, led in the cleanup of Saigon where many refugees congregated. American and Vietnamese marines cleared Hue, where the North Vietnamese had established a foothold in the Citadel. And most remarkable of all, it was the local police and militia that picked up the communist forces which attacked 34 of the 44 provincial capitals, five of the six autonomous cities, 71 of 242 district capitals, and 50 hamlets. Thus the communists failed to produce the uprising they expected. Thieu mobilized an additional 122,000 men for the armed forces in the first half of 1968. The South Vietnamese remained steady. Tet was an utter military and political defeat for the communists in Vietnam, yet a political disaster in the United States. The conventional American view was that the South Vietnamese government's military, economic, and social program was set back by some years.
This program had resulted in a revolution in education, where school enrollment increased massively, for example, from 410,000 to 2.7 million in primary education, starting in 1954. There were similar advances made over the same period in agriculture, trade, and industry. The South Vietnam of 1969 was not the same country it was in 1954, 1961, or even 1967. I have no doubt that it would have followed the development path of South Korea if it had not been caught up in a difficult war and then communist rule.
As for the military, it is important to understand that neither North nor South Vietnam produced any armaments at all. Essentially, the war was fought with weapons imported into Vietnam by their respective allies. As time passed, the average skill of the Vietnamese divisions improved, although they continued to vary greatly according to their commanding officers. This uneven but improving force, under General Abrams' tutelage, was tested in battle with the North Vietnamese in 1972. American ground forces had been withdrawn, leaving only air and naval units still in support of the South Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese were generously supported by Soviet tanks and artillery superior to those available to the South Vietnamese, as well as many anti-aircraft guns. It was in the context of this battle that President Nixon used B-52s against Hanoi, mined the harbor at Haiphong, and attacked the railway lines leading to China from Hanoi. The upshot was a military victory on the ground for the South Vietnamese.
In 1973, an accord was negotiated between North and South Vietnam. The North licked its wounds, paved the supply trails through Laos, and watched the American air and naval units withdraw on President Nixon's promise of $2.2 billion dollars in military aid to complete the process of Vietnamization of the South Vietnam military.
Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore was a kind of Greek chorus for the Asians throughout this period. In 1965, when all of Southeast Asia was menaced, he had remarked that "We may all go through the mincing machine." In 1966, he said to a group of students after noting that the Americans were buying time for a united Asia to emerge: "If we just sit down and believe people are going to buy time forever after for us, then we deserve to perish." In 1967, ASEAN was founded. In April 1973, at the National Press Club, Lee Kwan Yew laid out the alternatives in the following terms:
At the risk of being proved wrong, there are three scenarios I envisage as a result of the Paris agreement. First . . . the provisions are in the main honored . . . . In this case, the contest will become primarily political. The South Vietnamese government stands a very fair chance in such a contest. Second, an all-out offensive by both the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong as soon as they believe they are strong enough to overwhelm the armed forces of the South Vietnamese government . . . . Third, the North Vietnamese, to avoid unnecessary risks, ostensibly honor the Paris agreement. However, they will leave it to the Vietcong, with North Vietnamese infiltrators and fresh military supplies to augment their strength, to make a bid for power in the South . . . .
But, if the worst does happen, and the Vietcong, with the help of the North Vietnamese, do gain control over the South in the middle 1970s, it does not necessarily follow that the rest of Southeast Asia will go communist. The morale of the other peoples of Southeast Asia is now very different from what it was after Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Thais are now more prepared psychologically to face up to such a situation . . . . A crucial factor is whether they believe they can depend on American military and economic aid, as spelled out under the Guam doctrine.
For reasons which no one could have predicted in the spring of 1973, before Watergate had progressively undermined Nixon's authority and legitimacy, it was Lee's second scenario that came to pass in the mid-1970s. The simple fact is that, as of April 1975, the American public, with the China détente established, was prepared to end its involvement with Vietnam; and Southeast Asia was prepared to stand on its own feet. Second, the South Vietnamese did all that could be expected of them in the post-Diem period; and as time passes, they will deserve better of history than McNamara allows.
One returns to the wild card in this story: the manner in which the United States, including McNamara's own family, was driven into painful controversy over the war. And that is a part of the equation that all Americans must weigh for themselves. In fact, only McNamara can weigh all the factors which have driven him into the position that, whatever the cost, the United States should have withdrawn its troops from Vietnam.
With the exception of the Second World War, every conflict in which Americans have been engaged has involved public controversy. And this is to their credit, for who wants war? In the Revolutionary War, perhaps one-third of the people wanted independence; one third were pro-British; and one-third were simply out to make a fast buck by selling supplies to the Continental Army. In the war of 1812, the New England states, after the Hartford Convention, passed a resolution calling for withdrawal from the union rather than joining in the war against Canada. The Mexican War stirred great controversy in the United States. The Civil War split the nation from top to bottom. The Spanish-American War was followed by the unpopular conflict with the Philippine guerrillas. The First World War, like the Civil War, touched off draft riots. The Korean War left Truman more unpopular than either Nixon at the nadir of his fortunes, or Lyndon Johnson at his lowest point in the polls.
No one has promised that American independence itself, or America's role as a bastion for those who believe deeply in democracy, could be achieved without pain or loss or controversy. The pain, loss, and controversy resulting from Vietnam were accepted for ten years by the American people. That acceptance held the line so that a free Asia could survive and grow; for, in the end, the war and the treaty which led to it were about who would control the balance of power in Asia, an issue which was evidently at stake in the Asian crisis of 1965 and thereafter. Those who died or were wounded in Vietnam or are veterans of that conflict were not involved in a pointless war.
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W. W. Rostow is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of Texas at Austin. The present article appeared originally in England in the Times Literary Supplement (London), 9 June 1995, and is reprinted with permission.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...nter/rostow.htm
W. W. ROSTOW
For seven years, Robert McNamara and I were colleagues in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It is difficult to describe the ties that were formed as a result of our facing together the series of crises that confronted the United States in the 1960s. On occasion, my advice to the President differed from McNamara's, most notably on Vietnam and on policy toward Southeast Asia. Such differences among colleagues were inevitable and proper, however, and now, 30 years after we worked together, I continue to hold McNamara's devoted service in high regard.
McNamara's recent book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, begins with a dozen or so interesting but terse pages on the author's background; his schooling; his meeting, and marriage to, Margaret McKinstry Craig, to whose memory the book is dedicated; his wartime service as an air corps statistical control officer; and his postwar service with the Ford Motor Company. He had been president of that company for only seven weeks when John Kennedy made him Secretary of Defense in 1961. The problems of Vietnam from 1961 to early 1968 occupy virtually the rest of the book. Although the war lasted some eight more years, the story ends with McNamara's transition to the World Bank in 1968, as the Tet offensive begins.
In the period 1965-67, Robert McNamara came to believe that Vietnam was "a problem with no solution." This is the theme of his book. His frustration arose because the war was fought under five rules, which, as he saw it, proved incompatible with victory. These rules were: (1) that Southeast Asia as a whole must be kept from communist control; (2) that US troops should not be sent outside the borders of South Vietnam; (3) that the South Vietnamese should achieve political stability and--with US tutelage and military aid--learn to defend themselves; (4) that the United States under no circumstances should initiate the use of nuclear weapons; and (5) that the enemy operated under the assumption that it could win "a long inconclusive war." In the face of these rules, McNamara came to believe that the United States should withdraw from Vietnam, because Rule 3 proved impossible of attainment, and the costs of withdrawal (Rule 1) would be tolerable. To a degree impossible to determine, his conclusion, by his own account, was influenced also by the anti-war sentiment in the country which extended to his immediate family.
As far as the South Vietnamese were concerned, McNamara found President Ngo Dinh Diem inscrutable; was much disturbed by the assassination of Diem and his brother and close collaborator, Ngo Diem Nhu; was rendered almost hopeless by the subsequent period, when one impotent government followed another; and quoted with approval a characterization by an American official that President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky were "the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel."
On the tolerability of pulling out American forces from Vietnam, McNamara relies heavily in arguing his conclusion, already arrived at, on a private memorandum to the President of 12 September 1967, from Richard Helms. This memorandum was recently declassified and released. Written by "an experienced intelligence analyst" in the CIA, it addressed the question, "Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam." The general conclusion of a 33-page analysis was that the risks of withdrawal "are probably more limited and controllable than most previous argument has indicated." The specific conclusion about Southeast Asia was that "the most direct and immediate [implications] would be in the region of Southeast Asia itself." The key country would prove to be Thailand, where the situation would be "perilous and complicated."
On the US domestic scene, the memorandum said:
The worst potential damage would be of the self-inflicted kind: internal dissension which would limit our future ability to use our power and resources wisely and to full effect, and lead to a loss of confidence by others in the American capacity for leadership.
Having concluded, then, that the South Vietnamese would be unable to defend themselves in any time that would not overstretch the patience of American public opinion, and that the costs of pulling out were tolerable, McNamara in retrospect feels we ought to have withdrawn our forces "either in late 1963 amid the turmoil following Diem's assassination or in late 1964 or early 1965 in the face of increasing political weakness in South Vietnam." He adds three other dates when a pull-out would have been possible and desirable: July 1965, December 1965, and December 1967.
At the end of the book McNamara offers a list of 11 major failures in Vietnam policy, which follow closely his point of view in hindsight. There are also eight pages of reflection on post-Cold War military policy and a final word on Vietnam, the heart of which is:
Although we sought to do the right thing--and believed we were doing the right thing--in my judgment, hindsight proves us wrong. We both overestimated the effect of South Vietnam's loss on the security of the West and failed to adhere to the fundamental principle that, in the final analysis, if the South Vietnamese were to be saved, they had to win the war themselves.
This is as accurate a statement as I can muster of the author's present position.
McNamara's argument depends heavily on his view of the importance of Asia to the United States, and the extent to which withdrawal from Vietnam would affect the balance of power in Asia. At one point, referring to the human and material costs of the war, he asks:
Were such high costs justified?
Dean Rusk, Walter Rostow, Lee Kwan Yew, and many other geopoliticians across the globe to this day answer yes. They conclude that without US intervention in Vietnam, communist hegemony--both Soviet and Chinese--would have spread farther through South and East Asia to include control of Indonesia, Thailand, and possibly India. Some would go further and say that the USSR would have been led to take greater risks to extend its influence elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East, where it might well have sought control of the oil-producing nations. They might be correct, but I seriously question such judgments.
What these "geopoliticians" thought did not matter to the outcome. What Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson thought did matter. Each, from a different experience and perspective, had thought deeply about Asia; and they had arrived at similar conclusions about the balance of power in that continent.
Eisenhower had served in the Philippines on General MacArthur's staff. His job required him to think about the strategic shape of Asia. It was he who founded in 1954 the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as a bipartisan effort in the wake of the Korean War, designed to hold the balance of power in Southeast Asia as it was held in Northeast Asia by the outcome of the Korean War. It was he who first applied the phrase "domino theory" to the American engagement in what was French Indo-China. The day before Kennedy's Inaugural, he laid before the new President and his major aides (Rusk, McNamara, and Dillon) the two serious problems he most wished them to understand: the balance of payments issue and Laos. Although there are several versions of what Eisenhower said about Laos, the evidence, on balance, is that he thought it likely that Kennedy would have to invoke the SEATO Treaty and put troops into Laos--if possible, with others, if necessary, alone. Eisenhower, from 1961 to 1968, gave unfailing support to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson on Southeast Asia.
Kennedy's experience of Asia was quite different, although it brought him to similar conclusions. As a member of Congress, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, he was focused on the Soviet threat in Europe, and a repetition by Stalin of Hitler's attack on Western Europe. He did not vote for Truman's Point Four technical assistance program for the developing countries.
In 1951, when it was clear that the communist attack in Korea was not a feint for an attack on Western Europe, and the truce negotiations had begun at Panmunjom, Kennedy went with members of his family on a tour of the Middle East, India, and the Far East, including Vietnam. He returned convinced that the communist threat would come mainly in the underdeveloped regions. He told his colleagues in the House of Representatives that he had been wrong on Point Four and subsequently supported it. And, in time, he believed China would succeed the Soviet Union as the main threat. He led support in the Senate during 1958 for India's Second Five-Year Plan with Senator John Sherman Cooper, a Republican Senator from Kentucky, who had also been Ambassador in India. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he created a special team to work in support of India over the concurrent clash in Ladakh, saying that in the long run this conflict might well be more important than the confrontation with the Soviet Union in the Caribbean.
All this background bears on the much-debated question of whether or not Kennedy would have ended US military involvement in Vietnam. He was clearly frustrated by the political performance of Diem and Nhu. On the other hand, he was against American encouragement of a coup, and was appalled when Diem and Nhu were killed in the coup that took place. That the two were killed in an American-made armored troop-carrier added to his unhappiness.
McNamara writes that it is "highly probable" that Kennedy would have pulled US forces out of Vietnam. But in the autumn of 1963, Kennedy said this to Walter Cronkite, harking back to his Asian trip of 1951:
Our best judgment is that he [Diem] can't be successful on this basis. We hope that he comes to see that, but in the final analysis it is the people and the government [of South Vietnam] itself who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can do is help, and we are making it very clear, but I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. I know people don't like Americans to be engaged in this kind of an effort. Forty-seven Americans have been killed in combat with the enemy, but this is a very important struggle even though it is far away.
We . . . made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate--we may not like it--in the defense of Asia.
A week later, in a similar interview with David Brinkley, he was asked:
"Mr. President, have you had any reason to doubt this so-called `domino theory,' that if South Vietnam falls, the rest of Southeast Asia will go behind it?"
"No, I believe it. I believe it. I think that the struggle is close enough. China is so large, looms so high just beyond the frontiers, that if South Vietnam went, it would not only give them an improved geographic position for a guerrilla assault on Malaya, but would also give the impression that the wave of the future in Southeast Asia was China and the communists. So I believe it."
The main weight of the war fell, of course, on President Johnson. His view of Asia came out of a quite different background. He had been briefly in Australia during the Second World War, and this experience led to a life-long sympathy and affection for that country. In the late 1950s, his view of Asia as a whole crystallized. The turning point was the question of statehood for Hawaii. Johnson spoke of this matter during a speech at the East-West Center in Honolulu on 18 October 1966:
My forebears came from Britain, Ireland, and Germany. People in my section of the country regarded Asia as totally alien in spirit as well as nationality . . . . We therefore looked away from the Pacific, away from its hopes as well as away from its great crises. Even the wars that many of us fought here were often [fought] with leftovers of preparedness, and they did not heal our blindness . . . . One consequence of that blindness was that Hawaii was denied its rightful part in our Union of States for many, many years. Frankly, for two decades I opposed its admission as a State, until at last the undeniable evidence of history, as well as the irresistible persuasiveness of Jack Burns [the non-voting Hawaiian delegate to the Congress], removed the scales from my eyes. Then I began to work and fight for Hawaiian statehood. And I hold that to be one of the proudest achievements of my twenty-five years in Congress.
Later in the speech, he referred to Hawaii as "a model of how men and women of different races and different cultures can come and live and work together; to respect each other in freedom and in hope." The period of an intense and ultimately successful struggle for Hawaiian statehood (achieved in 1959) coincided with the emergence of Johnson as an effective civil rights leader in the Senate--with his critical role in the message of the 1957 legislation, the first formal civil rights action by the Congress since the Civil War. The link in his mind between his positions in civil rights and on Asia remained throughout his life.
In May 1961, Johnson, as Vice President, was plunged still more deeply into the Asian Scene. At Kennedy's request, he visited South Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, India, and Pakistan. Johnson's recommendation to Kennedy was to create an organization of the free nations of the Pacific and Asia which would not only deal with defense issues but issues of social justice, housing, land reform: "The greatest danger Southeast Asia offers to nations like the United States is not the momentary threat of communism itself, rather that danger stems from hunger, ignorance, poverty, and disease." It was this line of thought which led Johnson as President to deliver on 7 April 1965 his speech at John Hopkins University, from which the Asian Development Bank arose.
But a great deal was going on in Asia in 1964-65 which McNamara does not detail. Sukarno left the United Nations on 8 January 1965, and allied with Hanoi and Peking. Within Indonesia, he worked closely with Aidit, head of that country's communist party. He launched the confrontation with Malaysia just as the first North Vietnamese regulars infiltrated South Vietnam. Some 80 ships of the British Commonwealth were mobilized to defend Malaysia. As McNamara said in a joint memorandum to the President with McGeorge Bundy on 27 January 1965: "The underlying difficulties in Saigon arise from the spreading conviction that the future is without hope for anti-communists." From one end of Asia to the other, the local people knew that a dangerous crisis was taking place in 1965 which could go one way or the other.
This was the setting in which McNamara and Bundy wrote their famous "Fork in the Road" memorandum at the end of January 1965. This memorandum told President Johnson that he had to choose between sending more troops to Vietnam or "negotiations aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved with no further addition to our present military risk." Both favored the first course. The memorandum played a significant role in President Johnson's reluctant decision in early 1965 to commit a substantial number of American troops to South Vietnam. It was a late and painful decision to match the escalating activity of the North Vietnamese regulars and Sukarno, an escalation which was, in turn, an opportunistic but understandable response to the disarray of South Vietnamese politics in the wake of the assassination of Diem and Nhu.
Is it credible that the United States would have withdrawn in the aftermath of a coup and assassination which were seen by the world to have been carried out with its acquiescence? Is it credible that any US President would not respond to the communist "nutcracker" of 1965: the simultaneous entrance of North Vietnamese regulars into South Vietnam and the enterprise of Sukarno in joining the supposed communist wave of the future is Asia? I think not.
And so in Vietnam, General Westmoreland set about the slow work of building up an adequate logistical base, dealing with the communist forces as he found them and as they were introduced and supplied via the Ho Chi Minh trails in Laos. By the end of 1965, he had achieved a stalemate; about a million men, women, and children in 1966 were added to those under the protection of the Vietnamese government. And this positive trend continued for most of 1967. The plan for the Tet offensive of 1968, hatched in the summer months of 1967, was Hanoi's reaction to the slowly eroding position in the South.
On 29 September 1967, President Johnson replied in San Antonio both to McNamara and to the "experienced intelligence analyst" who had written the memorandum sent to him a few weeks earlier by Richard Helms, the memorandum whose latter-day release made such a profound impression on McNamara:
I cannot tell you tonight as your President--with certainty--that a communist conquest of South Vietnam would be followed by a communist conquest of Southeast Asia. But I do know there are North Vietnamese troops in Laos. I do know that there are North Vietnamese trained guerrillas tonight in Northeast Thailand. I do know that there are communist-supported guerrilla forces operating in Burma. And a communist coup was barely averted in Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the world.
So your American President cannot tell you with certainty that a Southeast Asia dominated by communist power would bring a third world war much closer to terrible reality. One could hope that this would not be so.
But all that we have learned in this tragic century strongly suggests to me that it would be so. As President of the United States, I am not prepared to gamble on the chance that it is not so. I am not prepared to risk the security--indeed, the survival--of this American Nation on mere hope and wishful thinking. I am convinced that by seeing this struggle through now, we are greatly reducing the chances of a much larger war--perhaps a nuclear war. I would rather stand in Vietnam, in our time, and by meeting this danger now, and facing up to it, thereby reduce the danger for our children and for our grandchildren.
There is no doubt President Johnson was frustrated by his inability to bring the war to a quick conclusion. But he was heartened by the progress of the rest of Asia behind the barrier created by South Vietnam and her allies who were "holding aggression at bay."
From the beginning to the end of his time as President, Johnson was governed by the conclusion he had reached in the late 1950s; namely that Asia--all of Asia--mattered greatly to the future of America and was worth fighting for and nurturing. When he went through Asia for three weeks at the end of 1966, he spoke at least 90 percent of the time about the need for Asia to unite and organize, not about the struggle in Vietnam.
In the end, Johnson left for his successor a good post-Tet situation in the field, both military and political, but a difficult political situation at home. He met Thieu in Honolulu after he had announced, on 31 March, that he would not run in 1968. He refused Thieu's offer to put in the joint communiqué that American forces would be reduced over the next year. He chose to leave that decision to his successor.
The Malaysian foreign minister, speaking retrospectively in Boston on 11 November 1981, first recalled the early days of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) between 1968 and 1975:
They were very useful years to further bind the member countries together . . . . In 1975 North Vietnamese tanks rolled past Danang, Cam Ranh Bay, and Tan Son Nhut into Saigon. The United States withdrew their last soldiers from Vietnam, and the worst of ASEAN's fears which underscored the Bangkok Declaration of 1967 came to pass. But ASEAN by then had seven solid years of living in neighborly cooperation. Call it foresight, or what you will, the fact remains that with ASEAN solidarity there were no falling dominoes in Southeast Asia following the fall of Saigon to the communists, and the United States withdrawal from Southeast Asia.
Both the NICs (New Industrial Countries) and the ASEAN members roughly quadrupled their real GNP between 1960 and 1981. They were, socially and politically as well as economically, quite different countries than they had been when Southeast Asia went through the crisis of 1965. McNamara does not deal with the importance of Southeast Asia or its dynamics in these critical years.
Another weakness of McNamara's book is his failure to discuss systematically the gift of sanctuary which rendered the war inevitably "long and inconclusive." There have been no examples in which a guerrilla war (or a war dependent on external supply) has been won in which one side was granted sanctuary by the other. The guerrilla wars in the Philippines under Magsaysay and the British effort in Malaysia were successful because one was a group of islands, while the other had a narrow neck of land to the north and sea supply for the guerrillas in Malaysia was denied. On the other hand, Napoleon met his first setback in the Peninsular War when the British helped the guerrillas; the guerrillas in Algeria were helped through Morocco and Tunisia; and the United States and others helped the Afghan defenders against the Russians through Pakistan.
South Vietnam was explicitly protected, by the Laos Accords of 1962, from the North Vietnamese transiting of Laos and Cambodia, via the Ho Chi Minh Trails and the Cambodian ports. This was not an understanding whispered in the corridors of the Palais des Nations, but a formal agreement between Ambassador Pushkin of the Soviet Union and Averell Harriman, who negotiated the treaty. It called for the Soviet Union to guarantee that no third party be transited by Hanoi in supply to the guerrillas in the South.
The North Vietnamese did not obey the Laos Accords for a single day after they came into force in early October 1962, nor did the Soviet government ever act on its freely taken responsibilities. October 1962 was the month of the Cuban missile crisis; and it led to a visit to Washington by Anastas Mikoyan, fresh from a rather miserable experience in Havana. There were those who urged President Kennedy to confront the Soviet Union immediately over its failure to act on its Laos Treaty commitments. They were turned down. It was not difficult to explain President Kennedy's reluctance to act in the wake of the traumatic confrontation in the Caribbean; but the alternative put to President Kennedy was to act decisively now or face a crisis "in a waning situation."
General Maxwell Taylor had all this in mind when he sent a long cable at the end of 1964 that included this passage:
[Hanoi] enjoys the priceless asset of a protected logistic sanctuary in the DRV and in Laos. I do not recall in history a successful anti-guerrilla campaign with less than a 10 to 1 numerical superiority over the guerrillas and without the elimination of assistance from outside the country.
Senator John Stennis echoed this point in August 1967: "The question is growing in the Congress as to whether it is wise to send more men if we are going to just leave them at the mercy of the guerrilla war without trying to cut off the enemy's supplies more effectively."
And McNamara himself quotes General DuPuy, General Westmoreland's planner, in a 1986 interview: "It turned out that [search and destroy] was a faulty concept, given the sanctuaries, given the fact that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never closed. It was a losing concept of operation." Thus, the sanctuary granted Hanoi was historically incompatible with American and South Vietnamese victory in a time-span consistent with American patience as a nation; and the bombing of the supply trails or other devices to reduce the flow from North Vietnam were demonstrably inadequate.
Those who advocated blocking the trails on the ground believed that action would force a concentration of North Vietnamese troops to keep the trails open, and two or three reinforced US divisions together with air supremacy could deal with them. This happened, incidentally, at Khe Sanh, where Hanoi concentrated during the Tet offensive several divisions (some think five) which were defeated by some 6000 US and Vietnamese forces plus air power intelligently directed by General Momyer. This reversed at Khe Sanh the normal proportions of guerrillas versus the defending force.
This proposal was definitively turned down on 27 April 1967 by President Johnson and Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, presumably on the grounds that any movement of American troops to block infiltration on the trails would bring the Russians and Chinese into the war.
On this matter General William Westmoreland (whom McNamara quotes) may have the last word:
The geographic restraints on the ground war were very real, and understandable.
Yet if you'll look at the situation as it's turned out, we basically attained our strategic objectives. We stopped the flow of communism . . . . I conclude that by strength, awkwardness, and good luck, most of our strategic objectives have been reached. I also say that we have to give President Johnson credit for not allowing the war to expand geographically . . . he was quite fearful that this was going to escalate into a world war. One of his main strategic objectives was to confine the war. He did not want it to spread . . . . Having said that, that's not the way I felt at the time. I felt that our hands were tied.
Historians will have to decide in the light of President Johnson's conclusion at San Antonio whether that price was worth paying. Clearly, if the alternative might have been a larger war or the risk of nuclear war, it was worth paying. In any case, Johnson was following the rules governing the policy of containment: block the extension of communist rule while minimizing the likelihood of nuclear war. McNamara refers to, but does not discuss, this central issue.
Considering that he is writing in the 1990s, McNamara's view of the Vietnamese is remarkably static. It stops in early 1968, if not earlier. In fact, the whole period 1954-75 was highly dynamic in South Vietnam. Vietnam was an underdeveloped, post-colonial country. Like Syngman Rhee in Korea, its first nationalist ruler earned his legitimacy by having nothing to do with the occupying power. Diem was also a mandarin to whom the sharing of power outside the family was extremely awkward. Each president was followed by a series of weak rulers, and then their countries found relative stability with men of the next generation--in Korea under Park, in Vietnam under Thieu and Ky from 1965.
Starting in September 1966, a political process was started. A Constituent Assembly was elected to draft a constitution. Despite communist intimidation, 81 percent of the population voted, out of 5.3 million registered. On 3 September 1967, a well-inspected presidential election was held. The Thieu-Ky ticket won with 34.8 percent of the votes. Typical of an underdeveloped country, there were ten civilian candidates. Registration had increased 11 percent since the vote of the previous year. Fifty-seven percent of the population of the country of voting age took part. Ambassador Dobrynin of the Soviet Union was almost precisely accurate when he said before the election that the Popular Front candidate commended by the communists would get 16 percent of the vote. The rest were explicitly anti-communist.
The Tet offensive is not dealt with in McNamara's book, except for one reference at the end to the attack on the US Embassy compound. Thieu was in the Delta when the Tet offensive struck late in January 1968; but Ky and Robert Komer, Westmoreland's deputy for civilian affairs, led in the cleanup of Saigon where many refugees congregated. American and Vietnamese marines cleared Hue, where the North Vietnamese had established a foothold in the Citadel. And most remarkable of all, it was the local police and militia that picked up the communist forces which attacked 34 of the 44 provincial capitals, five of the six autonomous cities, 71 of 242 district capitals, and 50 hamlets. Thus the communists failed to produce the uprising they expected. Thieu mobilized an additional 122,000 men for the armed forces in the first half of 1968. The South Vietnamese remained steady. Tet was an utter military and political defeat for the communists in Vietnam, yet a political disaster in the United States. The conventional American view was that the South Vietnamese government's military, economic, and social program was set back by some years.
This program had resulted in a revolution in education, where school enrollment increased massively, for example, from 410,000 to 2.7 million in primary education, starting in 1954. There were similar advances made over the same period in agriculture, trade, and industry. The South Vietnam of 1969 was not the same country it was in 1954, 1961, or even 1967. I have no doubt that it would have followed the development path of South Korea if it had not been caught up in a difficult war and then communist rule.
As for the military, it is important to understand that neither North nor South Vietnam produced any armaments at all. Essentially, the war was fought with weapons imported into Vietnam by their respective allies. As time passed, the average skill of the Vietnamese divisions improved, although they continued to vary greatly according to their commanding officers. This uneven but improving force, under General Abrams' tutelage, was tested in battle with the North Vietnamese in 1972. American ground forces had been withdrawn, leaving only air and naval units still in support of the South Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese were generously supported by Soviet tanks and artillery superior to those available to the South Vietnamese, as well as many anti-aircraft guns. It was in the context of this battle that President Nixon used B-52s against Hanoi, mined the harbor at Haiphong, and attacked the railway lines leading to China from Hanoi. The upshot was a military victory on the ground for the South Vietnamese.
In 1973, an accord was negotiated between North and South Vietnam. The North licked its wounds, paved the supply trails through Laos, and watched the American air and naval units withdraw on President Nixon's promise of $2.2 billion dollars in military aid to complete the process of Vietnamization of the South Vietnam military.
Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore was a kind of Greek chorus for the Asians throughout this period. In 1965, when all of Southeast Asia was menaced, he had remarked that "We may all go through the mincing machine." In 1966, he said to a group of students after noting that the Americans were buying time for a united Asia to emerge: "If we just sit down and believe people are going to buy time forever after for us, then we deserve to perish." In 1967, ASEAN was founded. In April 1973, at the National Press Club, Lee Kwan Yew laid out the alternatives in the following terms:
At the risk of being proved wrong, there are three scenarios I envisage as a result of the Paris agreement. First . . . the provisions are in the main honored . . . . In this case, the contest will become primarily political. The South Vietnamese government stands a very fair chance in such a contest. Second, an all-out offensive by both the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong as soon as they believe they are strong enough to overwhelm the armed forces of the South Vietnamese government . . . . Third, the North Vietnamese, to avoid unnecessary risks, ostensibly honor the Paris agreement. However, they will leave it to the Vietcong, with North Vietnamese infiltrators and fresh military supplies to augment their strength, to make a bid for power in the South . . . .
But, if the worst does happen, and the Vietcong, with the help of the North Vietnamese, do gain control over the South in the middle 1970s, it does not necessarily follow that the rest of Southeast Asia will go communist. The morale of the other peoples of Southeast Asia is now very different from what it was after Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Thais are now more prepared psychologically to face up to such a situation . . . . A crucial factor is whether they believe they can depend on American military and economic aid, as spelled out under the Guam doctrine.
For reasons which no one could have predicted in the spring of 1973, before Watergate had progressively undermined Nixon's authority and legitimacy, it was Lee's second scenario that came to pass in the mid-1970s. The simple fact is that, as of April 1975, the American public, with the China détente established, was prepared to end its involvement with Vietnam; and Southeast Asia was prepared to stand on its own feet. Second, the South Vietnamese did all that could be expected of them in the post-Diem period; and as time passes, they will deserve better of history than McNamara allows.
One returns to the wild card in this story: the manner in which the United States, including McNamara's own family, was driven into painful controversy over the war. And that is a part of the equation that all Americans must weigh for themselves. In fact, only McNamara can weigh all the factors which have driven him into the position that, whatever the cost, the United States should have withdrawn its troops from Vietnam.
With the exception of the Second World War, every conflict in which Americans have been engaged has involved public controversy. And this is to their credit, for who wants war? In the Revolutionary War, perhaps one-third of the people wanted independence; one third were pro-British; and one-third were simply out to make a fast buck by selling supplies to the Continental Army. In the war of 1812, the New England states, after the Hartford Convention, passed a resolution calling for withdrawal from the union rather than joining in the war against Canada. The Mexican War stirred great controversy in the United States. The Civil War split the nation from top to bottom. The Spanish-American War was followed by the unpopular conflict with the Philippine guerrillas. The First World War, like the Civil War, touched off draft riots. The Korean War left Truman more unpopular than either Nixon at the nadir of his fortunes, or Lyndon Johnson at his lowest point in the polls.
No one has promised that American independence itself, or America's role as a bastion for those who believe deeply in democracy, could be achieved without pain or loss or controversy. The pain, loss, and controversy resulting from Vietnam were accepted for ten years by the American people. That acceptance held the line so that a free Asia could survive and grow; for, in the end, the war and the treaty which led to it were about who would control the balance of power in Asia, an issue which was evidently at stake in the Asian crisis of 1965 and thereafter. Those who died or were wounded in Vietnam or are veterans of that conflict were not involved in a pointless war.
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W. W. Rostow is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of Texas at Austin. The present article appeared originally in England in the Times Literary Supplement (London), 9 June 1995, and is reprinted with permission.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...nter/rostow.htm
Der Verdammte Krieg (The Cursed War)
LAWRENCE G. KELLEY
Even 50 years after the Götterdämmerung in Berlin and war crimes trials in Nürnberg, few themes grip, haunt, or polarize German public life more than World War II. The enduring legacy of guilt, search for accountability, shame over complicity, and political imperative of reconciliation have left their mark on the German psyche--not to mention foreign policy--even in the buoyant, self-confident years since the 1990 unification of the country. Three recent events on the cultural scene demonstrate this point with telling clarity. They are the commercial success in Germany of Daniel J. Goldhagen's controversial study Hitler's Willing Executioners; the furor evoked in conservative Munich by a traveling exhibit of graphic wartime photographs titled Vernichtungskrieg im Osten: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, 1941-44 (War of Extermination in the East: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941-44), and the remarkable popularity of a lengthy video chronicle produced over the last six years by the television network ZDF, the latest episodes of which provide a psychological portrait of Hitlers Helfer (Hitler's Henchmen). The uproar over the photos in Crimes of the Wehrmacht led politicians throughout the German political spectrum to intercede. Hitler's Willing Executioners and historian-director Guido Knopp's 400-page companion volume to the TV series Hitler's Henchmen concurrently graced the nonfiction bestseller list for months. And ZDF, recognizing popular demand, has announced plans to continue its historical documentaries into the year 2000. Why the clamor?
All three of these events reflect the German obsession with a traumatic chapter in modern history, one on which a chasm separates young from old. Germans feel stark ambivalence about reopening the Nazi past, and polls show that a majority prefers not to disturb its ghosts. Some claim weariness with the issue, others assert its irrelevance to the present day. Yet a generational fault line divides the population: roughly two-thirds of those above age 30 favor putting the issue to rest, while a like number below age 30 oppose it.
The question of complicity has long been as much a political question as a fathers-and-sons conflict. Some groups confront it only reluctantly; others eagerly seize the chance to do so. The Left is quick to condemn the Wehrmacht as "the Devil's army," the sine qua non of Nazi genocide, while the Right perpetuates the image of a force free of collective guilt and avidly shifts the blame for atrocities to the leadership or to the SS. The implications of this disagreement figure prominently in electoral politics and Bundestag debates on, for instance, the out-of-area deployment of German forces to once-occupied countries in central Europe. Our unfortunate Bundeswehr colleagues, virtually all born after 1945, find themselves caught in the crossfire.
The truth is a differentiated one. Many, though certainly not all, Wehrmacht units and individual soldiers do share the responsibility for war crimes. The SS did not act alone; much of the savagery which Himmler's police inflicted occurred immediately behind a Wehrmacht shield. At times regular line units conducted or participated in executions; routinely they provided security and logistical support. Of course, the war was prosecuted on the Eastern Front for qualitatively different goals and with far greater ruthlessness than elsewhere. The mission entailed both the acquisition of Lebensraum and ethnic annihilation, and in many ways operations there virtually defined our understanding of the law of war. True, the Nazi leadership uniquely bears responsibility for violations of jus ad bellum--for unleashing an aggressive, racist campaign of territorial aggrandizement. But violations of jus in bello--how the war was waged--extended well beyond this select (if notorious) group and often involved the "boy next door," who routinely felt himself victimized and pleaded "just following orders." In the East, proportionality and discrimination, the watchwords of just war doctrine, were not operative concepts.
Graphic visual documentation in the photographs that comprise Crimes of the Wehrmacht--and in the ZDF video chronicle--has forced many to confront this reality, prompting a reaction that differs in scale, if not in intensity, from what Vietnam veterans experienced over My Lai. Organized by the liberal Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the exhibit contains pictures taken (despite a ban on photography) by fallen or captured Wehrmacht soldiers and now kept on display in war museums of the former USSR and Yugoslavia. The material depicts widespread summary executions and reprisals against Slavs and other groups officially branded Untermenschen. The fact of such actions remains beyond dispute--and they were far from the only crimes committed against the Russians, 60 to 70 percent of whose POWs perished in Nazi concentration camps--but for decades many Germans have viewed them as the exclusive sins of Hitler, the SS, and the Einsatzkommandos. The exhibition's organizers make it clear that while no wholesale indictment of Wehrmacht soldiers is justified, complicity in atrocities extended beyond the recognized war criminals to line units manned by common, outwardly upright young men. In doing so the organizers echo one of the principal points in Goldhagen's book: that "ordinary Germans" massively aided in the implementation of Hitler's genocidal policies.
There is another side to the war crimes story, however, and ZDF in its exceptional 18-part series The Cursed War (and sequels) illuminates it as well. In 1944, as the inexorable march of the Red Army reached German soil, pervasive fear gripped the local populace, which consisted overwhelmingly of noncombatants: women, children, and the elderly. If Goebbels hyped hate and fear for effect on the German side, it must be said that until April of 1945 noted Russian writers like Ilya Ehrenburg ("Germany is a witch . . . . Germans have no souls!") and Konstantin Simonov ("Kill a German each time you see one!") articulated an officially sanctioned Soviet line in the Red Army newspaper Red Star that conceded little in terms of demonization of the enemy. The Politburo ultimately halted this campaign--but on pragmatic rather than moral grounds, recognizing its implications for postwar Soviet occupation.
Their invective reinforced wrath. By this time the Soviets had liberated European Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and parts of Poland. With the sights of atrocities etched in their mind's eye--Babiy Yar, Maidanek, hanged partisans, maimed comrades, razed villages, starved Leningraders, and scorched earth--many Red Army troops sought blood vengeance (and corporeal gratification) as much as victory. Some even swore a kind of oath on this score. Murder, rape, and looting became commonplace, and Soviet commanders often failed to stop it. The 1944 massacre of the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf, exploited by Nazi propaganda as a rallying cry to stand to the last, came to symbolize Russian fury and inhumanity throughout the rapidly crumbling Third Reich. An eyewitness stated: "We found women and children nailed, crucifixion-like, to the gates and doors of the village. . . . All were stripped naked, many were disemboweled." Even with the passage of time, German survivors of the Red Army's drive on Berlin break down visibly on camera, with immense effect, while relating their experiences. Knopp comments with candor and admirable restraint in his companion text to the video series that the period bred "hate against hate," unleashing Soviet retribution on innocent civilians, forbidden to retreat by their own government, for countless Nazi excesses in the East. A prominent Soviet veteran, writing elsewhere, expressed the less-balanced perspective widely held to this day by his comrades: "Victors are not tried!" One wonders when--or whether--the Russians will finally face the reality of their own wartime misconduct, as their once sworn enemy has so painfully done.
But important as war crimes were, The Cursed War examines far vaster themes and represents a monumental, extensively researched, provocative effort--initially done in cooperation with Soviet/Russian television--to come to grips with an anguished past. From 1991 to 1995, episodes were broadcast to mark the 50th anniversary of critical events in the war; newer episodes in the series cover issues that were not time-sensitive. The videos have attracted a broad international following, with segments being seen in 48 countries, including the United States. When ZDF began preparatory work on the project, it put out a public request for new firsthand information. A windfall ensued, one of the common threads of which was the shame felt by many older Germans over materials long hidden away in the attic. Talking about the period and making available old snapshots, film clips, logbooks, and letters became a form of catharsis.
ZDF eventually conducted over 2000 interviews with eyewitnesses of the period, including a constellation of luminaries from European public life (many of them former soldiers) and an even larger group of common persons with uncommon vantage points. The latter group included Hitler's personal secretary, Guderian's aide de camp, relatives and friends of Hitler's Paladins, soldiers from the Führerbunker, Nazi advisors, Luftwaffe aces, submarine commanders, the translator for the KGB unit that discovered and absconded with Hitler's charred remains, political commissars, and camp survivors. Americans interviewed include such notables as Howard K. Smith (who covered the unconditional surrender in Karlshorst), John Kenneth Galbraith (who debriefed Albert Speer), and William Jackson (US prosecutor at Nürnberg). Unfortunately, most senior military commanders of the time have long since passed on, and the series must interpret their motives and actions through memoirs, documentation, or the eyes of others.
Considering the advanced age of all concerned, these videos have provided a last chance to short-circuit actuarial reality and answer such burning questions as: What really motivated Hitler and his entourage? How could an extremist splinter group that garnered but a minority vote in 1932 come to power in a democracy at all, much less remain there? How deep did Hitler's support truly run in the populace? What role did accommodation, acquiescence, and denial play in the process? Why did Nazi propaganda succeed? How did the levers of social control and mobilization function? How much resistance was possible? How sinister were the machinations and intrigues of Hitler's Paladins? Why did the professional, battle-hardened German officer corps go along with Hitler's war plans and policies, especially ones which it knew would fail?
These incisive videos serve an important purpose: the confrontation of German liberal democracy with the fire and ashes of its Wagnerian past. They fill a painful but significant educational void that has plagued German society, one that has continued to exacerbate the generation gap. History is Knopp's medium but not his only message, for in its essence his probing series addresses the character and core beliefs of a nation. It uncompromisingly points out hard truths, with which some passionately disagree. My only criticism of the treatment relates as much to the anti- national mindset of postwar Germany--with its grudging tolerance of military power--as to the author himself: the reluctance to portray patriotism as a legitimate motivating factor in the war. Patriotism was clearly a two-edged sword; abused by the Nazis for criminal purposes, it nonetheless rallied those countries that suffered attack. Professional US military officers and their Bundeswehr counterparts of today understand full well that "duty, honor, country" entails studied, critical commitment, not blind obedience. Regrettably, for many Germans, scarred and jaundiced by their past, patriotism remains the war's last casualty.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reviewer's notes on the availability of materials discussed in this essay:
Video: English versions (NTSC format) of TV episodes marked with an asterisk can be obtained from The History Channel (1-800-708-1776). German versions (PAL format) of all episodes are marketed in Germany through TIME-LIFE AG (011-49-180-521-2443), ZMD Verkaufsservice (011-49-89-8585-0202) or ZDF Enterprises, whose address is: ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Lise Maitner Str. 9, 55129 Mainz, Germany (Telephone: 011-49-6131-991292; Fax: 011-49-6131-991259). Comprehension in the original requires good listening ability (DLPT Level 2+).
Books: Companion books are available in German only. Comprehension requires good reading ability (DLPT Level 2+).
ZDF Video Chronicle:
Der Verdammte Krieg: Barbarossa (The Cursed War: Barbarossa)
Der Wahn vom Lebensraum (The Mania of Lebensraum)
Der Überfall (The Invasion)
Die Illusion des Sieges (The Illusion of Victory)
Der Kampf um Leningrad (The Struggle for Leningrad)
Der Kreml im Visier (The Kremlin in the Crosshairs)
Der Anfang vom Ende (The Beginning of the End)
Der Verdammte Krieg: Entscheidung Stalingrad (Decision: Stalingrad)
Tödliche Weisung (Fatal Directive)
Haß wider Haß (Hate Against Hate)
Leningrad will überleben (Leningrad Is Determined to Survive)
Die Falle schnappt zu (The Trap Snaps Shut)
Das Ende an der Wolga (The End on the Volga)
Der Verdammte Krieg: Bis zum bitteren Ende (To the Bitter End)
Der Feuersturm (The Firestorm)
Verbrannte Erde (Scorched Earth)
Die Russen kommen (The Russians Are Coming)
Der Zusammenbruch (The Collapse)
Die Schlacht um Berlin (The Battle for Berlin)
Triumph und Tragödie (Triumph and Tragedy)
*Hitler--eine Bilanz (Hitler):
*Der Privatmann (The Private Person)
*Der Verführer (The Seducer)
*Der Erpresser (The Blackmailer)
*Der Diktator (The Dictator)
*Der Kriegsherr (The Commander)
*Der Verbrecher (The Criminal)
*Hitlers Helfer (Hitler's Henchmen):
*Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy): Rudolf Heß
*Der Vollstrecker (The Executioner): Heinrich Himmler
*Der Brandstifter (The Incitor): Joseph Goebbels
*Der zweite Mann (The Number Two): Hermann Göring
*Der Architekt (The Architect): Albert Speer
*Der Nachfolger (The Successor): Karl Dönitz
The eight segments of Hitler's Henchmen to be broadcast in 1998 will cover Martin Bormann, Adolf Eichmann, Roland Freisler, Wilhelm Keitel, Joseph Mengele, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Erwin Rommel, and Baldur von Schirach.
Companion Books:
Knopp, Guido. Der verdammte Krieg: Das "Unternehmen Barbarossa" (The Cursed War: Operation Barbarossa). Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1991.
________. Entscheidung Stalingrad (Decision: Stalingrad). Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1993.
________. Das Ende 1945: Der verdammte Krieg (The Cursed War: 1945, The End). Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1995.
________. Hitler--Eine Bilanz (Hitler). Berlin: Siedler, 1995.
________. Hitlers Helfer (Hitler's Henchmen). Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1996.
Other Books:
Goldhagen, Daniel J. Hitler's Willing Executioners. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Werth, Alexander. Russia at War, 1941-1945. New York: Avon Books, 1965.
The Reviewer: Colonel Lawrence G. Kelley (USMC Ret.) is a former A-4 pilot and Russian Foreign Area Officer (FAO) with extensive experience in the former Soviet Union, German Democratic Republic, Federal Republic of Germany, and Western Pacific. His nine FAO assignments included two with the On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA); US Military Liaison Mission to the Commander-in-Chief, Group of Soviet Forces, Germany; Washington-Moscow "Hotline"; and Navy staff. He was the Deputy Commander/Director of Operations of OSIA-Europe from 1990 to 1995 and led 60 arms control missions under the INF Treaty, CFE Treaty, and Vienna Document-90/92. He served operational tours in attack/training squadrons, an infantry battalion, and aviation group and wing staffs, and he flew close air support in Vietnam. A Navy ROTC graduate of Princeton in Russian language, literature, and area studies, Colonel Kelley also studied at Leningrad State University and holds a master's degree in government and national security affairs from Georgetown University.
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Review Essay
The Korean War Revisited
DONALD W. BOOSE, JR.
© 1998 Donald W. Boose, Jr.
As the 50th anniversary of the Korean War nears, more is known about North Korean, Chinese, and Russian policy and decisionmaking than ever before. Sufficient gaps and inconsistencies exist to assure that speculation and conflicting interpretations will continue, but we have a clearer picture of the sequence of events and even of the motivations of the key decisionmakers than at any time since the war began. The five books reviewed in this essay, all published in the mid-1990s, have helped produce this clearer picture and richer understanding of a conflict that has cast long shadows. While their authors accept James Matray's sensible contention, made in his review essay in this issue (pp. 150-62) that the Korean War was both a civil war between Koreans and an international conflict, their focus is on the international aspects.
In The Korean War: An International History, William Stueck makes use of all the scholarship to date, including his own research, to examine the war at the strategic and international political level, touching on military operations with only the broadest of brushes. Because of this focus and the complexity of the issues with which Stueck deals, his book is most suitable for a reader already familiar with the war. But for such a reader, Stueck's account is informative and thought-provoking. Reflecting the current emerging consensus, he sees the civil and international aspects of the war as interlocked. Ideological polarization between Koreans of the left and right made conflict in Korea likely in any event, but the close ties between Korean nationalists of both camps and foreign countries internationalized the struggle. This international dimension was magnified when geography and world events placed the Korean peninsula on the post-World War II boundary between the antagonistic Soviet- and US-led blocs. Stueck emphasizes this multilateral nature of the war, the interplay between US domestic politics and events in Korea, and the relationship between the course of the war and regional and global issues. These included the formation of NATO and German rearmament, Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Soviet bloc, negotiations for a peace treaty with Japan and the establishment of the postwar system of US bilateral security arrangements, Chinese efforts to replace the Nationalist regime in the United Nations, and events in Taiwan, Indochina, Southern Europe, and Southwest Asia.
Stueck is particularly good at depicting activity within the United Nations; another of his major themes is the ability of US allies and neutrals to influence American actions through UN deliberations. Finally, he examines in detail the fateful misjudgments by all the major participants in the war. He emphasizes the mistaken communist belief that the South Korean population would rise against the Syngman Rhee government and that the United States would not intervene, as well as American failure to anticipate the Chinese intervention, repeated failures on both sides to recognize situations in which the war might have been brought to a mutually acceptable conclusion, and misunderstandings during the Armistice negotiations. Stueck concludes that while the war was a horrific tragedy for the Korean people (particularly in light of his belief that the war could have been ended early), it also led the United States and the Soviet Union to back away from a potentially larger confrontation. For this reason, he calls the Korean War a "substitute for World War III."
Two Chinese scholars, Chen Jian in China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation, and Zhang Shu Guang in Mao's Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953, focus on China's role in the war. Both authors make use of memoirs, selectively released Chinese primary documents, and the work of Chinese researchers with access to archival and classified Chinese sources in their work. Some of their interpretations may be disputed, but they both provide valuable and informative insights into Chinese strategic-level decisionmaking.
The precise timing and degree of Chinese involvement in North Korean preparation and planning for the war are still not entirely clear. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, while primarily concerned with their own objectives and national interests, shared communist ideology and were bound by the historical connection and geographical proximity between China and Korea. Their common perception that they were threatened by anti-communist forces led by the United States also influenced their actions. Several divisions of ethnic Koreans fought against the Japanese and the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jeshi) as part of the Chinese Communist Forces. In 1946, at a crucial stage in the Chinese civil war, Kim provided Mao's troops and their families refuge and a strategic base until the Chinese communists could resume the offensive. As Mao's forces neared victory in mid-1949, the Chinese began to release the ethnic Korean divisions for return to Korea, greatly increasing North Korean combat potential. In December 1949, Mao began a two-month-long visit to Russia, during which a Sino-Soviet mutual security treaty and other agreements were signed. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev claims that Mao and Stalin discussed Kim Il-sung's desire to attack the south, with Mao arguing that the United States was unlikely to intervene. The evidence from other participants in the discussions is ambiguous, but Chen is convinced that the two leaders did discuss Kim's plans, at least in general terms, and that these discussions constituted a "Chinese-Soviet green light for Kim Il-sung." Zhang does not address the Mao-Stalin talks, but points out that in early 1950 the Chinese stepped up the repatriation of ethnic Korean soldiers, strengthened their defensive forces in the Northeast (Manchuria) in preparation for the coming North Korean offensive, and concluded with the North Koreans a series of civilian communications agreements that would enhance combined military cooperation.
Both Chen and Zhang agree that, by the time of the North Korean attack on 25 June 1950, the Chinese leadership had long-since concluded that the United States was China's primary enemy and that a military conflict was likely. Chen argues that the Chinese leadership, exemplified and directed by Mao Zedong, was motivated primarily by the need to consolidate the revolution and to maintain its momentum. Other motivations included a desire to overcome a century of humiliation by restoring China's role as a major power and a perception of the United States as a long-term and enduring threat to China. All would play a role in China's intervention in the Korean War. Zhang describes Mao's vision of the world divided into "two camps," led respectively by the Soviet Union and the United States, with a great "intermediate zone" comprised of neutral countries and nations emerging from colonialism where China could play a leading role from a position of moral superiority while restoring its traditional national pride and leading position in Asia. Chen sees the US-China confrontation as a product of the tension between the Chinese communist revolution and American efforts to contain communism--a tension aggravated by miscommunication and misperceptions resulting from cultural and ideological differences. By 1950, the Chinese leadership had concluded that the danger of direct US intervention in China had receded, but that the United States would continue to be an implacable foe of the revolution, threatening China from the "three danger spots" of Korea, Taiwan, and Indochina. Thus, the Chinese were predisposed to confront the United States even before the Korean War began.
Both Chen and Zhang provide useful synopses of previous scholarship on the Chinese intervention in Korea. They note that the prevailing Western interpretation shifted in the 1960s from a belief that China's entry was part of a well- orchestrated Soviet aggression to a view that China's actions were simply a response to a perceived threat posed by US-led forces advancing toward the Chinese border, an interpretation held by most Chinese scholars as well. Chen challenges this view, arguing that because "Beijing's decision to enter the war was based on the belief that the outcome of the Korean crisis was closely related to the new China's vital domestic and international interests . . . there was little possibility that China's entrance into the war could have been averted." Chen also points out that just as the Chinese word for "crisis" (weiji) contains the two characters meaning "danger" and "opportunity," the American intervention in Korea was, from the beginning, both a dangerous threat, confirming Mao's fundamental view of the aggressive nature of US policy in Asia, and an opportunity to confront the United States. The confrontation could reduce the threat to China, enhance China's revolutionary momentum, and strengthen Chinese communist authority domestically and in the region.
In July 1950, soon after the first US reinforcements were deployed to Korea, the Chinese established a substantial military force and logistical stockpiles in the Northeast and began political mobilization in preparation for possible intervention. On 4 August as the North Korean army began its offensive against the Pusan Perimeter, Mao raised the possibility of sending an army of "volunteers" to Korea. Throughout the month of August and into September, the Chinese Politburo debated intervention. According to Chen, Mao was the leading proponent for intervention, but had difficulty mobilizing support so long as North Korea was on the offensive. When the North Korean attack stalled and General MacArthur began a United Nations Command (UNC) counteroffensive with the 15 September Inch'on landing, Mao won the argument. On 2 October, two days after the first Republic of Korea forces crossed the 38th parallel, Mao sent a long telegram to Stalin, informing the Russian leader that China had decided to send an army of "volunteers" into Korea. Five days later, US forces also moved north across the 38th parallel. Although the Chinese leadership momentarily hesitated on 12 October when Stalin appeared to renege on promises to provide support, they made the final decision on 18 October, and the next day the Chinese People's Volunteers (CPV) under the command of General Peng Dehuai began to cross the Yalu River into Korea.
Chen briefly addresses China's wartime experiences, but his account essentially ends with the Chinese decision for war. Zhang's emphasis is on Mao's military philosophy and the Chinese conduct of the war. He traces the development of Mao Zedong's approach to war, which was an amalgamation of traditional Chinese military thought, Leninist theory, and the lessons Mao derived from his decades of conducting protracted war. He sees as a contributing factor in Mao's decision to intervene in Korea a romanticized notion of war and a belief that the Chinese could overcome a technologically advanced enemy through superior will and morale. The experience of the Korean War would temper that notion, but much of Mao's military thought is still reflected in current statements of Chinese doctrine.
Working primarily from Chinese sources, Zhang misidentifies some UNC forces (he frequently confuses Marine and Army units) and his description of tactical- level actions is not always consistent with US accounts. Nonetheless, his description of Chinese strategic and operational decisionmaking is valuable. American readers will be intrigued by his insights into the Chinese internal debate and thought processes about the decision to cross the 38th parallel during the November 1950-January 1951 offensive; CPV commander Peng, recognizing that his exhausted forces were outrunning their supplies, argued for an operational pause while Mao insisted that the attack continue. Other insights can be found in descriptions of China's shift to protracted war after the failure of the offensive, the Chinese approach to the mobile defense, and their efforts to keep their forces supplied in the face of UNC air attacks.
Zhang makes clear that for the Chinese, the Korean conflict was, above all, a war of logistics. In Communist Logistics in the Korean War, Charles R. Shrader examines this essential aspect of North Korean and Chinese military operations. In spite of their very weak industrial bases, the North Koreans and Chinese were able throughout the war to obtain supplies from the Soviets, through local sources, and by the use of captured materiel. Their great challenge was transporting supplies from the secure depots in Manchuria across Korea to the front lines, over punishing terrain and in the face of UNC air attack. Thus, the crucial contest, Shrader insists, was between communist efforts to distribute supplies and the UNC interdiction effort.
The North Koreans and Chinese began their offensives with well-trained, well-prepared forces, but with logistical systems unequal to the demands of sustained combat operations and vulnerable to air interdiction. Both the initial North Korean offensive and the subsequent Chinese attacks eventually stalled when the communists outran their supplies. From mid-1951 through the end of 1952, the communists energetically improved their logistical system, built up air defenses, developed the means to repair or bypass railways and roads quickly, and adopted passive measures, such as camouflage and decoys, to avoid air attack. These efforts were aided by the slackening of UNC ground pressure after the initiation of Armistice talks.
As a result of these actions, by early 1953 the communists were able not only to support a strong defense, but had improved their logistical capability and stockpiled sufficient materiel to be able to conduct sustained offensive operations. Shrader concludes that by the end of the war the communists were "on the verge of being able to support a massive and extended offensive campaign, which would have constituted a serious threat to the United Nations forces." In the absence of Chinese and North Korean sources on logistics, Shrader's account is based largely on intelligence reports and the debriefings of communist prisoners of war. Future revelations may add to our knowledge of the subject, particularly at the strategic and policy levels, but it seems unlikely that Shrader's portrayal of operational-level communist logistics will be superseded anytime soon.
The 1953 communist offensive to which Shrader refers was forestalled by the conclusion of an Armistice. Negotiations for that Armistice began in 1951; Herbert Goldhamer, a RAND psychologist doing research in Korea, was subsequently invited by one of the participants to observe the workings of the military team conducting the negotiations for the UNC side. Goldhamer's observations and suggestions were so valuable to the UNC negotiators that they asked him to participate actively in their preparations. And so, for four months, Goldhamer had an unparalleled view of the workings of the UNC delegation. A manuscript he prepared immediately after returning to Tokyo has now been published as The 1951 Korean Armistice Conference: A Personal Memoir. It is an extraordinary document that provides frank and critical views of the negotiators and the negotiating procedure.
Goldhamer observes that the UNC negotiators spent more time trying to draft fast responses to communist proposals than to analyzing the proposals carefully, clarifying their own objectives and assumptions, and developing a coherent approach to achieve the objectives. He is particularly critical of the American tendency to be impatient to make "progress" and to seek that progress by making concessions. "One of the most disastrous consequences of this demand for progress," Goldhamer argues, "was the drive toward tactical attempts to `create' progress by sheer action no matter how disastrous it would be from the standpoint of the U.N. negotiating position." In the opinion of this reviewer, who for more than a decade was involved directly or indirectly with the Military Armistice Commission in Korea and who has spent years negotiating with both opponents and allies, this book should be required reading for every senior officer. Goldhamer's insights remain relevant and are applicable to every type of negotiation.
The Armistice ended the fighting and provided a way for the external powers to back away from direct confrontation. It also provided a decades-long pause during which the two Koreas have been able to follow their respective paths of development, for better or for worse. But it did not resolve the underlying tensions within Korea. The tragic drama of the Korean War goes on. The players remain both "civil" and "international," and the United States, particularly the US military, is still closely connected with events on the peninsula. This being the case, and with the US relationship with China looming as America's major foreign and security policy challenge for the foreseeable future, all of these books will be of value to the military professional and concerned citizen.
Those who wish to read more on the strategy and policy of the Korean War might start with the Korea Society's conference report, The Korean War: An Assessment of the Historical Record, which also provides a useful bibliography and chronology of the war. Allan R. Millett, who is working on his own history of the war, has produced an extensive bibliographic essay, "A Reader's Guide to the Korean War." Many of the key Chinese and Soviet documents are included as appendices to Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War by Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai. The Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars publishes a periodic Bulletin that is a particularly rich and useful source of primary documents, analysis, and information on the state of current research.
Two books dealing with larger issues contain important discussions of the Chinese intervention. Chae-Jin Lee devotes a third of his book China and Korea: Dynamic Relations to the war, summarizing the previous scholarship on the Chinese involvement and providing conclusions from his own research. One substantial chapter of Thomas J. Christensen's Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and the Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958 deals with the Chinese intervention, providing Christensen's analysis of Chinese motivations. Kathryn Weathersby will soon publish a book on the war based on her extensive research in the former-Soviet archives. And so the literature on the strategic and policy aspects of the war continues to grow, refracting the light from those ever-more distant events through various lenses and expanding our understanding of strategic leadership and decisionmaking.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chen, Jian. China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994.
Christensen, Thomas J. Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and the Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996.
Cold War International History Project Bulletin. Available from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1000 Jefferson Drive, SW, Washington, D.C. 20560. Also available on the internet at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/cwhip.
Conference Report: An Assessment of the Historical Record. Washington: The Korea Society, 1995. Available from The Korea Society, 1350 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 204, Washington, D.C. 20036.
Goncharov, Sergei, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai. Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993.
Goldhamer, Herbert. The 1951 Korean Armistice Conference: A Personal Memoir. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1994.
Lee, Chae-Jin. China and Korea: Dynamic Relations. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press. 1996.
Millett, Allan R. "A Reader's Guide to the Korean War," The Journal of Military History, 61 (July 1997), 583-97. Revised version of an essay originally published in Joint Force Quarterly, No. 7 (Spring 1995), 119-26.
Shrader, Charles R. Communist Logistics in the Korean War. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Stueck, William. The Korean War: An International History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995.
Zhang, Shu Guang. Mao's Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953. Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1995.
The Reviewer: Colonel Donald W. Boose, Jr. (USA, Ret.) spent six years with the United Nations Command Component of the Military Armistice Commission in Korea and was the Assistant Chief of Staff/J-5 (Director of Strategic Plans and Policy) of US Forces, Japan, from 1987 to 1990. Prior to his retirement from the Army, he was Director of Asian Studies at the US Army War College, where he continues to teach. He is the coauthor of Great Battles of Antiquity, to which he contributed chapters on warfare in pre-modern East Asia.
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Review Essay
Korea's Partition: Soviet-American Pursuit of Reunification, 1945-1948
JAMES I. MATRAY
© 1998 James I. Matray
It became fashionable more than a decade ago for scholars to portray the Korean War as a civil conflict, rejecting the traditional interpretation of the war as an example of Soviet-inspired, external aggression.[1] But the recent release of previously classified Soviet and Chinese documents has brought an abrupt end to this emerging consensus. This has made possible renewed emphasis on international factors in reexaminations of the Korean War. Kathryn Weathersby signaled that this shift was well underway in 1993 when she concluded that the war's origins "lie primarily with the division of Korea in 1945 and the polarization of Korean politics that resulted from . . . the policies of the two occupying powers. . . . The Soviet Union played a key role in the outbreak of the war, but it was as facilitator, not as originator."[2] This essay reviews and compares traditional and revisionist perspectives on the origins of the Korean War.
The Historical Debate
President Harry S. Truman provided the touchstone for the debate surrounding the reasons for the Korean War just two days after the start of hostilities.[3] On 27 June 1950, he told the American people that North Korea's attack on South Korea showed that world "communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war."[4] This assessment reflected Truman's firm belief that North Korea was a puppet of the Soviet Union. Acting on instructions from Moscow, Kim Il-sung had sent troops southward as part of the Soviet plan for global conquest. In his memoirs, Truman equated Joseph Stalin's actions with Adolf Hitler's in the 1930s, arguing that military intervention to defend the Republic of Korea (ROK) was essential because appeasement had not prevented but ensured the outbreak of World War II.[5] Top Administration officials, as well as the general public, fully shared these assumptions. This traditional interpretation provided the analytical foundation for insider accounts of the origins of the Korean War.[6]
Surprisingly, some observers challenged Truman's assessment even before the Korean War ended on 27 July 1953. For example, Wilbur Hitchcock published an article in 1951 asserting that Kim Il-sung, not Stalin, "pulled the switch" initiating the Korean conflict. He emphasized in particular the Soviet boycott of the Security Council that prevented Moscow from vetoing resolutions authorizing UN military action to defend the ROK. In addition, North Korea's attack sparked a number of unwelcome developments for the Soviet Union, including a massive US military buildup, rearmament of West Germany, and the strengthening of NATO. Thus, according to Hitchcock, Kim Il-sung "jumped the gun" and attacked the ROK before the Soviets were ready for the invasion. I. F. Stone, in contrast to Hitchcock, focused his 1952 study of the Korean War on South Korea's responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities. ROK President Syngman Rhee was provocative, Stone contends, instigating many border clashes at the 38th parallel before 25 June 1950. In response to North Korean retaliation, Rhee portrayed the orderly retreat of his forces as a military debacle, thereby persuading Truman to commit troops. General Douglas MacArthur, John Foster Dulles, and Chiang Kai-shek were participants in this conspiracy to reverse the process of US military disengagement from East Asia after World War II.[7]
Neither the Hitchcock nor Stone interpretation had won many adherents as the fighting in Korea ended. Thereafter, the Truman assessment prevailed for a decade largely because Soviet-American relations remained acrimonious. Early studies of the Korean War blamed the United States for the North Korean attack, invariably charging that the Truman Administration had abandoned South Korea publicly and thus gave Kim Il-sung a green light to launch his invasion. For proof, these writers pointed to Secretary of State Dean Acheson's National Press Club speech excluding the ROK from the US "defensive perimeter," congressional rejection of the Korean aid bill, Senator Tom Connally's public prediction that Soviet or Chinese communist conquest of all Korea was inevitable, and limits on the military capabilities of South Korea.[8] This traditional analytical approach survived into the 1960s;[9] some recent detailed studies still reflect this viewpoint.[10]
Consensus regarding the reasons for the Korean War brought a predictable shift toward the investigation of other issues. If the United States had decided to abandon South Korea before 25 June 1950, it begged the question of why Truman would reverse the policy and order US military intervention. Glenn D. Paige and Ernest R. May provided answers to this riddle in two studies that each stressed international factors to explain American behavior. The United States, they wrote, had to act against Soviet-inspired aggression or risk irreparable damage to American credibility and prestige.[11] Other writers evaluated and offered judgments on the way that the United States conducted the war following Truman's commitment of ground troops. These studies extolling the virtues of fighting limited war in a nuclear age were elaborations of the traditional interpretation. While critical of the UN offensive across the 38th parallel because this brought Chinese military intervention, these writers applauded the Truman Administration for rejecting MacArthur's proposals for widening the war.[12]
Meanwhile, a New Left revisionist interpretation had emerged to challenge the traditional view that assigned responsibility to the Soviet Union for starting the Cold War. According to these writers, the United States had used its superior economic power and an atomic monopoly in an effort to establish global political dominance in the postwar era. Ironically, Korea at first escaped reinterpretation at the hands of the revisionists. For example, Richard J. Barnet accepted the traditional view that North Korea initiated the Korean War, although he condemned the United States for intervening to save Rhee's dictatorial regime. Denna Frank Fleming advanced a New Left assessment of Korea in his two-volume study of the Cold War, but few considered his account credible.[13] US involvement in Vietnam would transform "left revisionism" into both a plausible and legitimate explanation for US foreign policy, not only with regard to Korea, but just about every other major event in US history. Thus, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko could charge boldly that South Korea struck first in June 1950 and North Korea's invasion was an act of self-defense. Karunakar Gupta added the details of how the ROK's army ignited the Korean War with an assault on Haeju, a North Korean city on the Ongjin peninsula.[14]
The most important effect of revisionist accounts of the Korean War was to stimulate interest in the civil origins of the conflict. Adding impetus to this trend was the publication of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs. According to the Soviet leader, Stalin approved North Korea's attack only with great reluctance, fearing the prospect of US military intervention. But Kim Il-sung persuaded Stalin that South Korea's people would welcome the North Koreans as liberators, thus assuring swift conquest before the United States could respond. Robert R. Simmons advanced an intriguing explanation for the timing of the North Korean attack. Reviving the Hitchcock interpretation, he argued that Moscow and Pyongyang had agreed on an invasion date of 15 August 1950. The attack came two months earlier and before military preparations were complete, however, because of the internal political rivalry between Kim Il-sung and Foreign Minister Pak Hon-yong.[15] Without access to Soviet and North Korean records it is impossible to confirm the Simmons interpretation.
Revisionists have characterized the Korean War as a civil conflict, rather than a case of external aggression justifying an international response in the name of collective security. While traditional accounts concentrated on the events of 25 June 1950 and thereafter, revisionists insisted that it was vital to search for answers in an earlier period. In the first volume of his The Origins of the Korean War, titled Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, Bruce Cumings devotes an unprecedented amount of space to the era of Japanese colonial rule. According to this revisionist, a conventional war would start in Korea in June 1950 because the United States prevented a leftist revolution on the peninsula in 1945 and imposed a reactionary regime in the south during the years immediately following World War II. The Cumings study was controversial, but for many readers convincing because of the author's reliance upon Korean language sources.[16] More important, future studies of the war could not claim credibility without addressing the domestic origins of the conflict.
While Cumings discussed internal developments on the Korean peninsula immediately after World War II, other American scholars were reassessing US foreign policy toward Korea during the same period. The State Department's release of classified documents in 1976 for the year 1950 allowed researchers to produce detailed studies of US involvement in Korea from the start of World War II to the outbreak of hostilities a decade later. No conclusive evidence emerged, however, either to confirm or deny the validity of the traditional argument that North Korea attacked first and initiated the war. But the domestic origins of the war received greater attention.[17] New surveys of the Korean War acknowledged the importance of developments on the Korean peninsula during the five years after Japan's surrender in 1945. While accepting that Stalin was involved in planning the invasion, these writers insisted that Kim Il-sung was the primary decisionmaker. None challenged the assumption that North Korea struck first, but they did not condemn Kim Il-sung because of evidence that Rhee would have staged an invasion northward if he had held enough military power. Reflecting the effects of access to new research materials, these studies all either stated or implied that Korea was a civil war.[18]
Since about 1985, revisionism has peaked in popularity and begun to lose adherents. John Halliday and Bruce Cumings, in their study Korea: The Unknown War, insist that South Korea initiated the Korean War, contending that the "Fierce Tiger" unit of the ROK's 17th Regiment on the Ongjin Peninsula launched an assault northward at around 0200 on 25 June 1950. Reviving Stone's interpretation, Halliday and Cumings claim that Rhee set a trap for North Korea. The South Korean attack would provoke a communist invasion and bring US military intervention, thereby setting the stage for the ROK conquest of North Korea. Cumings presents a detailed explanation of this "trap theory"--and much more--in the second volume of his Origins of the Korean War.[19] Despite the testimony of former communist military leaders, the North Koreans always have maintained that the ROK attacked first and initiated the war. But John Merrill observed in 1989 that the question of who started the Korean War no longer was a matter of debate. The size and scope of the North Korean offensive argued powerfully that Pyongyang planned the invasion in advance. William Stueck agrees, emphasizing the international dimensions of the conflict in the most recent full-length account of the Korean War.[20]
Revisionism and Korea's Division
Disagreement about the reasons for Korea's partition in 1945 developed in parallel with the historical debate surrounding the origins of the Korean conflict, although with far less intensity. Arguably, Korea's division at the 38th parallel as World War II ended was the most important event in the modern history of that nation. Had the United States and the Soviet Union not forcibly divided this East Asian country, there would have been no Korean War. A civil conflict was highly probable, however, after the surrender of Japan. This was because Japanese colonial rule had worsened mounting social, economic, and political inequities that Korea had endured during the 19th century.[21] Cumings relies on meticulous and exhaustive research to demonstrate that Korea was ripe for a radical restructuring at the end of World War II "because of the forces descending upon Korea in the period of colonial rule." As elsewhere in Asia, Cumings contends, revolutionary nationalism was the main political force in Korea even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Those favoring radical change were leaders of a movement dedicated to destroying not just Japanese colonialism, but Korea's exploitive traditional system of economic, political, and social privilege as well.[22]
But there would be no civil war in Korea in 1945 because the United States and the Soviet Union prevented it. Ostensibly to accept the surrender of Japanese forces, the Soviets occupied Korea north of the 38th parallel in August, while the Americans would establish control south of that line the next month.[23] The revisionists condemn President Truman for arranging Korea's division into zones of military occupation. For example, Cumings advances the revisionist argument that dispatching US troops to South Korea was "an unprecedented act of ambition" and "the first postwar act of containment." US occupation officials followed thereafter a counterrevolutionary course, backing the political aspirations of reactionary conservative Korean politicians in the south, especially Syngman Rhee, and striving "through unilateral actions to build a bulwark against communism."[24] But traditional scholars have applauded the United States for acting to prevent the Soviet Union from occupying all of Korea and creating there a satellite modeled after Poland. Endorsing the traditional view, Charles Dobbs blames Soviet aggressive and expansionist ambition for making it necessary to partition Korea. Moscow, he writes, "had done little to deserve" a voice in the postwar reconstruction of Korea because the Soviets "had made no significant contribution to the defeat of Japan."[25]
Soviet-American partition of Korea after World War II meant that barring resort to war, reunification was possible only after an international diplomatic or domestic political agreement had paved the way for a negotiated settlement. Responsibility for the deadlock transforming the 38th parallel into a fortified boundary and thereby creating the circumstances necessary for the outbreak of the Korean War became a matter of concern. Recent studies accept without much discussion the revisionist argument that blames the United States for perpetuating Korea's division. If the Truman Administration had not manufactured a South Korea, these studies suggest, the popular preference for revolutionary political and economic change would have resulted in the establishment of a leftist government to rule a reunified Korea.[26] Recently, challenges to this interpretation signal the emergence in Korean War studies of a "revisionism from the right" that seeks to rehabilitate the traditional view. Newly available communist archival materials do not justify, however, a complete resurrection of traditional explanations for the postwar impasse preventing Korea's reunification. Rather, Weathersby's findings in particular argue for an abandonment of the revisionist versus traditionalist bipolarity that for over two decades has trapped Korean War studies in an analytical straightjacket.[27]
Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War heads the list of important recent works on the Korean War for scholars striving to revive traditional judgments about the conflict. Its authors make extensive use of new documents, memoirs, and personal interviews to reveal that Kim Il-sung manipulated both Stalin and Mao Zedong to gain their consent for his plan to invade South Korea. But Uncertain Partners, on balance, revives and sustains traditional views about the origins of the Korean conflict. For example, the authors accept, without elaboration, the judgment that North Korea was "wholly dependent" on Moscow and was "justly called a Soviet satellite."[28] Erik van Ree provides abundant evidence and detailed analysis to support this traditional viewpoint in his 1989 study which points to the "presence of the Soviet army, the network of Soviet advisors, the stifling economic grip, the presence of an impressive propaganda machine, and the all-pervading adulation of Joseph Stalin" as proof that North Korea was a satellite. Van Ree assigns "most of the blame" to the Soviets "for the continuation of Korea's division in the two years after the Second World War."[29]
Van Ree challenges another fundamental tenet of left revisionism when he claims that Soviet occupation officials ignored the Korean People's Republic and rejected its legitimacy. Moscow instead transported to Korea from Siberia "loyal" Soviet Koreans and placed them in charge of "people's committees." He endorses Dae-sook Suh's description of early developments north of the 38th parallel, identifying the Soviet military as "the real authority" in North Korea. The Soviet Civil Administration delayed reforms and constructed a "classic `monolithic' model" closely resembling communist regimes in Eastern Europe.[30]
Socialism in One Zone depends heavily on research materials that suffer from ideological and political subjectivity, notably Soviet public papers, official memoirs, and secondary histories. Using these sources, Van Ree mounts a new defense of traditional assertions scholars advanced in assessing the Korean War decades earlier, but which revisionists managed to discredit without providing documentary proof. For example, he defines Soviet postwar goals in Korea as first the historic desire to acquire warm-water ports and second the creation of a buffer zone against an expected revival of Japanese aggression. During World War II, an "aloof" Stalin was "not enthusiastic" about a Korean trusteeship because he expected geographic proximity would assure Soviet control over the entire peninsula. He would not accept "a position as simply one trustee among four." Washington, Van Ree concludes, consistently advocated steps toward ending Korea's division, but Moscow always blocked progress because it preferred to maintain an "exclusive Soviet grip" on socialism in one zone.[31]
In the spring of 1946, a Soviet-American Joint Commission met in Seoul to implement the Moscow Agreement of December 1945. Its main task was to select a representative cross-section of Korean leaders to form a provisional government that then would cooperate with the establishment of a trusteeship before the restoration of Korea's independence. According to Van Ree, Stalin was responsible for the failure of these negotiations because he inflexibly demanded the exclusion of right-wing politicians. Extreme conservatives such as Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku were required to "cooperate" but not support trusteeship, Van Ree insists, and their participation was "not inimical to Moscow." The charge that pledges from Rhee and Kim Ku of cooperation were insincere was "probably true, but it was also irrelevant." Moscow knew that the vast majority of Koreans opposed unification under a communist or leftist regime. Van Ree speculates that Stalin wanted a stalemate, anticipating that this would split the conservatives and force Washington to accept the flawed Soviet interpretation of the Moscow Agreement. Stalin, fearing that South Korean communists might strike a deal with moderates, opposed peasant uprisings in the south because he was obsessed with retaining control of North Korea.[32]
In an article appearing in 1993, the late John Wilz tried to revive the traditional explanation for the failure of postwar Soviet-American talks to end Korea's division. During World War II, he wrote, although President Franklin D. Roosevelt did see that because of the "realities of geography, the prospect of Soviet domination of . . . Korea was transparent," Roosevelt did not want to anger Stalin. Truman wisely dropped Roosevelt's misguided trusteeship plan in favor of joint military occupation. He then advocated elections and quick reunification, but Stalin refused to cooperate because only Korean communists and leftists supported Soviet aims. Wilz, a champion of traditional views regarding US policy in Korea, dismissed the Cumings interpretation as "leftist," blaming Moscow for transforming the 38th parallel "into a fortified frontier" and North Korea into "a bastion of Sovietism."[33] William Stueck further encourages a revival of traditional judgments in a recent article blaming Moscow for blocking Korea's postwar unification. Occupation policies in South Korea, he asserts, may have been "shortsighted or self-serving," but "it is uncertain that they influenced events and policies north of the 38th parallel."[34]
New Documents and Renewed Debate
Release of additional Soviet archival materials will decide whether a revived traditional explanation for the creation of two Koreas will become conventional wisdom. If this occurs, a "right revisionism" will replace the "left revisionism" that for nearly a generation has dominated Korean War studies. Starting in 1992, Weathersby began to publish translations of Soviet documents that verify a number of traditional interpretations. For example, she points to "thousands of pages of documents on postwar Korea in the Russian Foreign Ministry archive" as proof that "North Korea was utterly dependent economically on the Soviet Union." Kim Il-sung's persistent requests for the services of Soviet economic specialists reveals that "to an unusual degree, North Korea was dependent on the Soviet Union for technical expertise."[35] Van Ree has argued correctly, Weathersby's findings have confirmed, that "Stalin was not in a hurry to crash into Korea" during 1945. Moreover, the Soviet Union had no "well-prepared plans" for civil administration north of the 38th parallel, requiring considerable improvisation. Once in control of the north, the "operation was an investment" for the Soviet Union. Moscow rebuilt the railroad system and then restored metal, chemical, and glass plants to serve the enormous needs of a recovering Soviet economy.[36]
Other traditional judgments regarding Soviet policy in Korea are no longer valid in light of newly available Soviet documents. For example, Weathersby presents persuasive evidence that Stalin followed a "cautious policy toward Korea" in pursuit of "limited aims."[37] His objective "was not simply to gain control over the entire peninsula, as with Poland." "Poland was too vital to the U.S.S.R.," she writes, "but Korea was not." Weathersby believes that the Soviet Union "would have been content with the Finland solution."[38] Moscow's wartime support for a trusteeship in Korea then was sincere, especially because it would ensure Japan would "not have the right to industrial or any other concessions." In September 1945, after Soviet-American partition of Korea, Moscow continued to favor "some sort of joint administration of Korea." "Upon the conclusion of the occupation regime, presumably after two years," a Foreign Ministry report stated, "Korea must become a trust territory of the four powers."[39] But the Soviets would never permit either Rhee or Kim Ku to assume power over a united Korea because both had "dreams of creating an independent Korea in which, in place of Japanese oppressors, Korean landlords and capitalists . . . will sit on the neck of the Korean people."[40]
Weathersby's findings demonstrate that strategic interests dominated Stalin's thinking regarding Korea. First, the Soviet leader thought North Korea might be a bargaining chip during his negotiations to determine the postwar security structure in East Asia. Moscow was willing in September 1945 to place a key Korean port in a Chinese zone of occupation and approve US acquisition of several naval bases in the Pacific if the Soviet Union gained access to three Korean ports and a united Korea secured control over the island of Tsushima.[41] Second, Stalin's primary concern was "to prevent Korea from being turned into a staging ground for future aggression against the USSR."[42] He especially feared a resurgence of Japanese power. A Foreign Ministry briefing paper describes US policy in southern Korea as very alarming because American occupation officials "not only have retained in Korea the old administrative apparatus, but they have also left in leading posts many Japanese and local collaborators."[43] Third, Weathersby underscores "the impa
LAWRENCE G. KELLEY
Even 50 years after the Götterdämmerung in Berlin and war crimes trials in Nürnberg, few themes grip, haunt, or polarize German public life more than World War II. The enduring legacy of guilt, search for accountability, shame over complicity, and political imperative of reconciliation have left their mark on the German psyche--not to mention foreign policy--even in the buoyant, self-confident years since the 1990 unification of the country. Three recent events on the cultural scene demonstrate this point with telling clarity. They are the commercial success in Germany of Daniel J. Goldhagen's controversial study Hitler's Willing Executioners; the furor evoked in conservative Munich by a traveling exhibit of graphic wartime photographs titled Vernichtungskrieg im Osten: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, 1941-44 (War of Extermination in the East: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941-44), and the remarkable popularity of a lengthy video chronicle produced over the last six years by the television network ZDF, the latest episodes of which provide a psychological portrait of Hitlers Helfer (Hitler's Henchmen). The uproar over the photos in Crimes of the Wehrmacht led politicians throughout the German political spectrum to intercede. Hitler's Willing Executioners and historian-director Guido Knopp's 400-page companion volume to the TV series Hitler's Henchmen concurrently graced the nonfiction bestseller list for months. And ZDF, recognizing popular demand, has announced plans to continue its historical documentaries into the year 2000. Why the clamor?
All three of these events reflect the German obsession with a traumatic chapter in modern history, one on which a chasm separates young from old. Germans feel stark ambivalence about reopening the Nazi past, and polls show that a majority prefers not to disturb its ghosts. Some claim weariness with the issue, others assert its irrelevance to the present day. Yet a generational fault line divides the population: roughly two-thirds of those above age 30 favor putting the issue to rest, while a like number below age 30 oppose it.
The question of complicity has long been as much a political question as a fathers-and-sons conflict. Some groups confront it only reluctantly; others eagerly seize the chance to do so. The Left is quick to condemn the Wehrmacht as "the Devil's army," the sine qua non of Nazi genocide, while the Right perpetuates the image of a force free of collective guilt and avidly shifts the blame for atrocities to the leadership or to the SS. The implications of this disagreement figure prominently in electoral politics and Bundestag debates on, for instance, the out-of-area deployment of German forces to once-occupied countries in central Europe. Our unfortunate Bundeswehr colleagues, virtually all born after 1945, find themselves caught in the crossfire.
The truth is a differentiated one. Many, though certainly not all, Wehrmacht units and individual soldiers do share the responsibility for war crimes. The SS did not act alone; much of the savagery which Himmler's police inflicted occurred immediately behind a Wehrmacht shield. At times regular line units conducted or participated in executions; routinely they provided security and logistical support. Of course, the war was prosecuted on the Eastern Front for qualitatively different goals and with far greater ruthlessness than elsewhere. The mission entailed both the acquisition of Lebensraum and ethnic annihilation, and in many ways operations there virtually defined our understanding of the law of war. True, the Nazi leadership uniquely bears responsibility for violations of jus ad bellum--for unleashing an aggressive, racist campaign of territorial aggrandizement. But violations of jus in bello--how the war was waged--extended well beyond this select (if notorious) group and often involved the "boy next door," who routinely felt himself victimized and pleaded "just following orders." In the East, proportionality and discrimination, the watchwords of just war doctrine, were not operative concepts.
Graphic visual documentation in the photographs that comprise Crimes of the Wehrmacht--and in the ZDF video chronicle--has forced many to confront this reality, prompting a reaction that differs in scale, if not in intensity, from what Vietnam veterans experienced over My Lai. Organized by the liberal Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the exhibit contains pictures taken (despite a ban on photography) by fallen or captured Wehrmacht soldiers and now kept on display in war museums of the former USSR and Yugoslavia. The material depicts widespread summary executions and reprisals against Slavs and other groups officially branded Untermenschen. The fact of such actions remains beyond dispute--and they were far from the only crimes committed against the Russians, 60 to 70 percent of whose POWs perished in Nazi concentration camps--but for decades many Germans have viewed them as the exclusive sins of Hitler, the SS, and the Einsatzkommandos. The exhibition's organizers make it clear that while no wholesale indictment of Wehrmacht soldiers is justified, complicity in atrocities extended beyond the recognized war criminals to line units manned by common, outwardly upright young men. In doing so the organizers echo one of the principal points in Goldhagen's book: that "ordinary Germans" massively aided in the implementation of Hitler's genocidal policies.
There is another side to the war crimes story, however, and ZDF in its exceptional 18-part series The Cursed War (and sequels) illuminates it as well. In 1944, as the inexorable march of the Red Army reached German soil, pervasive fear gripped the local populace, which consisted overwhelmingly of noncombatants: women, children, and the elderly. If Goebbels hyped hate and fear for effect on the German side, it must be said that until April of 1945 noted Russian writers like Ilya Ehrenburg ("Germany is a witch . . . . Germans have no souls!") and Konstantin Simonov ("Kill a German each time you see one!") articulated an officially sanctioned Soviet line in the Red Army newspaper Red Star that conceded little in terms of demonization of the enemy. The Politburo ultimately halted this campaign--but on pragmatic rather than moral grounds, recognizing its implications for postwar Soviet occupation.
Their invective reinforced wrath. By this time the Soviets had liberated European Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and parts of Poland. With the sights of atrocities etched in their mind's eye--Babiy Yar, Maidanek, hanged partisans, maimed comrades, razed villages, starved Leningraders, and scorched earth--many Red Army troops sought blood vengeance (and corporeal gratification) as much as victory. Some even swore a kind of oath on this score. Murder, rape, and looting became commonplace, and Soviet commanders often failed to stop it. The 1944 massacre of the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf, exploited by Nazi propaganda as a rallying cry to stand to the last, came to symbolize Russian fury and inhumanity throughout the rapidly crumbling Third Reich. An eyewitness stated: "We found women and children nailed, crucifixion-like, to the gates and doors of the village. . . . All were stripped naked, many were disemboweled." Even with the passage of time, German survivors of the Red Army's drive on Berlin break down visibly on camera, with immense effect, while relating their experiences. Knopp comments with candor and admirable restraint in his companion text to the video series that the period bred "hate against hate," unleashing Soviet retribution on innocent civilians, forbidden to retreat by their own government, for countless Nazi excesses in the East. A prominent Soviet veteran, writing elsewhere, expressed the less-balanced perspective widely held to this day by his comrades: "Victors are not tried!" One wonders when--or whether--the Russians will finally face the reality of their own wartime misconduct, as their once sworn enemy has so painfully done.
But important as war crimes were, The Cursed War examines far vaster themes and represents a monumental, extensively researched, provocative effort--initially done in cooperation with Soviet/Russian television--to come to grips with an anguished past. From 1991 to 1995, episodes were broadcast to mark the 50th anniversary of critical events in the war; newer episodes in the series cover issues that were not time-sensitive. The videos have attracted a broad international following, with segments being seen in 48 countries, including the United States. When ZDF began preparatory work on the project, it put out a public request for new firsthand information. A windfall ensued, one of the common threads of which was the shame felt by many older Germans over materials long hidden away in the attic. Talking about the period and making available old snapshots, film clips, logbooks, and letters became a form of catharsis.
ZDF eventually conducted over 2000 interviews with eyewitnesses of the period, including a constellation of luminaries from European public life (many of them former soldiers) and an even larger group of common persons with uncommon vantage points. The latter group included Hitler's personal secretary, Guderian's aide de camp, relatives and friends of Hitler's Paladins, soldiers from the Führerbunker, Nazi advisors, Luftwaffe aces, submarine commanders, the translator for the KGB unit that discovered and absconded with Hitler's charred remains, political commissars, and camp survivors. Americans interviewed include such notables as Howard K. Smith (who covered the unconditional surrender in Karlshorst), John Kenneth Galbraith (who debriefed Albert Speer), and William Jackson (US prosecutor at Nürnberg). Unfortunately, most senior military commanders of the time have long since passed on, and the series must interpret their motives and actions through memoirs, documentation, or the eyes of others.
Considering the advanced age of all concerned, these videos have provided a last chance to short-circuit actuarial reality and answer such burning questions as: What really motivated Hitler and his entourage? How could an extremist splinter group that garnered but a minority vote in 1932 come to power in a democracy at all, much less remain there? How deep did Hitler's support truly run in the populace? What role did accommodation, acquiescence, and denial play in the process? Why did Nazi propaganda succeed? How did the levers of social control and mobilization function? How much resistance was possible? How sinister were the machinations and intrigues of Hitler's Paladins? Why did the professional, battle-hardened German officer corps go along with Hitler's war plans and policies, especially ones which it knew would fail?
These incisive videos serve an important purpose: the confrontation of German liberal democracy with the fire and ashes of its Wagnerian past. They fill a painful but significant educational void that has plagued German society, one that has continued to exacerbate the generation gap. History is Knopp's medium but not his only message, for in its essence his probing series addresses the character and core beliefs of a nation. It uncompromisingly points out hard truths, with which some passionately disagree. My only criticism of the treatment relates as much to the anti- national mindset of postwar Germany--with its grudging tolerance of military power--as to the author himself: the reluctance to portray patriotism as a legitimate motivating factor in the war. Patriotism was clearly a two-edged sword; abused by the Nazis for criminal purposes, it nonetheless rallied those countries that suffered attack. Professional US military officers and their Bundeswehr counterparts of today understand full well that "duty, honor, country" entails studied, critical commitment, not blind obedience. Regrettably, for many Germans, scarred and jaundiced by their past, patriotism remains the war's last casualty.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reviewer's notes on the availability of materials discussed in this essay:
Video: English versions (NTSC format) of TV episodes marked with an asterisk can be obtained from The History Channel (1-800-708-1776). German versions (PAL format) of all episodes are marketed in Germany through TIME-LIFE AG (011-49-180-521-2443), ZMD Verkaufsservice (011-49-89-8585-0202) or ZDF Enterprises, whose address is: ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Lise Maitner Str. 9, 55129 Mainz, Germany (Telephone: 011-49-6131-991292; Fax: 011-49-6131-991259). Comprehension in the original requires good listening ability (DLPT Level 2+).
Books: Companion books are available in German only. Comprehension requires good reading ability (DLPT Level 2+).
ZDF Video Chronicle:
Der Verdammte Krieg: Barbarossa (The Cursed War: Barbarossa)
Der Wahn vom Lebensraum (The Mania of Lebensraum)
Der Überfall (The Invasion)
Die Illusion des Sieges (The Illusion of Victory)
Der Kampf um Leningrad (The Struggle for Leningrad)
Der Kreml im Visier (The Kremlin in the Crosshairs)
Der Anfang vom Ende (The Beginning of the End)
Der Verdammte Krieg: Entscheidung Stalingrad (Decision: Stalingrad)
Tödliche Weisung (Fatal Directive)
Haß wider Haß (Hate Against Hate)
Leningrad will überleben (Leningrad Is Determined to Survive)
Die Falle schnappt zu (The Trap Snaps Shut)
Das Ende an der Wolga (The End on the Volga)
Der Verdammte Krieg: Bis zum bitteren Ende (To the Bitter End)
Der Feuersturm (The Firestorm)
Verbrannte Erde (Scorched Earth)
Die Russen kommen (The Russians Are Coming)
Der Zusammenbruch (The Collapse)
Die Schlacht um Berlin (The Battle for Berlin)
Triumph und Tragödie (Triumph and Tragedy)
*Hitler--eine Bilanz (Hitler):
*Der Privatmann (The Private Person)
*Der Verführer (The Seducer)
*Der Erpresser (The Blackmailer)
*Der Diktator (The Dictator)
*Der Kriegsherr (The Commander)
*Der Verbrecher (The Criminal)
*Hitlers Helfer (Hitler's Henchmen):
*Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy): Rudolf Heß
*Der Vollstrecker (The Executioner): Heinrich Himmler
*Der Brandstifter (The Incitor): Joseph Goebbels
*Der zweite Mann (The Number Two): Hermann Göring
*Der Architekt (The Architect): Albert Speer
*Der Nachfolger (The Successor): Karl Dönitz
The eight segments of Hitler's Henchmen to be broadcast in 1998 will cover Martin Bormann, Adolf Eichmann, Roland Freisler, Wilhelm Keitel, Joseph Mengele, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Erwin Rommel, and Baldur von Schirach.
Companion Books:
Knopp, Guido. Der verdammte Krieg: Das "Unternehmen Barbarossa" (The Cursed War: Operation Barbarossa). Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1991.
________. Entscheidung Stalingrad (Decision: Stalingrad). Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1993.
________. Das Ende 1945: Der verdammte Krieg (The Cursed War: 1945, The End). Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1995.
________. Hitler--Eine Bilanz (Hitler). Berlin: Siedler, 1995.
________. Hitlers Helfer (Hitler's Henchmen). Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1996.
Other Books:
Goldhagen, Daniel J. Hitler's Willing Executioners. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Werth, Alexander. Russia at War, 1941-1945. New York: Avon Books, 1965.
The Reviewer: Colonel Lawrence G. Kelley (USMC Ret.) is a former A-4 pilot and Russian Foreign Area Officer (FAO) with extensive experience in the former Soviet Union, German Democratic Republic, Federal Republic of Germany, and Western Pacific. His nine FAO assignments included two with the On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA); US Military Liaison Mission to the Commander-in-Chief, Group of Soviet Forces, Germany; Washington-Moscow "Hotline"; and Navy staff. He was the Deputy Commander/Director of Operations of OSIA-Europe from 1990 to 1995 and led 60 arms control missions under the INF Treaty, CFE Treaty, and Vienna Document-90/92. He served operational tours in attack/training squadrons, an infantry battalion, and aviation group and wing staffs, and he flew close air support in Vietnam. A Navy ROTC graduate of Princeton in Russian language, literature, and area studies, Colonel Kelley also studied at Leningrad State University and holds a master's degree in government and national security affairs from Georgetown University.
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Review Essay
The Korean War Revisited
DONALD W. BOOSE, JR.
© 1998 Donald W. Boose, Jr.
As the 50th anniversary of the Korean War nears, more is known about North Korean, Chinese, and Russian policy and decisionmaking than ever before. Sufficient gaps and inconsistencies exist to assure that speculation and conflicting interpretations will continue, but we have a clearer picture of the sequence of events and even of the motivations of the key decisionmakers than at any time since the war began. The five books reviewed in this essay, all published in the mid-1990s, have helped produce this clearer picture and richer understanding of a conflict that has cast long shadows. While their authors accept James Matray's sensible contention, made in his review essay in this issue (pp. 150-62) that the Korean War was both a civil war between Koreans and an international conflict, their focus is on the international aspects.
In The Korean War: An International History, William Stueck makes use of all the scholarship to date, including his own research, to examine the war at the strategic and international political level, touching on military operations with only the broadest of brushes. Because of this focus and the complexity of the issues with which Stueck deals, his book is most suitable for a reader already familiar with the war. But for such a reader, Stueck's account is informative and thought-provoking. Reflecting the current emerging consensus, he sees the civil and international aspects of the war as interlocked. Ideological polarization between Koreans of the left and right made conflict in Korea likely in any event, but the close ties between Korean nationalists of both camps and foreign countries internationalized the struggle. This international dimension was magnified when geography and world events placed the Korean peninsula on the post-World War II boundary between the antagonistic Soviet- and US-led blocs. Stueck emphasizes this multilateral nature of the war, the interplay between US domestic politics and events in Korea, and the relationship between the course of the war and regional and global issues. These included the formation of NATO and German rearmament, Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Soviet bloc, negotiations for a peace treaty with Japan and the establishment of the postwar system of US bilateral security arrangements, Chinese efforts to replace the Nationalist regime in the United Nations, and events in Taiwan, Indochina, Southern Europe, and Southwest Asia.
Stueck is particularly good at depicting activity within the United Nations; another of his major themes is the ability of US allies and neutrals to influence American actions through UN deliberations. Finally, he examines in detail the fateful misjudgments by all the major participants in the war. He emphasizes the mistaken communist belief that the South Korean population would rise against the Syngman Rhee government and that the United States would not intervene, as well as American failure to anticipate the Chinese intervention, repeated failures on both sides to recognize situations in which the war might have been brought to a mutually acceptable conclusion, and misunderstandings during the Armistice negotiations. Stueck concludes that while the war was a horrific tragedy for the Korean people (particularly in light of his belief that the war could have been ended early), it also led the United States and the Soviet Union to back away from a potentially larger confrontation. For this reason, he calls the Korean War a "substitute for World War III."
Two Chinese scholars, Chen Jian in China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation, and Zhang Shu Guang in Mao's Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953, focus on China's role in the war. Both authors make use of memoirs, selectively released Chinese primary documents, and the work of Chinese researchers with access to archival and classified Chinese sources in their work. Some of their interpretations may be disputed, but they both provide valuable and informative insights into Chinese strategic-level decisionmaking.
The precise timing and degree of Chinese involvement in North Korean preparation and planning for the war are still not entirely clear. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, while primarily concerned with their own objectives and national interests, shared communist ideology and were bound by the historical connection and geographical proximity between China and Korea. Their common perception that they were threatened by anti-communist forces led by the United States also influenced their actions. Several divisions of ethnic Koreans fought against the Japanese and the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jeshi) as part of the Chinese Communist Forces. In 1946, at a crucial stage in the Chinese civil war, Kim provided Mao's troops and their families refuge and a strategic base until the Chinese communists could resume the offensive. As Mao's forces neared victory in mid-1949, the Chinese began to release the ethnic Korean divisions for return to Korea, greatly increasing North Korean combat potential. In December 1949, Mao began a two-month-long visit to Russia, during which a Sino-Soviet mutual security treaty and other agreements were signed. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev claims that Mao and Stalin discussed Kim Il-sung's desire to attack the south, with Mao arguing that the United States was unlikely to intervene. The evidence from other participants in the discussions is ambiguous, but Chen is convinced that the two leaders did discuss Kim's plans, at least in general terms, and that these discussions constituted a "Chinese-Soviet green light for Kim Il-sung." Zhang does not address the Mao-Stalin talks, but points out that in early 1950 the Chinese stepped up the repatriation of ethnic Korean soldiers, strengthened their defensive forces in the Northeast (Manchuria) in preparation for the coming North Korean offensive, and concluded with the North Koreans a series of civilian communications agreements that would enhance combined military cooperation.
Both Chen and Zhang agree that, by the time of the North Korean attack on 25 June 1950, the Chinese leadership had long-since concluded that the United States was China's primary enemy and that a military conflict was likely. Chen argues that the Chinese leadership, exemplified and directed by Mao Zedong, was motivated primarily by the need to consolidate the revolution and to maintain its momentum. Other motivations included a desire to overcome a century of humiliation by restoring China's role as a major power and a perception of the United States as a long-term and enduring threat to China. All would play a role in China's intervention in the Korean War. Zhang describes Mao's vision of the world divided into "two camps," led respectively by the Soviet Union and the United States, with a great "intermediate zone" comprised of neutral countries and nations emerging from colonialism where China could play a leading role from a position of moral superiority while restoring its traditional national pride and leading position in Asia. Chen sees the US-China confrontation as a product of the tension between the Chinese communist revolution and American efforts to contain communism--a tension aggravated by miscommunication and misperceptions resulting from cultural and ideological differences. By 1950, the Chinese leadership had concluded that the danger of direct US intervention in China had receded, but that the United States would continue to be an implacable foe of the revolution, threatening China from the "three danger spots" of Korea, Taiwan, and Indochina. Thus, the Chinese were predisposed to confront the United States even before the Korean War began.
Both Chen and Zhang provide useful synopses of previous scholarship on the Chinese intervention in Korea. They note that the prevailing Western interpretation shifted in the 1960s from a belief that China's entry was part of a well- orchestrated Soviet aggression to a view that China's actions were simply a response to a perceived threat posed by US-led forces advancing toward the Chinese border, an interpretation held by most Chinese scholars as well. Chen challenges this view, arguing that because "Beijing's decision to enter the war was based on the belief that the outcome of the Korean crisis was closely related to the new China's vital domestic and international interests . . . there was little possibility that China's entrance into the war could have been averted." Chen also points out that just as the Chinese word for "crisis" (weiji) contains the two characters meaning "danger" and "opportunity," the American intervention in Korea was, from the beginning, both a dangerous threat, confirming Mao's fundamental view of the aggressive nature of US policy in Asia, and an opportunity to confront the United States. The confrontation could reduce the threat to China, enhance China's revolutionary momentum, and strengthen Chinese communist authority domestically and in the region.
In July 1950, soon after the first US reinforcements were deployed to Korea, the Chinese established a substantial military force and logistical stockpiles in the Northeast and began political mobilization in preparation for possible intervention. On 4 August as the North Korean army began its offensive against the Pusan Perimeter, Mao raised the possibility of sending an army of "volunteers" to Korea. Throughout the month of August and into September, the Chinese Politburo debated intervention. According to Chen, Mao was the leading proponent for intervention, but had difficulty mobilizing support so long as North Korea was on the offensive. When the North Korean attack stalled and General MacArthur began a United Nations Command (UNC) counteroffensive with the 15 September Inch'on landing, Mao won the argument. On 2 October, two days after the first Republic of Korea forces crossed the 38th parallel, Mao sent a long telegram to Stalin, informing the Russian leader that China had decided to send an army of "volunteers" into Korea. Five days later, US forces also moved north across the 38th parallel. Although the Chinese leadership momentarily hesitated on 12 October when Stalin appeared to renege on promises to provide support, they made the final decision on 18 October, and the next day the Chinese People's Volunteers (CPV) under the command of General Peng Dehuai began to cross the Yalu River into Korea.
Chen briefly addresses China's wartime experiences, but his account essentially ends with the Chinese decision for war. Zhang's emphasis is on Mao's military philosophy and the Chinese conduct of the war. He traces the development of Mao Zedong's approach to war, which was an amalgamation of traditional Chinese military thought, Leninist theory, and the lessons Mao derived from his decades of conducting protracted war. He sees as a contributing factor in Mao's decision to intervene in Korea a romanticized notion of war and a belief that the Chinese could overcome a technologically advanced enemy through superior will and morale. The experience of the Korean War would temper that notion, but much of Mao's military thought is still reflected in current statements of Chinese doctrine.
Working primarily from Chinese sources, Zhang misidentifies some UNC forces (he frequently confuses Marine and Army units) and his description of tactical- level actions is not always consistent with US accounts. Nonetheless, his description of Chinese strategic and operational decisionmaking is valuable. American readers will be intrigued by his insights into the Chinese internal debate and thought processes about the decision to cross the 38th parallel during the November 1950-January 1951 offensive; CPV commander Peng, recognizing that his exhausted forces were outrunning their supplies, argued for an operational pause while Mao insisted that the attack continue. Other insights can be found in descriptions of China's shift to protracted war after the failure of the offensive, the Chinese approach to the mobile defense, and their efforts to keep their forces supplied in the face of UNC air attacks.
Zhang makes clear that for the Chinese, the Korean conflict was, above all, a war of logistics. In Communist Logistics in the Korean War, Charles R. Shrader examines this essential aspect of North Korean and Chinese military operations. In spite of their very weak industrial bases, the North Koreans and Chinese were able throughout the war to obtain supplies from the Soviets, through local sources, and by the use of captured materiel. Their great challenge was transporting supplies from the secure depots in Manchuria across Korea to the front lines, over punishing terrain and in the face of UNC air attack. Thus, the crucial contest, Shrader insists, was between communist efforts to distribute supplies and the UNC interdiction effort.
The North Koreans and Chinese began their offensives with well-trained, well-prepared forces, but with logistical systems unequal to the demands of sustained combat operations and vulnerable to air interdiction. Both the initial North Korean offensive and the subsequent Chinese attacks eventually stalled when the communists outran their supplies. From mid-1951 through the end of 1952, the communists energetically improved their logistical system, built up air defenses, developed the means to repair or bypass railways and roads quickly, and adopted passive measures, such as camouflage and decoys, to avoid air attack. These efforts were aided by the slackening of UNC ground pressure after the initiation of Armistice talks.
As a result of these actions, by early 1953 the communists were able not only to support a strong defense, but had improved their logistical capability and stockpiled sufficient materiel to be able to conduct sustained offensive operations. Shrader concludes that by the end of the war the communists were "on the verge of being able to support a massive and extended offensive campaign, which would have constituted a serious threat to the United Nations forces." In the absence of Chinese and North Korean sources on logistics, Shrader's account is based largely on intelligence reports and the debriefings of communist prisoners of war. Future revelations may add to our knowledge of the subject, particularly at the strategic and policy levels, but it seems unlikely that Shrader's portrayal of operational-level communist logistics will be superseded anytime soon.
The 1953 communist offensive to which Shrader refers was forestalled by the conclusion of an Armistice. Negotiations for that Armistice began in 1951; Herbert Goldhamer, a RAND psychologist doing research in Korea, was subsequently invited by one of the participants to observe the workings of the military team conducting the negotiations for the UNC side. Goldhamer's observations and suggestions were so valuable to the UNC negotiators that they asked him to participate actively in their preparations. And so, for four months, Goldhamer had an unparalleled view of the workings of the UNC delegation. A manuscript he prepared immediately after returning to Tokyo has now been published as The 1951 Korean Armistice Conference: A Personal Memoir. It is an extraordinary document that provides frank and critical views of the negotiators and the negotiating procedure.
Goldhamer observes that the UNC negotiators spent more time trying to draft fast responses to communist proposals than to analyzing the proposals carefully, clarifying their own objectives and assumptions, and developing a coherent approach to achieve the objectives. He is particularly critical of the American tendency to be impatient to make "progress" and to seek that progress by making concessions. "One of the most disastrous consequences of this demand for progress," Goldhamer argues, "was the drive toward tactical attempts to `create' progress by sheer action no matter how disastrous it would be from the standpoint of the U.N. negotiating position." In the opinion of this reviewer, who for more than a decade was involved directly or indirectly with the Military Armistice Commission in Korea and who has spent years negotiating with both opponents and allies, this book should be required reading for every senior officer. Goldhamer's insights remain relevant and are applicable to every type of negotiation.
The Armistice ended the fighting and provided a way for the external powers to back away from direct confrontation. It also provided a decades-long pause during which the two Koreas have been able to follow their respective paths of development, for better or for worse. But it did not resolve the underlying tensions within Korea. The tragic drama of the Korean War goes on. The players remain both "civil" and "international," and the United States, particularly the US military, is still closely connected with events on the peninsula. This being the case, and with the US relationship with China looming as America's major foreign and security policy challenge for the foreseeable future, all of these books will be of value to the military professional and concerned citizen.
Those who wish to read more on the strategy and policy of the Korean War might start with the Korea Society's conference report, The Korean War: An Assessment of the Historical Record, which also provides a useful bibliography and chronology of the war. Allan R. Millett, who is working on his own history of the war, has produced an extensive bibliographic essay, "A Reader's Guide to the Korean War." Many of the key Chinese and Soviet documents are included as appendices to Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War by Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai. The Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars publishes a periodic Bulletin that is a particularly rich and useful source of primary documents, analysis, and information on the state of current research.
Two books dealing with larger issues contain important discussions of the Chinese intervention. Chae-Jin Lee devotes a third of his book China and Korea: Dynamic Relations to the war, summarizing the previous scholarship on the Chinese involvement and providing conclusions from his own research. One substantial chapter of Thomas J. Christensen's Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and the Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958 deals with the Chinese intervention, providing Christensen's analysis of Chinese motivations. Kathryn Weathersby will soon publish a book on the war based on her extensive research in the former-Soviet archives. And so the literature on the strategic and policy aspects of the war continues to grow, refracting the light from those ever-more distant events through various lenses and expanding our understanding of strategic leadership and decisionmaking.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chen, Jian. China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994.
Christensen, Thomas J. Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and the Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996.
Cold War International History Project Bulletin. Available from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1000 Jefferson Drive, SW, Washington, D.C. 20560. Also available on the internet at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/cwhip.
Conference Report: An Assessment of the Historical Record. Washington: The Korea Society, 1995. Available from The Korea Society, 1350 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 204, Washington, D.C. 20036.
Goncharov, Sergei, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai. Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993.
Goldhamer, Herbert. The 1951 Korean Armistice Conference: A Personal Memoir. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1994.
Lee, Chae-Jin. China and Korea: Dynamic Relations. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press. 1996.
Millett, Allan R. "A Reader's Guide to the Korean War," The Journal of Military History, 61 (July 1997), 583-97. Revised version of an essay originally published in Joint Force Quarterly, No. 7 (Spring 1995), 119-26.
Shrader, Charles R. Communist Logistics in the Korean War. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Stueck, William. The Korean War: An International History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995.
Zhang, Shu Guang. Mao's Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953. Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1995.
The Reviewer: Colonel Donald W. Boose, Jr. (USA, Ret.) spent six years with the United Nations Command Component of the Military Armistice Commission in Korea and was the Assistant Chief of Staff/J-5 (Director of Strategic Plans and Policy) of US Forces, Japan, from 1987 to 1990. Prior to his retirement from the Army, he was Director of Asian Studies at the US Army War College, where he continues to teach. He is the coauthor of Great Battles of Antiquity, to which he contributed chapters on warfare in pre-modern East Asia.
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Review Essay
Korea's Partition: Soviet-American Pursuit of Reunification, 1945-1948
JAMES I. MATRAY
© 1998 James I. Matray
It became fashionable more than a decade ago for scholars to portray the Korean War as a civil conflict, rejecting the traditional interpretation of the war as an example of Soviet-inspired, external aggression.[1] But the recent release of previously classified Soviet and Chinese documents has brought an abrupt end to this emerging consensus. This has made possible renewed emphasis on international factors in reexaminations of the Korean War. Kathryn Weathersby signaled that this shift was well underway in 1993 when she concluded that the war's origins "lie primarily with the division of Korea in 1945 and the polarization of Korean politics that resulted from . . . the policies of the two occupying powers. . . . The Soviet Union played a key role in the outbreak of the war, but it was as facilitator, not as originator."[2] This essay reviews and compares traditional and revisionist perspectives on the origins of the Korean War.
The Historical Debate
President Harry S. Truman provided the touchstone for the debate surrounding the reasons for the Korean War just two days after the start of hostilities.[3] On 27 June 1950, he told the American people that North Korea's attack on South Korea showed that world "communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war."[4] This assessment reflected Truman's firm belief that North Korea was a puppet of the Soviet Union. Acting on instructions from Moscow, Kim Il-sung had sent troops southward as part of the Soviet plan for global conquest. In his memoirs, Truman equated Joseph Stalin's actions with Adolf Hitler's in the 1930s, arguing that military intervention to defend the Republic of Korea (ROK) was essential because appeasement had not prevented but ensured the outbreak of World War II.[5] Top Administration officials, as well as the general public, fully shared these assumptions. This traditional interpretation provided the analytical foundation for insider accounts of the origins of the Korean War.[6]
Surprisingly, some observers challenged Truman's assessment even before the Korean War ended on 27 July 1953. For example, Wilbur Hitchcock published an article in 1951 asserting that Kim Il-sung, not Stalin, "pulled the switch" initiating the Korean conflict. He emphasized in particular the Soviet boycott of the Security Council that prevented Moscow from vetoing resolutions authorizing UN military action to defend the ROK. In addition, North Korea's attack sparked a number of unwelcome developments for the Soviet Union, including a massive US military buildup, rearmament of West Germany, and the strengthening of NATO. Thus, according to Hitchcock, Kim Il-sung "jumped the gun" and attacked the ROK before the Soviets were ready for the invasion. I. F. Stone, in contrast to Hitchcock, focused his 1952 study of the Korean War on South Korea's responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities. ROK President Syngman Rhee was provocative, Stone contends, instigating many border clashes at the 38th parallel before 25 June 1950. In response to North Korean retaliation, Rhee portrayed the orderly retreat of his forces as a military debacle, thereby persuading Truman to commit troops. General Douglas MacArthur, John Foster Dulles, and Chiang Kai-shek were participants in this conspiracy to reverse the process of US military disengagement from East Asia after World War II.[7]
Neither the Hitchcock nor Stone interpretation had won many adherents as the fighting in Korea ended. Thereafter, the Truman assessment prevailed for a decade largely because Soviet-American relations remained acrimonious. Early studies of the Korean War blamed the United States for the North Korean attack, invariably charging that the Truman Administration had abandoned South Korea publicly and thus gave Kim Il-sung a green light to launch his invasion. For proof, these writers pointed to Secretary of State Dean Acheson's National Press Club speech excluding the ROK from the US "defensive perimeter," congressional rejection of the Korean aid bill, Senator Tom Connally's public prediction that Soviet or Chinese communist conquest of all Korea was inevitable, and limits on the military capabilities of South Korea.[8] This traditional analytical approach survived into the 1960s;[9] some recent detailed studies still reflect this viewpoint.[10]
Consensus regarding the reasons for the Korean War brought a predictable shift toward the investigation of other issues. If the United States had decided to abandon South Korea before 25 June 1950, it begged the question of why Truman would reverse the policy and order US military intervention. Glenn D. Paige and Ernest R. May provided answers to this riddle in two studies that each stressed international factors to explain American behavior. The United States, they wrote, had to act against Soviet-inspired aggression or risk irreparable damage to American credibility and prestige.[11] Other writers evaluated and offered judgments on the way that the United States conducted the war following Truman's commitment of ground troops. These studies extolling the virtues of fighting limited war in a nuclear age were elaborations of the traditional interpretation. While critical of the UN offensive across the 38th parallel because this brought Chinese military intervention, these writers applauded the Truman Administration for rejecting MacArthur's proposals for widening the war.[12]
Meanwhile, a New Left revisionist interpretation had emerged to challenge the traditional view that assigned responsibility to the Soviet Union for starting the Cold War. According to these writers, the United States had used its superior economic power and an atomic monopoly in an effort to establish global political dominance in the postwar era. Ironically, Korea at first escaped reinterpretation at the hands of the revisionists. For example, Richard J. Barnet accepted the traditional view that North Korea initiated the Korean War, although he condemned the United States for intervening to save Rhee's dictatorial regime. Denna Frank Fleming advanced a New Left assessment of Korea in his two-volume study of the Cold War, but few considered his account credible.[13] US involvement in Vietnam would transform "left revisionism" into both a plausible and legitimate explanation for US foreign policy, not only with regard to Korea, but just about every other major event in US history. Thus, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko could charge boldly that South Korea struck first in June 1950 and North Korea's invasion was an act of self-defense. Karunakar Gupta added the details of how the ROK's army ignited the Korean War with an assault on Haeju, a North Korean city on the Ongjin peninsula.[14]
The most important effect of revisionist accounts of the Korean War was to stimulate interest in the civil origins of the conflict. Adding impetus to this trend was the publication of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs. According to the Soviet leader, Stalin approved North Korea's attack only with great reluctance, fearing the prospect of US military intervention. But Kim Il-sung persuaded Stalin that South Korea's people would welcome the North Koreans as liberators, thus assuring swift conquest before the United States could respond. Robert R. Simmons advanced an intriguing explanation for the timing of the North Korean attack. Reviving the Hitchcock interpretation, he argued that Moscow and Pyongyang had agreed on an invasion date of 15 August 1950. The attack came two months earlier and before military preparations were complete, however, because of the internal political rivalry between Kim Il-sung and Foreign Minister Pak Hon-yong.[15] Without access to Soviet and North Korean records it is impossible to confirm the Simmons interpretation.
Revisionists have characterized the Korean War as a civil conflict, rather than a case of external aggression justifying an international response in the name of collective security. While traditional accounts concentrated on the events of 25 June 1950 and thereafter, revisionists insisted that it was vital to search for answers in an earlier period. In the first volume of his The Origins of the Korean War, titled Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, Bruce Cumings devotes an unprecedented amount of space to the era of Japanese colonial rule. According to this revisionist, a conventional war would start in Korea in June 1950 because the United States prevented a leftist revolution on the peninsula in 1945 and imposed a reactionary regime in the south during the years immediately following World War II. The Cumings study was controversial, but for many readers convincing because of the author's reliance upon Korean language sources.[16] More important, future studies of the war could not claim credibility without addressing the domestic origins of the conflict.
While Cumings discussed internal developments on the Korean peninsula immediately after World War II, other American scholars were reassessing US foreign policy toward Korea during the same period. The State Department's release of classified documents in 1976 for the year 1950 allowed researchers to produce detailed studies of US involvement in Korea from the start of World War II to the outbreak of hostilities a decade later. No conclusive evidence emerged, however, either to confirm or deny the validity of the traditional argument that North Korea attacked first and initiated the war. But the domestic origins of the war received greater attention.[17] New surveys of the Korean War acknowledged the importance of developments on the Korean peninsula during the five years after Japan's surrender in 1945. While accepting that Stalin was involved in planning the invasion, these writers insisted that Kim Il-sung was the primary decisionmaker. None challenged the assumption that North Korea struck first, but they did not condemn Kim Il-sung because of evidence that Rhee would have staged an invasion northward if he had held enough military power. Reflecting the effects of access to new research materials, these studies all either stated or implied that Korea was a civil war.[18]
Since about 1985, revisionism has peaked in popularity and begun to lose adherents. John Halliday and Bruce Cumings, in their study Korea: The Unknown War, insist that South Korea initiated the Korean War, contending that the "Fierce Tiger" unit of the ROK's 17th Regiment on the Ongjin Peninsula launched an assault northward at around 0200 on 25 June 1950. Reviving Stone's interpretation, Halliday and Cumings claim that Rhee set a trap for North Korea. The South Korean attack would provoke a communist invasion and bring US military intervention, thereby setting the stage for the ROK conquest of North Korea. Cumings presents a detailed explanation of this "trap theory"--and much more--in the second volume of his Origins of the Korean War.[19] Despite the testimony of former communist military leaders, the North Koreans always have maintained that the ROK attacked first and initiated the war. But John Merrill observed in 1989 that the question of who started the Korean War no longer was a matter of debate. The size and scope of the North Korean offensive argued powerfully that Pyongyang planned the invasion in advance. William Stueck agrees, emphasizing the international dimensions of the conflict in the most recent full-length account of the Korean War.[20]
Revisionism and Korea's Division
Disagreement about the reasons for Korea's partition in 1945 developed in parallel with the historical debate surrounding the origins of the Korean conflict, although with far less intensity. Arguably, Korea's division at the 38th parallel as World War II ended was the most important event in the modern history of that nation. Had the United States and the Soviet Union not forcibly divided this East Asian country, there would have been no Korean War. A civil conflict was highly probable, however, after the surrender of Japan. This was because Japanese colonial rule had worsened mounting social, economic, and political inequities that Korea had endured during the 19th century.[21] Cumings relies on meticulous and exhaustive research to demonstrate that Korea was ripe for a radical restructuring at the end of World War II "because of the forces descending upon Korea in the period of colonial rule." As elsewhere in Asia, Cumings contends, revolutionary nationalism was the main political force in Korea even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Those favoring radical change were leaders of a movement dedicated to destroying not just Japanese colonialism, but Korea's exploitive traditional system of economic, political, and social privilege as well.[22]
But there would be no civil war in Korea in 1945 because the United States and the Soviet Union prevented it. Ostensibly to accept the surrender of Japanese forces, the Soviets occupied Korea north of the 38th parallel in August, while the Americans would establish control south of that line the next month.[23] The revisionists condemn President Truman for arranging Korea's division into zones of military occupation. For example, Cumings advances the revisionist argument that dispatching US troops to South Korea was "an unprecedented act of ambition" and "the first postwar act of containment." US occupation officials followed thereafter a counterrevolutionary course, backing the political aspirations of reactionary conservative Korean politicians in the south, especially Syngman Rhee, and striving "through unilateral actions to build a bulwark against communism."[24] But traditional scholars have applauded the United States for acting to prevent the Soviet Union from occupying all of Korea and creating there a satellite modeled after Poland. Endorsing the traditional view, Charles Dobbs blames Soviet aggressive and expansionist ambition for making it necessary to partition Korea. Moscow, he writes, "had done little to deserve" a voice in the postwar reconstruction of Korea because the Soviets "had made no significant contribution to the defeat of Japan."[25]
Soviet-American partition of Korea after World War II meant that barring resort to war, reunification was possible only after an international diplomatic or domestic political agreement had paved the way for a negotiated settlement. Responsibility for the deadlock transforming the 38th parallel into a fortified boundary and thereby creating the circumstances necessary for the outbreak of the Korean War became a matter of concern. Recent studies accept without much discussion the revisionist argument that blames the United States for perpetuating Korea's division. If the Truman Administration had not manufactured a South Korea, these studies suggest, the popular preference for revolutionary political and economic change would have resulted in the establishment of a leftist government to rule a reunified Korea.[26] Recently, challenges to this interpretation signal the emergence in Korean War studies of a "revisionism from the right" that seeks to rehabilitate the traditional view. Newly available communist archival materials do not justify, however, a complete resurrection of traditional explanations for the postwar impasse preventing Korea's reunification. Rather, Weathersby's findings in particular argue for an abandonment of the revisionist versus traditionalist bipolarity that for over two decades has trapped Korean War studies in an analytical straightjacket.[27]
Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War heads the list of important recent works on the Korean War for scholars striving to revive traditional judgments about the conflict. Its authors make extensive use of new documents, memoirs, and personal interviews to reveal that Kim Il-sung manipulated both Stalin and Mao Zedong to gain their consent for his plan to invade South Korea. But Uncertain Partners, on balance, revives and sustains traditional views about the origins of the Korean conflict. For example, the authors accept, without elaboration, the judgment that North Korea was "wholly dependent" on Moscow and was "justly called a Soviet satellite."[28] Erik van Ree provides abundant evidence and detailed analysis to support this traditional viewpoint in his 1989 study which points to the "presence of the Soviet army, the network of Soviet advisors, the stifling economic grip, the presence of an impressive propaganda machine, and the all-pervading adulation of Joseph Stalin" as proof that North Korea was a satellite. Van Ree assigns "most of the blame" to the Soviets "for the continuation of Korea's division in the two years after the Second World War."[29]
Van Ree challenges another fundamental tenet of left revisionism when he claims that Soviet occupation officials ignored the Korean People's Republic and rejected its legitimacy. Moscow instead transported to Korea from Siberia "loyal" Soviet Koreans and placed them in charge of "people's committees." He endorses Dae-sook Suh's description of early developments north of the 38th parallel, identifying the Soviet military as "the real authority" in North Korea. The Soviet Civil Administration delayed reforms and constructed a "classic `monolithic' model" closely resembling communist regimes in Eastern Europe.[30]
Socialism in One Zone depends heavily on research materials that suffer from ideological and political subjectivity, notably Soviet public papers, official memoirs, and secondary histories. Using these sources, Van Ree mounts a new defense of traditional assertions scholars advanced in assessing the Korean War decades earlier, but which revisionists managed to discredit without providing documentary proof. For example, he defines Soviet postwar goals in Korea as first the historic desire to acquire warm-water ports and second the creation of a buffer zone against an expected revival of Japanese aggression. During World War II, an "aloof" Stalin was "not enthusiastic" about a Korean trusteeship because he expected geographic proximity would assure Soviet control over the entire peninsula. He would not accept "a position as simply one trustee among four." Washington, Van Ree concludes, consistently advocated steps toward ending Korea's division, but Moscow always blocked progress because it preferred to maintain an "exclusive Soviet grip" on socialism in one zone.[31]
In the spring of 1946, a Soviet-American Joint Commission met in Seoul to implement the Moscow Agreement of December 1945. Its main task was to select a representative cross-section of Korean leaders to form a provisional government that then would cooperate with the establishment of a trusteeship before the restoration of Korea's independence. According to Van Ree, Stalin was responsible for the failure of these negotiations because he inflexibly demanded the exclusion of right-wing politicians. Extreme conservatives such as Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku were required to "cooperate" but not support trusteeship, Van Ree insists, and their participation was "not inimical to Moscow." The charge that pledges from Rhee and Kim Ku of cooperation were insincere was "probably true, but it was also irrelevant." Moscow knew that the vast majority of Koreans opposed unification under a communist or leftist regime. Van Ree speculates that Stalin wanted a stalemate, anticipating that this would split the conservatives and force Washington to accept the flawed Soviet interpretation of the Moscow Agreement. Stalin, fearing that South Korean communists might strike a deal with moderates, opposed peasant uprisings in the south because he was obsessed with retaining control of North Korea.[32]
In an article appearing in 1993, the late John Wilz tried to revive the traditional explanation for the failure of postwar Soviet-American talks to end Korea's division. During World War II, he wrote, although President Franklin D. Roosevelt did see that because of the "realities of geography, the prospect of Soviet domination of . . . Korea was transparent," Roosevelt did not want to anger Stalin. Truman wisely dropped Roosevelt's misguided trusteeship plan in favor of joint military occupation. He then advocated elections and quick reunification, but Stalin refused to cooperate because only Korean communists and leftists supported Soviet aims. Wilz, a champion of traditional views regarding US policy in Korea, dismissed the Cumings interpretation as "leftist," blaming Moscow for transforming the 38th parallel "into a fortified frontier" and North Korea into "a bastion of Sovietism."[33] William Stueck further encourages a revival of traditional judgments in a recent article blaming Moscow for blocking Korea's postwar unification. Occupation policies in South Korea, he asserts, may have been "shortsighted or self-serving," but "it is uncertain that they influenced events and policies north of the 38th parallel."[34]
New Documents and Renewed Debate
Release of additional Soviet archival materials will decide whether a revived traditional explanation for the creation of two Koreas will become conventional wisdom. If this occurs, a "right revisionism" will replace the "left revisionism" that for nearly a generation has dominated Korean War studies. Starting in 1992, Weathersby began to publish translations of Soviet documents that verify a number of traditional interpretations. For example, she points to "thousands of pages of documents on postwar Korea in the Russian Foreign Ministry archive" as proof that "North Korea was utterly dependent economically on the Soviet Union." Kim Il-sung's persistent requests for the services of Soviet economic specialists reveals that "to an unusual degree, North Korea was dependent on the Soviet Union for technical expertise."[35] Van Ree has argued correctly, Weathersby's findings have confirmed, that "Stalin was not in a hurry to crash into Korea" during 1945. Moreover, the Soviet Union had no "well-prepared plans" for civil administration north of the 38th parallel, requiring considerable improvisation. Once in control of the north, the "operation was an investment" for the Soviet Union. Moscow rebuilt the railroad system and then restored metal, chemical, and glass plants to serve the enormous needs of a recovering Soviet economy.[36]
Other traditional judgments regarding Soviet policy in Korea are no longer valid in light of newly available Soviet documents. For example, Weathersby presents persuasive evidence that Stalin followed a "cautious policy toward Korea" in pursuit of "limited aims."[37] His objective "was not simply to gain control over the entire peninsula, as with Poland." "Poland was too vital to the U.S.S.R.," she writes, "but Korea was not." Weathersby believes that the Soviet Union "would have been content with the Finland solution."[38] Moscow's wartime support for a trusteeship in Korea then was sincere, especially because it would ensure Japan would "not have the right to industrial or any other concessions." In September 1945, after Soviet-American partition of Korea, Moscow continued to favor "some sort of joint administration of Korea." "Upon the conclusion of the occupation regime, presumably after two years," a Foreign Ministry report stated, "Korea must become a trust territory of the four powers."[39] But the Soviets would never permit either Rhee or Kim Ku to assume power over a united Korea because both had "dreams of creating an independent Korea in which, in place of Japanese oppressors, Korean landlords and capitalists . . . will sit on the neck of the Korean people."[40]
Weathersby's findings demonstrate that strategic interests dominated Stalin's thinking regarding Korea. First, the Soviet leader thought North Korea might be a bargaining chip during his negotiations to determine the postwar security structure in East Asia. Moscow was willing in September 1945 to place a key Korean port in a Chinese zone of occupation and approve US acquisition of several naval bases in the Pacific if the Soviet Union gained access to three Korean ports and a united Korea secured control over the island of Tsushima.[41] Second, Stalin's primary concern was "to prevent Korea from being turned into a staging ground for future aggression against the USSR."[42] He especially feared a resurgence of Japanese power. A Foreign Ministry briefing paper describes US policy in southern Korea as very alarming because American occupation officials "not only have retained in Korea the old administrative apparatus, but they have also left in leading posts many Japanese and local collaborators."[43] Third, Weathersby underscores "the impa
The Media as an
Instrument of War
KENNETH PAYNE
The media, in the modern era, are indisputably an instrument of war. This is because winning modern wars is as much dependent on carrying domestic and international public opinion as it is on defeating the enemy on the battlefield. And it remains true regardless of the aspirations of many journalists to give an impartial and balanced assessment of conflict.
The experience of the US military in the post-Cold War world demonstrates that victory on the battlefield is seldom as simple as defeating the enemy by force of arms. From Somalia and Haiti through Kosovo and Afghanistan, success has been defined in political, rather than military, terms.
Today’s military commanders stand to gain more than ever before from controlling the media and shaping their output. The laws and conventions of war, however, do not adequately reflect the critical role that the media play in shaping the political outcome of conflicts. International humanitarian law requires that media members are afforded the rights of civilians; the question is whether this is sustainable when the exigencies of warfighting suggest that controlling the media is essential.
The Media and the Laws of War
It is difficult to generalize about the international media, a heterogeneous entity that includes representatives of numerous organizations with varying political and cultural foundations. But it is nonetheless an incontrovertible fact that the international media as a whole are not a neutral force on the battlefield.
Consider the US-led invasion of Iraq. Of course, the US military was aware of the possibility of bad press when it introduced widespread embedding.
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Reporters bring their own perceptions, and the level of access and freedom of reporting entailed in the embedding scheme meant that damaging reports were a real possibility. Indeed, damaging reports eventually occurred, as when The Washington Post quoted Lieutenant General William Wallace as saying that the enemy being fought was “different from the one we war-gamed against.”1
Members of the media remain entitled to express their opinions, whether or not they are billeted with US forces. In an era in which the media are less deferential to authority than World War II, and in wars that are less integral to their home societies, journalists have proved capable of fierce criticism, both of individual participants’ behavior and of the wider strategic purpose of a conflict.
Consider a later example from the occupation of Iraq, the battle for Fallujah in April-May 2004. Writing after the withdrawal of most coalition forces from downtown Fallujah in favor of indigenous Iraqi units, Ralph Peters offered this assessment of the power of the media in determining military outcomes:
The [US] Marines in Fallujah weren’t beaten by the terrorists and insurgents, who were being eliminated effectively and accurately. They were beaten by al-Jazeera. . . . The media [are] often referred to off-handedly as a strategic factor. But we still don’t fully appreciate [their] fatal power. . . . In Fallujah, we allowed a bonanza of hundreds of terrorists and insurgents to escape us—despite promising that we would bring them to justice. We stopped because we were worried about what already hostile populations might think of us. The global media disrupted the US and Coalition chains of command. . . . We could have won militarily. Instead, we surrendered politically and called it a success. Our enemies won the information war. We literally didn’t know what hit us.2
The Fallujah stalemate demonstrates that the neutral status that the press enjoys in conflicts is far removed from neutrality in any normative sense. The question then becomes whether this is an appropriate circumstance, whether it is sustainable, and what are the likely implications.
The Geneva Protocols
The overarching framework of international humanitarian law governing the conduct of belligerents dates to an era before the expansion of international news networks that operate across a range of media and are
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capable of live battlefield reporting. Early international humanitarian law did not give a great deal of attention to the rights and responsibilities of the media in war. As noted in the Commentary on the first Protocol additional to the Geneva Conventions, “International humanitarian law instruments dating from before 1977 do not contain any special provisions relating to journalists or their mission.”3
The 1949 Geneva Conventions do, however, address the position of battlefield reporters, at least in terms of the obligations of combatants toward detained correspondents. Journalists are to be afforded all the protection due to combatants, and, while their equipment could be confiscated on capture, they are not legally obliged to respond to interrogation. Sick or wounded correspondents should receive medical treatment and, if detained by belligerents, they should be treated humanely.
With the 1977 protocols to the Conventions, the situation changed somewhat, with signatories agreeing that journalists should be considered as civilians4 when “engaged in dangerous missions in areas of armed conflict,” provided that “they take no action adversely affecting their status as civilians.”5 To this end, correspondents have an obligation to differentiate themselves from combatants, for example by not wearing military uniforms. As the Commentary on the Protocol states, “On the battlefield a combatant cannot reasonably be asked to spare an individual whom he cannot identify as a journalist.”6 As civilians, journalists are entitled by the 1977 Protocol to “enjoy general protection against the dangers arising from military operations” and “shall not be the object of attack.”7
The United States, unlike the United Kingdom, has not ratified the 1977 Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, but US forces nevertheless have an ingrained tradition of treating the media as noncombatants. In essence this status revolves around the condition established in the Protocol that the media “take no action adversely affecting their status as civilians.” For Alexandre Balguy-Gallois, writing in the International Review of the Red Cross, “The media cannot be considered a legitimate target, even if they are being used for propaganda purposes.” Nonetheless, he concedes “an evident need for the adoption of a new [legal] instrument, . . . to reaffirm those elements of humanitarian law that apply to journalists and media personnel, . . . [and] to improve existing law and adapt it to the requirements of today.”8
By contrast, consider this assessment from the Department of Defense’s Office of General Counsel:
Enemy military forces are declared hostile. They may be attacked at will, along with their equipment and stores. Civilians and civilian property that make a direct contribution to the war effort may also be attacked, along with objects
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whose damage or destruction would produce a military advantage because of their nature, location, purpose, or use. . . .
Civilian media generally are not considered to be lawful military targets, but circumstances may make them so. In both Rwanda and Somalia, for example, civilian radio broadcasts urged the civilian population to commit acts of violence against members of other tribes, in the case of Rwanda, or against UN-authorized forces providing humanitarian assistance, in the case of Somalia. When it is determined that civilian media broadcasts are directly interfering with the accomplishment of a military force’s mission, there is no law of war objection to using the minimum necessary force to shut them down. The extent to which force can be used for purely psychological operations purposes, such as shutting down a civilian radio station for the sole purpose of undermining the morale of the civilian population, is an issue that has yet to be addressed authoritatively by the international community.9
Control of the Media
The relationship between the media and the military hinges on the extent to which the media’s civilian status can be considered compromised by the activities of the armed forces alongside which they operate. At whatever level the media interact with the military during times of conflict, there is always an inherent tension between the ostensible goals of impartial and balanced media reporting and the military objectives of the combatants.
Public Affairs as an Information Operation
Western militaries have given considerable attention to the means through which they might influence the activities and output of the media. Should they choose to exercise them, the tools at their disposal could include deception, distortion, omission, or obfuscation: the tools of political “spin” adapted to the ends of warfighting. Many Public Affairs officers will bridle at the preceding sentence, but it remains the case that, in some circumstances, the interests of the media in pursuit of a story and the military in pursuit of victory do not coincide.
The balance between public affairs and information operations is a delicate one, as indicated in the relevant US Army Field Manual, Public Affairs Tactics, Techniques and Procedures. “Information operations,” notes the manual, “involve a variety of disciplines and activities [including] information campaigns.” Public affairs “support to [information operations] requires . . . synchronization of efforts with other organizations and agencies to ensure themes and messages are consistent and deconflicted.” The language in the manual is instructive: public affairs is not seen as an entity in itself, but as a “related activity” of information operations.10
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The US military, as the manual demonstrates, is acutely aware of the importance of media portrayal of conflict, and has developed an array of techniques to affect that presentation. Public affairs staffs begin their support of information operations by drafting a Public Affairs Estimate, which includes an assessment of the media presence. The estimate addresses the following questions: “What media representatives and organizations are in the area of operation? Are they radio, television, or print? Are they state-run or independent? What is their political slant? Are they pro- or anti-coalition? Are they receptive to coalition information products such as news releases or other print or electronic products?”11
Lying outright to the media may not, in many circumstances, make much sense, but controlling the flow of information emphatically does, and the purpose of the public affairs staff is precisely that—to control the dissemination of information so as to maximize the military and political advantage to US forces.
Of course, outright lies do have a place on the battlefield. A media-savvy commander will also seek to use the media to directly affect the enemy’s plans, as part of a military deception operation. The current US Army field manual on information operations provides further details on the military advantages that can be gained from skillful manipulation of the media. Military deception, it notes, is “a fundamental instrument of military art. Its ultimate goal is to deceive adversaries and others about friendly force dispositions, capabilities, vulnerabilities, and intentions.”12 The manual goes on to describe the mechanism through which an enemy can be deceived through the construction of “a plausible, but false, view of the situation, which will lead the deception target into acting in a manner that will accomplish the commander’s goal. Once the story is completed, the [Deception Working Group] determines the deception means necessary to portray the events and indicators.”13
The manual, perhaps understandably in an unclassified text, does not dwell explicitly on the use of the media as a means of disseminating the deception’s story. To be sure, there are also a wide variety of non-media-related means of deceiving opposition forces. But the manual does point to one episode of military deception through the use of the media: the Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973, which it offers as an example of “Conditioning an Adversary.” The Egyptians, it notes, “used deceptive measures and a broad range of centrally directed and controlled deception events involving political and military activities. These included . . . publishing reports in the press that officers would be allowed leave for the annual hajj pilgrimage.”14
Whether for purposes of military deception or more broadly in an effort to control the public and elite perception of a conflict, the US military has a keen interest in influencing how the media perceive the events on the battle-
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field. During the recent invasion of Iraq, the two main methods by which the US military sought to influence the media were the program of embedding reporters and the strategic-level news presentations given by senior personnel in Qatar and Washington.
Embedding
Embedding reporters within military units has long been a feature of Western war—reporters accompanied US forces ashore at Normandy, and in the Vietnam War reporters were given unprecedented latitude in accompanying US forces into battle. Embedding in the recent Iraqi invasion was not so different from these earlier conflicts, except that reporters were tied to one unit, rather than being free to roam. But embedding in Iraq was dramatically different from the experience of the press in other recent conflicts involving the United States, particularly Afghanistan post-9/11 and the 1991 liberation of Kuwait. For Walter Cronkite, “The principal advantage [of embedding] is that it is 180 degrees better than the blackout the military enforced during the first Gulf War.”15
Embedding in its modern guise provides the military with two key advantages in influencing the output of the embedded media. First, embedding with troops restricts a reporter’s view of the battlefield to the view available to the unit he or she is embedded with. The embedding program in the Iraq invasion demonstrated that the media, particularly television news, have a tendency to focus on the drama of the small-scale tactical actions they can see, rather than the broader operational and strategic dimensions of the conflict.
A post-invasion study by Columbia University’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that embedded reports were “largely anecdotal. [They were] combat-focused, and mostly live and unedited. Much [of the reporting] lacks context but is usually rich in detail. It has all the virtues and vices of reporting only what you can see.”16 For Chief of the British General Staff, General Sir Mike Jackson, embedding produces images that “are no more than snapshots at a particular time and a particular place. Dramatic they may be, but frankly they tell you very little, if anything at all, about the progress of the campaign at a strategic level.”17 Clearly this is a mixed blessing for the military, depending on whether it wishes the media to focus on the tactical or strategic dimensions of a conflict at any given time.
What’s more, by choosing which units to embed reporters with, the US military enjoys a high degree of control over which part of the battlefield will receive media coverage—particularly since operating independently on the battlefield has become incredibly dangerous. The preparation of the Medina Republican Guard division, to give just one example, took place from the air, with no embedded reporting available. The same is true of all the Spe-
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cial Forces operations in western Iraq, and much of the Peshmerga-Special Forces operation in the north.
A second advantage of embedding is subtler. When US forces go into combat, the mainstream American media are, in the first instance at least, predisposed to back them. There is a plausible supposition that embedding enhances this tendency, by bringing reporters closer to the soldiers of one side than the other, perhaps to the extent of prompting a subconscious bias in reporting, the product of shared hardships and camaraderie.
For reporters, there is an implicit danger in talking about where “we” go and what “we” have achieved—and this “Stockholm syndrome” is evident even among reporters who aim for the most scrupulous objectivity. For George Wilson, a journalist for the National Journal, the dangers of subconscious bias were very real: “You were put in a position where you would certainly not be antagonistic to the kids that you were involved with and admired, and you went in, in those conditions, without having the ability like I had in other wars to check things out for myself. So in effect I was putting myself in a position to be a propagandist, which was great for the Pentagon, but not so great for the readers.”18
Strategic Presentation
Embedding with units deployed on the battlefield is only one level at which the military can seek to influence the media. During the Iraq invasion, the US military presented a strategic perspective of the battlefield to journalists through daily briefings at the Central Command (CENTCOM) field headquarters in Qatar and at the Pentagon. The British military also held occasional briefings in London, timed to fit the news cycle and minimize the potential for conflicting messages with the other coalition media outlets.
But the strategic-level presentations, as they had in the earlier liberation of Kuwait, received a mixed reception from the media, in marked contrast to the widespread enthusiasm for embedding. Several of the network reporters dispatched to CENTCOM headquarters in Qatar expressed displeasure at the flow of “big picture” information from coalition headquarters. On 27 March 2003, for example, Michael Wolff of New York Magazine drew applause from assembled journalists when he asked the CENTCOM briefer, “Why should we stay? What’s the value to us for what we learn at this million-dollar press center?” The immediate answer, from Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, was that reporters should try to gather the “entire mosaic” of information. He emphasized the role of embedded media, who “tell a very important story,” but added that the Central Command briefings were an important part of the big picture.19
But the quality and quantity of information provided at the briefings did not always bear out Brooks’s comments: very little, for example, is known
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about critical Special Forces operations, or about coalition battle damage assessments—how many tanks were destroyed by the coalition, what proportion of missiles missed their targets. From this perspective, the focus on embedded reports allowed the military to control the “big picture” portrayal of the war, even if they had limited control of the tactical presentation by embedded reporters. And embedding diverted the media’s attention from the relative paucity of information available elsewhere.
Media Control, and the Lack of It
Widespread embedding during the invasion of Iraq encouraged the media to focus on the tactical level, the more so given the relative paucity of strategic detail available. This suited the coalition strategy very well. The invasion was conducted with a relatively small force, if anything enhancing the importance of strategic surprise, as exemplified by the uncertainty over the destination of the 4th Infantry Division, the drive through the Karbala gap by the 3d Infantry Division, and the air assault north from Kuwait into the western desert by the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). In other circumstances, the US military will doubtless need to adopt a different media approach.
Post-invasion Iraq provides a good contrast. The protracted insurgency that followed the end of major combat operations in Iraq has presented new challenges for the coalition in seeking to shape the media picture of conditions on the battlefield. Embedding with the military remained an option for some reporters, but—at least until the spate of journalistic kidnappings beginning in April 2004—many reporters preferred to operate independently, often accompanied by their own security advisors.
In many ways, the low-intensity insurgency war currently under way in Iraq is more typical of the semi-permissive environment normally facing war correspondents than was the invasion itself. In Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere, correspondents work in dangerous and uncertain environments. The BBC requires that all staff deploying to such hotspots complete a one-week hostile environment training program. Other media organizations make similar arrangements for their staffs. Controlling the media in these semi-permissive environments presents a different challenge for Western militaries, but one that is critically important, given the centrality of the media in denying, or shaping, the information available to the enemy, and in favorably influencing the domestic and international portrayal of military activities.
The experience of US Marines in Fallujah (April 2004) and in Najaf (August 2004) typifies the problem. Early moves to decisively engage and defeat insurgent groups in the towns were rapidly stymied by media reporting of hardship in the towns and of considerable damage to the urban environ-
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ment. Political pressure to limit the assault quickly followed, and the Marines subsequently withdrew—in the case of Fallujah, to be replaced by nominal Iraqi authority control, and in Najaf by a negotiated settlement to secure the return of the Imam Ali shrine.
In both examples, the abiding perception is one of strategic defeat for US forces, whatever the tactical success achieved by the Marines. Fallujah remained an insurgent stronghold, and Moqtada al Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” withdrew from Najaf in good order. From this Ralph Peters drew the conclusion that the best way to counter adverse media reporting of the sort he perceived around Fallujah in May 2004 is to “speed the kill. . . . We must direct our doctrine, training, equipment, organization, and plans toward winning low-level fights much faster. Before the global media can do what enemy forces cannot do and stop us short. We can still win the big campaigns. But we’re apt to lose thereafter, in the dirty end-game fights.”20
Peters’ approach amounts to conducting military combat without a media presence. He suggests speed as one factor—space is another. Sometimes the sheer remoteness of the battlefield, or the level of risk involved, will serve to limit the presence of the media. The invasion of Afghanistan illustrates the point, with little scope for independents to operate in Taliban-held areas of the country, or in the disputed border regions adjacent to Pakistan. Somalia, Chechnya, Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, the southern Philippines, and Kashmir are other examples of places deemed too risky for deploying reporters by many media organizations. On the whole, however, there will always be some sort of media presence, no matter how difficult the terrain or how rapid the military exploitation of a given scenario. Bold freelancers and local operatives armed with satellite phones ensure that there will usually be a Fallujah byline if the story merits one.
Targeting the Media
If the media are present, and they are undermining the political-military strategy, it makes sense to control them. If they are behaving in a non-neutral way, it may even seem appropriate to target them. But where are the boundaries of neutrality? Perhaps targeting is lawful if your enemy is using the media to defeat you militarily, for example through a deception operation. But what if he is merely shaping the media reporting of the conflict through his own information operations? Would targeting the media be legitimate in these circumstances, even if the media were not complicit in this strategy? Or what if the media in question have brought their own damaging prejudices to the battlefield, regardless of the ambition of the enemy to control them?
The broad outlines of debate are readily apparent, as illustrated by the opinion from the Pentagon counsel quoted earlier. If the media are behav-
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ing impartially, then they are entitled to treatment as civilians. Where they are not, the assessment of the general counsel suggests that they can be targeted militarily. The trick is in making an accurate judgment about their partiality and the motives behind it.
A recent example dates from the Kosovo conflict in 1999, when Allied forces successfully attacked the studios of Radio-TV Serbia, the state broadcaster. General Wesley Clark, then NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, offers this retrospective in his book Waging Modern War:
It was difficult to get political approval for striking the television stations, because strikes on television facilities seemed undemocratic and perhaps illegal. . . . At one point I had secured French permission to attack the Serb television transmitter, as well as American approval, only to have NATO balk when some of the ambassadors questioned whether the target was truly military. . . . I tried to craft a public explanation of the military value of the transmitters, which didn’t succeed.21
Approval was eventually forthcoming, however, and the attack on the station’s Belgrade headquarters on 23 April resulted in a temporary disruption of broadcasting, and approximately ten staff fatalities. Clearly, the Serbian state-run media were not behaving with scrupulous impartiality in reporting the conflict and, moreover, they were bureaucratically an agent of their government.
The situation is somewhat more complicated where non-state-controlled media are operating. Some such media may aim to be more impartial than others, and where they are behaving in a biased manner, legal opinion may conclude that they can no longer be classed as civilians.
But making a judgment about the impartiality of a broadcaster or newspaper is problematic. Suppose a television channel were showing graphic footage of the civilian casualties caused by your troops, or that they screened interviews with dejected prisoners of war captured by your enemy. In both examples, this footage could have an effect on the perceptions of the war among viewers on both sides of the conflict. While the combatants themselves are prohibited from this sort of activity, the independent media are not legally a party to the conflict. But does that mean that the station can be legitimately targeted? Then there is the question of proportionate response—should you jam their transmissions, discredit them somehow, or counter their message with your own propaganda? Keeping them away from areas of the battlefield where their reporting would be damaging seems sensible enough, but what lengths can one go to in order to achieve that?
Then there is the problem of whether it is enough that the media themselves strive to be impartial, even if the constraints of the battlefield and the deliberate efforts of the combatants are undermining their efforts. If their
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host combatant is engaged in information operations intended to favorably shape the media message, such that the media’s output serves to further the purposes of that belligerent, then there are legitimate questions about the de facto neutrality of the media, even if the media organization attempts to be scrupulously impartial and objective. Can rigorous objectivity realistically be achieved in such circumstances? In the language of the Pentagon’s counsel, could such a broadcaster be making “a direct contribution to the war effort,” in which case might the provisions of the Geneva Protocols be moot?
As to whether the international media have ever deliberately been violently attacked by Western forces, it is impossible for an outsider to provide a definitive answer, but it seems improbable in most conceivable circumstances. There were several episodes during the invasion of Iraq in which international media were hit by fire from coalition troops. In April 2003, a BBC team led by veteran correspondent John Simpson and traveling south toward Baghdad from Kurdish-controlled territory was hit by a bomb apparently dropped from a coalition aircraft, despite the presence nearby of US Special Forces.22 Earlier in the conflict, the ITN reporter Terry Lloyd was killed in uncertain circumstances while driving in southern Iraq.23 In the most controversial incident, US forces apparently fired on the offices of Al-Jazeera in Baghdad.24
In all three cases, there is no evidence of deliberate forethought. Furthermore, there was little incentive for the coalition to target the media during the invasion, even when they did not appreciate the reporting. Coalition forces were easily achieving their military objectives in Iraq and enjoying a broadly sympathetic press, at least in the United States. Lloyd and Simpson were both well-schooled in the principles of impartial and objective reporting and had chosen to operate as “independents,” outside the embedding program, partly in an effort to maximize their autonomy. And even in the case of Al-Jazeera, which was broadcasting material in the Middle East that could readily be construed as damaging to US objectives, the lasting opprobrium consequent on attacking the office easily outweighed the temporary advantage from interrupting Al-Jazeera operations in Baghdad.
Journalists have, however, become targets of one of the combatants in post-invasion Iraq, with a number of reporters having been kidnapped by insurgents, and some later executed. The objective appears to have been to undermine support for the reconstruction process, rather than to neutralize a media inimical to their objectives. In fact, the media in post-invasion Iraq were in some ways working to the advantage of the insurgents by publicizing hostage-taking of Western company employees engaged in the reconstruction effort, and giving exposure to the inability of US forces to subdue parts of the country—notably Fallujah—without recourse to politically unsustainable levels of urban violence.
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By late August 2004, according to the International News Safety Institute, 51 media workers had died in Iraq since the start of the conflict 17 months earlier.25 Some of these were killed deliberately by one of the parties to the conflict, some were caught up in the cross-fire, and some were killed in accidents. There is no convincing evidence that coalition forces deliberately targeted any reporters. Nonetheless, the centrality of public opinion, both in the region and among the domestic audience in coalition countries, means that the sorts of tricky legal and ethical issues outlined above are likely to become concrete, rather than hypothetical, questions for military lawyers in the years ahead.
Veteran British war correspondent Martin Bell, quoted in The Guardian shortly after the bombing of Al-Jazeera’s office, expressed his concern that “independent witnessing of war is becoming increasingly dangerous, and this may be the end of it. I have a feeling that independent journalists have become a target because the management of the information war has become a higher priority than ever.”26 Bell might be wrong in the sense of journalists being deliberately attacked by Western forces, but in the broader sense of the importance of controlling the media on the battlefield, he is surely correct in suggesting that the importance of information operations makes the job of a war correspondent more difficult and perhaps more dangerous than before.
Conclusion
The conflicts of the last decade have amply demonstrated that the media, ostensibly non-state actors, have become an important party in many international conflicts. In conflicts involving advanced Western militaries, this is accentuated by the evolution and increasing importance of information operations. Winning the media war is crucially important to Western war-planners, and increasingly sophisticated methods for doing so have been developed— albeit with varying results.
And while the means and objectives of waging war have changed dramatically during the last decade, the press itself also has undergone a dramatic transformation. The developments of the last decade scarcely need rehearsing; from 24-hour rolling news stations to the proliferation of on-line current affairs websites and blogs, the news-oriented public has a greater range of sources than ever before, and the military has a commensurately more complex task in winning the information war.
The existing legal framework covering the position of the media during conflict was established before many of these developments. The question now is whether a consensus can be found that systematically addresses the new realities of war-reporting. With reporters increasingly vul-
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nerable under the existing arrangements, perhaps it is time to consider a new humanitarian law specifically addressing the issues raised above.
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NOTES
1. Rick Atkinson, “General: A Longer War Likely,” The Washington Post, 28 March 2003, p. A01. For more detail on the background of this episode, see Rick Atkinson, In the Company of Soldiers (London: Little Brown, 2004), pp. 171-75.
2. Ralph Peters, “Kill Faster,” New York Post, 20 May 2004.
3. Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977. Part IV: Civilian population. Section III—Treatment of persons in the power of a party to the conflict, Chapter III—Journalists. This Protocol and subsequent references to the Geneva Conventions may be found at http://www.icrc.org.
4. The Geneva conventions define civilians in “Convention III Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Part I (1949).” Article 50 defines a civilian as anyone who is not a member of the armed forces of a party to the conflict, or of a militia, or an inhabitant of a non-occupied territory who takes up arms on the approach of invading forces, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws of war.
5. Article 79, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I). The relevant text in full reads: “1. Journalists engaged in dangerous professional missions in areas of armed conflict shall be considered as civilians within the meaning of Article 50. . . . 2. They shall be protected as such under the Conventions and this Protocol, provided that they take no action adversely affecting their status as civilians.”
6. Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977. Part IV: Civilian population, Section III, Chapter III—Journalists, Commentary at para 2. This is an interesting point given the proclivity of Special Forces soldiers to wear a hybrid of military and civilian outdoor clothing, and the tendency of some journalists to do likewise.
7. Article 51, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977.
8. Alexandre Balguy-Gallois, “The Protection of Journalists and News Media Personnel in Armed Conflict,” International Review of the Red Cross, March 2004, pp. 37-68.
9. Department of Defense, Office of General Counsel, “An Assessment of International Legal Issues in Information Operations,” May 1999, pp. 6-9, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dod-io...od-io-legal.pdf.
10. US Department of the Army, Public Affairs Tactics, Techniques and Procedures, Field Manual 3-61.1 (Washington: GPO, 1 October 2000), ch. 9, “Information Operations,” http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib...army/fm/3-61-1/.
11. Ibid., para 9-18.
12. US Department of the Army, Information Operations: Doctrine, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, Field Manual 3-13 (FM 100-6) (Washington: GPO, November 2003), para. 4-4.
13. Ibid., para. 4-60.
14. Ibid., box inset.
15. Walter Cronkite, Reuters report, 22 April 2003.
16. Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Embedded Reporters: What Are Americans Getting?” April 2003, http://www.journalism.org/resources/resear...bed/default.asp.
17. Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Mike Jackson, Ministry of Defence Press Conference, London, 28 March 2003.
18. George Wilson, National Journal, interview with PBS, 22 April 2003.
19. US CENTCOM briefing transcript, 27 March 2003, Release No. 03-03-70, http://www.centcom.mil/CENTCOMNews/News_Re...se=20030370.txt.
20. Peters.
21. Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), p. 251.
22. BBC News, “‘Friendly Fire’ Hits Kurdish Convoy,” 6 April 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2921743.stm.
23. “Missing ITN Crew May Have Come Under ‘Friendly Fire,’” The Guardian, 23 March 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,919832,00.html.
24. BBC News, “Al Jazeera ‘Hit by Missile,”’ 8 April 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2927527.stm.
25. Dominic Timms, “War Toll Rises to 51,” The Guardian, 27 August 2004.
26. Ciar Byrne, “Iraq: The Most Dangerous War for Journalists,” The Guardian, 9 April 2003.
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Kenneth Payne is a BBC news producer with an academic and professional background in defense issues. He holds a Ph.D. in US foreign policy and has completed a NATO Research Fellowship. Before joining the BBC he ran the European Security program at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, Britain’s leading defense institute. Within the BBC, he specializes in defense, security, and intelligence issues.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...pring/payne.htm
Instrument of War
KENNETH PAYNE
The media, in the modern era, are indisputably an instrument of war. This is because winning modern wars is as much dependent on carrying domestic and international public opinion as it is on defeating the enemy on the battlefield. And it remains true regardless of the aspirations of many journalists to give an impartial and balanced assessment of conflict.
The experience of the US military in the post-Cold War world demonstrates that victory on the battlefield is seldom as simple as defeating the enemy by force of arms. From Somalia and Haiti through Kosovo and Afghanistan, success has been defined in political, rather than military, terms.
Today’s military commanders stand to gain more than ever before from controlling the media and shaping their output. The laws and conventions of war, however, do not adequately reflect the critical role that the media play in shaping the political outcome of conflicts. International humanitarian law requires that media members are afforded the rights of civilians; the question is whether this is sustainable when the exigencies of warfighting suggest that controlling the media is essential.
The Media and the Laws of War
It is difficult to generalize about the international media, a heterogeneous entity that includes representatives of numerous organizations with varying political and cultural foundations. But it is nonetheless an incontrovertible fact that the international media as a whole are not a neutral force on the battlefield.
Consider the US-led invasion of Iraq. Of course, the US military was aware of the possibility of bad press when it introduced widespread embedding.
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Reporters bring their own perceptions, and the level of access and freedom of reporting entailed in the embedding scheme meant that damaging reports were a real possibility. Indeed, damaging reports eventually occurred, as when The Washington Post quoted Lieutenant General William Wallace as saying that the enemy being fought was “different from the one we war-gamed against.”1
Members of the media remain entitled to express their opinions, whether or not they are billeted with US forces. In an era in which the media are less deferential to authority than World War II, and in wars that are less integral to their home societies, journalists have proved capable of fierce criticism, both of individual participants’ behavior and of the wider strategic purpose of a conflict.
Consider a later example from the occupation of Iraq, the battle for Fallujah in April-May 2004. Writing after the withdrawal of most coalition forces from downtown Fallujah in favor of indigenous Iraqi units, Ralph Peters offered this assessment of the power of the media in determining military outcomes:
The [US] Marines in Fallujah weren’t beaten by the terrorists and insurgents, who were being eliminated effectively and accurately. They were beaten by al-Jazeera. . . . The media [are] often referred to off-handedly as a strategic factor. But we still don’t fully appreciate [their] fatal power. . . . In Fallujah, we allowed a bonanza of hundreds of terrorists and insurgents to escape us—despite promising that we would bring them to justice. We stopped because we were worried about what already hostile populations might think of us. The global media disrupted the US and Coalition chains of command. . . . We could have won militarily. Instead, we surrendered politically and called it a success. Our enemies won the information war. We literally didn’t know what hit us.2
The Fallujah stalemate demonstrates that the neutral status that the press enjoys in conflicts is far removed from neutrality in any normative sense. The question then becomes whether this is an appropriate circumstance, whether it is sustainable, and what are the likely implications.
The Geneva Protocols
The overarching framework of international humanitarian law governing the conduct of belligerents dates to an era before the expansion of international news networks that operate across a range of media and are
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capable of live battlefield reporting. Early international humanitarian law did not give a great deal of attention to the rights and responsibilities of the media in war. As noted in the Commentary on the first Protocol additional to the Geneva Conventions, “International humanitarian law instruments dating from before 1977 do not contain any special provisions relating to journalists or their mission.”3
The 1949 Geneva Conventions do, however, address the position of battlefield reporters, at least in terms of the obligations of combatants toward detained correspondents. Journalists are to be afforded all the protection due to combatants, and, while their equipment could be confiscated on capture, they are not legally obliged to respond to interrogation. Sick or wounded correspondents should receive medical treatment and, if detained by belligerents, they should be treated humanely.
With the 1977 protocols to the Conventions, the situation changed somewhat, with signatories agreeing that journalists should be considered as civilians4 when “engaged in dangerous missions in areas of armed conflict,” provided that “they take no action adversely affecting their status as civilians.”5 To this end, correspondents have an obligation to differentiate themselves from combatants, for example by not wearing military uniforms. As the Commentary on the Protocol states, “On the battlefield a combatant cannot reasonably be asked to spare an individual whom he cannot identify as a journalist.”6 As civilians, journalists are entitled by the 1977 Protocol to “enjoy general protection against the dangers arising from military operations” and “shall not be the object of attack.”7
The United States, unlike the United Kingdom, has not ratified the 1977 Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, but US forces nevertheless have an ingrained tradition of treating the media as noncombatants. In essence this status revolves around the condition established in the Protocol that the media “take no action adversely affecting their status as civilians.” For Alexandre Balguy-Gallois, writing in the International Review of the Red Cross, “The media cannot be considered a legitimate target, even if they are being used for propaganda purposes.” Nonetheless, he concedes “an evident need for the adoption of a new [legal] instrument, . . . to reaffirm those elements of humanitarian law that apply to journalists and media personnel, . . . [and] to improve existing law and adapt it to the requirements of today.”8
By contrast, consider this assessment from the Department of Defense’s Office of General Counsel:
Enemy military forces are declared hostile. They may be attacked at will, along with their equipment and stores. Civilians and civilian property that make a direct contribution to the war effort may also be attacked, along with objects
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whose damage or destruction would produce a military advantage because of their nature, location, purpose, or use. . . .
Civilian media generally are not considered to be lawful military targets, but circumstances may make them so. In both Rwanda and Somalia, for example, civilian radio broadcasts urged the civilian population to commit acts of violence against members of other tribes, in the case of Rwanda, or against UN-authorized forces providing humanitarian assistance, in the case of Somalia. When it is determined that civilian media broadcasts are directly interfering with the accomplishment of a military force’s mission, there is no law of war objection to using the minimum necessary force to shut them down. The extent to which force can be used for purely psychological operations purposes, such as shutting down a civilian radio station for the sole purpose of undermining the morale of the civilian population, is an issue that has yet to be addressed authoritatively by the international community.9
Control of the Media
The relationship between the media and the military hinges on the extent to which the media’s civilian status can be considered compromised by the activities of the armed forces alongside which they operate. At whatever level the media interact with the military during times of conflict, there is always an inherent tension between the ostensible goals of impartial and balanced media reporting and the military objectives of the combatants.
Public Affairs as an Information Operation
Western militaries have given considerable attention to the means through which they might influence the activities and output of the media. Should they choose to exercise them, the tools at their disposal could include deception, distortion, omission, or obfuscation: the tools of political “spin” adapted to the ends of warfighting. Many Public Affairs officers will bridle at the preceding sentence, but it remains the case that, in some circumstances, the interests of the media in pursuit of a story and the military in pursuit of victory do not coincide.
The balance between public affairs and information operations is a delicate one, as indicated in the relevant US Army Field Manual, Public Affairs Tactics, Techniques and Procedures. “Information operations,” notes the manual, “involve a variety of disciplines and activities [including] information campaigns.” Public affairs “support to [information operations] requires . . . synchronization of efforts with other organizations and agencies to ensure themes and messages are consistent and deconflicted.” The language in the manual is instructive: public affairs is not seen as an entity in itself, but as a “related activity” of information operations.10
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The US military, as the manual demonstrates, is acutely aware of the importance of media portrayal of conflict, and has developed an array of techniques to affect that presentation. Public affairs staffs begin their support of information operations by drafting a Public Affairs Estimate, which includes an assessment of the media presence. The estimate addresses the following questions: “What media representatives and organizations are in the area of operation? Are they radio, television, or print? Are they state-run or independent? What is their political slant? Are they pro- or anti-coalition? Are they receptive to coalition information products such as news releases or other print or electronic products?”11
Lying outright to the media may not, in many circumstances, make much sense, but controlling the flow of information emphatically does, and the purpose of the public affairs staff is precisely that—to control the dissemination of information so as to maximize the military and political advantage to US forces.
Of course, outright lies do have a place on the battlefield. A media-savvy commander will also seek to use the media to directly affect the enemy’s plans, as part of a military deception operation. The current US Army field manual on information operations provides further details on the military advantages that can be gained from skillful manipulation of the media. Military deception, it notes, is “a fundamental instrument of military art. Its ultimate goal is to deceive adversaries and others about friendly force dispositions, capabilities, vulnerabilities, and intentions.”12 The manual goes on to describe the mechanism through which an enemy can be deceived through the construction of “a plausible, but false, view of the situation, which will lead the deception target into acting in a manner that will accomplish the commander’s goal. Once the story is completed, the [Deception Working Group] determines the deception means necessary to portray the events and indicators.”13
The manual, perhaps understandably in an unclassified text, does not dwell explicitly on the use of the media as a means of disseminating the deception’s story. To be sure, there are also a wide variety of non-media-related means of deceiving opposition forces. But the manual does point to one episode of military deception through the use of the media: the Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973, which it offers as an example of “Conditioning an Adversary.” The Egyptians, it notes, “used deceptive measures and a broad range of centrally directed and controlled deception events involving political and military activities. These included . . . publishing reports in the press that officers would be allowed leave for the annual hajj pilgrimage.”14
Whether for purposes of military deception or more broadly in an effort to control the public and elite perception of a conflict, the US military has a keen interest in influencing how the media perceive the events on the battle-
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field. During the recent invasion of Iraq, the two main methods by which the US military sought to influence the media were the program of embedding reporters and the strategic-level news presentations given by senior personnel in Qatar and Washington.
Embedding
Embedding reporters within military units has long been a feature of Western war—reporters accompanied US forces ashore at Normandy, and in the Vietnam War reporters were given unprecedented latitude in accompanying US forces into battle. Embedding in the recent Iraqi invasion was not so different from these earlier conflicts, except that reporters were tied to one unit, rather than being free to roam. But embedding in Iraq was dramatically different from the experience of the press in other recent conflicts involving the United States, particularly Afghanistan post-9/11 and the 1991 liberation of Kuwait. For Walter Cronkite, “The principal advantage [of embedding] is that it is 180 degrees better than the blackout the military enforced during the first Gulf War.”15
Embedding in its modern guise provides the military with two key advantages in influencing the output of the embedded media. First, embedding with troops restricts a reporter’s view of the battlefield to the view available to the unit he or she is embedded with. The embedding program in the Iraq invasion demonstrated that the media, particularly television news, have a tendency to focus on the drama of the small-scale tactical actions they can see, rather than the broader operational and strategic dimensions of the conflict.
A post-invasion study by Columbia University’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that embedded reports were “largely anecdotal. [They were] combat-focused, and mostly live and unedited. Much [of the reporting] lacks context but is usually rich in detail. It has all the virtues and vices of reporting only what you can see.”16 For Chief of the British General Staff, General Sir Mike Jackson, embedding produces images that “are no more than snapshots at a particular time and a particular place. Dramatic they may be, but frankly they tell you very little, if anything at all, about the progress of the campaign at a strategic level.”17 Clearly this is a mixed blessing for the military, depending on whether it wishes the media to focus on the tactical or strategic dimensions of a conflict at any given time.
What’s more, by choosing which units to embed reporters with, the US military enjoys a high degree of control over which part of the battlefield will receive media coverage—particularly since operating independently on the battlefield has become incredibly dangerous. The preparation of the Medina Republican Guard division, to give just one example, took place from the air, with no embedded reporting available. The same is true of all the Spe-
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cial Forces operations in western Iraq, and much of the Peshmerga-Special Forces operation in the north.
A second advantage of embedding is subtler. When US forces go into combat, the mainstream American media are, in the first instance at least, predisposed to back them. There is a plausible supposition that embedding enhances this tendency, by bringing reporters closer to the soldiers of one side than the other, perhaps to the extent of prompting a subconscious bias in reporting, the product of shared hardships and camaraderie.
For reporters, there is an implicit danger in talking about where “we” go and what “we” have achieved—and this “Stockholm syndrome” is evident even among reporters who aim for the most scrupulous objectivity. For George Wilson, a journalist for the National Journal, the dangers of subconscious bias were very real: “You were put in a position where you would certainly not be antagonistic to the kids that you were involved with and admired, and you went in, in those conditions, without having the ability like I had in other wars to check things out for myself. So in effect I was putting myself in a position to be a propagandist, which was great for the Pentagon, but not so great for the readers.”18
Strategic Presentation
Embedding with units deployed on the battlefield is only one level at which the military can seek to influence the media. During the Iraq invasion, the US military presented a strategic perspective of the battlefield to journalists through daily briefings at the Central Command (CENTCOM) field headquarters in Qatar and at the Pentagon. The British military also held occasional briefings in London, timed to fit the news cycle and minimize the potential for conflicting messages with the other coalition media outlets.
But the strategic-level presentations, as they had in the earlier liberation of Kuwait, received a mixed reception from the media, in marked contrast to the widespread enthusiasm for embedding. Several of the network reporters dispatched to CENTCOM headquarters in Qatar expressed displeasure at the flow of “big picture” information from coalition headquarters. On 27 March 2003, for example, Michael Wolff of New York Magazine drew applause from assembled journalists when he asked the CENTCOM briefer, “Why should we stay? What’s the value to us for what we learn at this million-dollar press center?” The immediate answer, from Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, was that reporters should try to gather the “entire mosaic” of information. He emphasized the role of embedded media, who “tell a very important story,” but added that the Central Command briefings were an important part of the big picture.19
But the quality and quantity of information provided at the briefings did not always bear out Brooks’s comments: very little, for example, is known
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about critical Special Forces operations, or about coalition battle damage assessments—how many tanks were destroyed by the coalition, what proportion of missiles missed their targets. From this perspective, the focus on embedded reports allowed the military to control the “big picture” portrayal of the war, even if they had limited control of the tactical presentation by embedded reporters. And embedding diverted the media’s attention from the relative paucity of information available elsewhere.
Media Control, and the Lack of It
Widespread embedding during the invasion of Iraq encouraged the media to focus on the tactical level, the more so given the relative paucity of strategic detail available. This suited the coalition strategy very well. The invasion was conducted with a relatively small force, if anything enhancing the importance of strategic surprise, as exemplified by the uncertainty over the destination of the 4th Infantry Division, the drive through the Karbala gap by the 3d Infantry Division, and the air assault north from Kuwait into the western desert by the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). In other circumstances, the US military will doubtless need to adopt a different media approach.
Post-invasion Iraq provides a good contrast. The protracted insurgency that followed the end of major combat operations in Iraq has presented new challenges for the coalition in seeking to shape the media picture of conditions on the battlefield. Embedding with the military remained an option for some reporters, but—at least until the spate of journalistic kidnappings beginning in April 2004—many reporters preferred to operate independently, often accompanied by their own security advisors.
In many ways, the low-intensity insurgency war currently under way in Iraq is more typical of the semi-permissive environment normally facing war correspondents than was the invasion itself. In Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere, correspondents work in dangerous and uncertain environments. The BBC requires that all staff deploying to such hotspots complete a one-week hostile environment training program. Other media organizations make similar arrangements for their staffs. Controlling the media in these semi-permissive environments presents a different challenge for Western militaries, but one that is critically important, given the centrality of the media in denying, or shaping, the information available to the enemy, and in favorably influencing the domestic and international portrayal of military activities.
The experience of US Marines in Fallujah (April 2004) and in Najaf (August 2004) typifies the problem. Early moves to decisively engage and defeat insurgent groups in the towns were rapidly stymied by media reporting of hardship in the towns and of considerable damage to the urban environ-
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ment. Political pressure to limit the assault quickly followed, and the Marines subsequently withdrew—in the case of Fallujah, to be replaced by nominal Iraqi authority control, and in Najaf by a negotiated settlement to secure the return of the Imam Ali shrine.
In both examples, the abiding perception is one of strategic defeat for US forces, whatever the tactical success achieved by the Marines. Fallujah remained an insurgent stronghold, and Moqtada al Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” withdrew from Najaf in good order. From this Ralph Peters drew the conclusion that the best way to counter adverse media reporting of the sort he perceived around Fallujah in May 2004 is to “speed the kill. . . . We must direct our doctrine, training, equipment, organization, and plans toward winning low-level fights much faster. Before the global media can do what enemy forces cannot do and stop us short. We can still win the big campaigns. But we’re apt to lose thereafter, in the dirty end-game fights.”20
Peters’ approach amounts to conducting military combat without a media presence. He suggests speed as one factor—space is another. Sometimes the sheer remoteness of the battlefield, or the level of risk involved, will serve to limit the presence of the media. The invasion of Afghanistan illustrates the point, with little scope for independents to operate in Taliban-held areas of the country, or in the disputed border regions adjacent to Pakistan. Somalia, Chechnya, Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, the southern Philippines, and Kashmir are other examples of places deemed too risky for deploying reporters by many media organizations. On the whole, however, there will always be some sort of media presence, no matter how difficult the terrain or how rapid the military exploitation of a given scenario. Bold freelancers and local operatives armed with satellite phones ensure that there will usually be a Fallujah byline if the story merits one.
Targeting the Media
If the media are present, and they are undermining the political-military strategy, it makes sense to control them. If they are behaving in a non-neutral way, it may even seem appropriate to target them. But where are the boundaries of neutrality? Perhaps targeting is lawful if your enemy is using the media to defeat you militarily, for example through a deception operation. But what if he is merely shaping the media reporting of the conflict through his own information operations? Would targeting the media be legitimate in these circumstances, even if the media were not complicit in this strategy? Or what if the media in question have brought their own damaging prejudices to the battlefield, regardless of the ambition of the enemy to control them?
The broad outlines of debate are readily apparent, as illustrated by the opinion from the Pentagon counsel quoted earlier. If the media are behav-
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ing impartially, then they are entitled to treatment as civilians. Where they are not, the assessment of the general counsel suggests that they can be targeted militarily. The trick is in making an accurate judgment about their partiality and the motives behind it.
A recent example dates from the Kosovo conflict in 1999, when Allied forces successfully attacked the studios of Radio-TV Serbia, the state broadcaster. General Wesley Clark, then NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, offers this retrospective in his book Waging Modern War:
It was difficult to get political approval for striking the television stations, because strikes on television facilities seemed undemocratic and perhaps illegal. . . . At one point I had secured French permission to attack the Serb television transmitter, as well as American approval, only to have NATO balk when some of the ambassadors questioned whether the target was truly military. . . . I tried to craft a public explanation of the military value of the transmitters, which didn’t succeed.21
Approval was eventually forthcoming, however, and the attack on the station’s Belgrade headquarters on 23 April resulted in a temporary disruption of broadcasting, and approximately ten staff fatalities. Clearly, the Serbian state-run media were not behaving with scrupulous impartiality in reporting the conflict and, moreover, they were bureaucratically an agent of their government.
The situation is somewhat more complicated where non-state-controlled media are operating. Some such media may aim to be more impartial than others, and where they are behaving in a biased manner, legal opinion may conclude that they can no longer be classed as civilians.
But making a judgment about the impartiality of a broadcaster or newspaper is problematic. Suppose a television channel were showing graphic footage of the civilian casualties caused by your troops, or that they screened interviews with dejected prisoners of war captured by your enemy. In both examples, this footage could have an effect on the perceptions of the war among viewers on both sides of the conflict. While the combatants themselves are prohibited from this sort of activity, the independent media are not legally a party to the conflict. But does that mean that the station can be legitimately targeted? Then there is the question of proportionate response—should you jam their transmissions, discredit them somehow, or counter their message with your own propaganda? Keeping them away from areas of the battlefield where their reporting would be damaging seems sensible enough, but what lengths can one go to in order to achieve that?
Then there is the problem of whether it is enough that the media themselves strive to be impartial, even if the constraints of the battlefield and the deliberate efforts of the combatants are undermining their efforts. If their
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host combatant is engaged in information operations intended to favorably shape the media message, such that the media’s output serves to further the purposes of that belligerent, then there are legitimate questions about the de facto neutrality of the media, even if the media organization attempts to be scrupulously impartial and objective. Can rigorous objectivity realistically be achieved in such circumstances? In the language of the Pentagon’s counsel, could such a broadcaster be making “a direct contribution to the war effort,” in which case might the provisions of the Geneva Protocols be moot?
As to whether the international media have ever deliberately been violently attacked by Western forces, it is impossible for an outsider to provide a definitive answer, but it seems improbable in most conceivable circumstances. There were several episodes during the invasion of Iraq in which international media were hit by fire from coalition troops. In April 2003, a BBC team led by veteran correspondent John Simpson and traveling south toward Baghdad from Kurdish-controlled territory was hit by a bomb apparently dropped from a coalition aircraft, despite the presence nearby of US Special Forces.22 Earlier in the conflict, the ITN reporter Terry Lloyd was killed in uncertain circumstances while driving in southern Iraq.23 In the most controversial incident, US forces apparently fired on the offices of Al-Jazeera in Baghdad.24
In all three cases, there is no evidence of deliberate forethought. Furthermore, there was little incentive for the coalition to target the media during the invasion, even when they did not appreciate the reporting. Coalition forces were easily achieving their military objectives in Iraq and enjoying a broadly sympathetic press, at least in the United States. Lloyd and Simpson were both well-schooled in the principles of impartial and objective reporting and had chosen to operate as “independents,” outside the embedding program, partly in an effort to maximize their autonomy. And even in the case of Al-Jazeera, which was broadcasting material in the Middle East that could readily be construed as damaging to US objectives, the lasting opprobrium consequent on attacking the office easily outweighed the temporary advantage from interrupting Al-Jazeera operations in Baghdad.
Journalists have, however, become targets of one of the combatants in post-invasion Iraq, with a number of reporters having been kidnapped by insurgents, and some later executed. The objective appears to have been to undermine support for the reconstruction process, rather than to neutralize a media inimical to their objectives. In fact, the media in post-invasion Iraq were in some ways working to the advantage of the insurgents by publicizing hostage-taking of Western company employees engaged in the reconstruction effort, and giving exposure to the inability of US forces to subdue parts of the country—notably Fallujah—without recourse to politically unsustainable levels of urban violence.
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By late August 2004, according to the International News Safety Institute, 51 media workers had died in Iraq since the start of the conflict 17 months earlier.25 Some of these were killed deliberately by one of the parties to the conflict, some were caught up in the cross-fire, and some were killed in accidents. There is no convincing evidence that coalition forces deliberately targeted any reporters. Nonetheless, the centrality of public opinion, both in the region and among the domestic audience in coalition countries, means that the sorts of tricky legal and ethical issues outlined above are likely to become concrete, rather than hypothetical, questions for military lawyers in the years ahead.
Veteran British war correspondent Martin Bell, quoted in The Guardian shortly after the bombing of Al-Jazeera’s office, expressed his concern that “independent witnessing of war is becoming increasingly dangerous, and this may be the end of it. I have a feeling that independent journalists have become a target because the management of the information war has become a higher priority than ever.”26 Bell might be wrong in the sense of journalists being deliberately attacked by Western forces, but in the broader sense of the importance of controlling the media on the battlefield, he is surely correct in suggesting that the importance of information operations makes the job of a war correspondent more difficult and perhaps more dangerous than before.
Conclusion
The conflicts of the last decade have amply demonstrated that the media, ostensibly non-state actors, have become an important party in many international conflicts. In conflicts involving advanced Western militaries, this is accentuated by the evolution and increasing importance of information operations. Winning the media war is crucially important to Western war-planners, and increasingly sophisticated methods for doing so have been developed— albeit with varying results.
And while the means and objectives of waging war have changed dramatically during the last decade, the press itself also has undergone a dramatic transformation. The developments of the last decade scarcely need rehearsing; from 24-hour rolling news stations to the proliferation of on-line current affairs websites and blogs, the news-oriented public has a greater range of sources than ever before, and the military has a commensurately more complex task in winning the information war.
The existing legal framework covering the position of the media during conflict was established before many of these developments. The question now is whether a consensus can be found that systematically addresses the new realities of war-reporting. With reporters increasingly vul-
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nerable under the existing arrangements, perhaps it is time to consider a new humanitarian law specifically addressing the issues raised above.
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NOTES
1. Rick Atkinson, “General: A Longer War Likely,” The Washington Post, 28 March 2003, p. A01. For more detail on the background of this episode, see Rick Atkinson, In the Company of Soldiers (London: Little Brown, 2004), pp. 171-75.
2. Ralph Peters, “Kill Faster,” New York Post, 20 May 2004.
3. Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977. Part IV: Civilian population. Section III—Treatment of persons in the power of a party to the conflict, Chapter III—Journalists. This Protocol and subsequent references to the Geneva Conventions may be found at http://www.icrc.org.
4. The Geneva conventions define civilians in “Convention III Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Part I (1949).” Article 50 defines a civilian as anyone who is not a member of the armed forces of a party to the conflict, or of a militia, or an inhabitant of a non-occupied territory who takes up arms on the approach of invading forces, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws of war.
5. Article 79, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I). The relevant text in full reads: “1. Journalists engaged in dangerous professional missions in areas of armed conflict shall be considered as civilians within the meaning of Article 50. . . . 2. They shall be protected as such under the Conventions and this Protocol, provided that they take no action adversely affecting their status as civilians.”
6. Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977. Part IV: Civilian population, Section III, Chapter III—Journalists, Commentary at para 2. This is an interesting point given the proclivity of Special Forces soldiers to wear a hybrid of military and civilian outdoor clothing, and the tendency of some journalists to do likewise.
7. Article 51, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977.
8. Alexandre Balguy-Gallois, “The Protection of Journalists and News Media Personnel in Armed Conflict,” International Review of the Red Cross, March 2004, pp. 37-68.
9. Department of Defense, Office of General Counsel, “An Assessment of International Legal Issues in Information Operations,” May 1999, pp. 6-9, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dod-io...od-io-legal.pdf.
10. US Department of the Army, Public Affairs Tactics, Techniques and Procedures, Field Manual 3-61.1 (Washington: GPO, 1 October 2000), ch. 9, “Information Operations,” http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib...army/fm/3-61-1/.
11. Ibid., para 9-18.
12. US Department of the Army, Information Operations: Doctrine, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, Field Manual 3-13 (FM 100-6) (Washington: GPO, November 2003), para. 4-4.
13. Ibid., para. 4-60.
14. Ibid., box inset.
15. Walter Cronkite, Reuters report, 22 April 2003.
16. Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Embedded Reporters: What Are Americans Getting?” April 2003, http://www.journalism.org/resources/resear...bed/default.asp.
17. Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Mike Jackson, Ministry of Defence Press Conference, London, 28 March 2003.
18. George Wilson, National Journal, interview with PBS, 22 April 2003.
19. US CENTCOM briefing transcript, 27 March 2003, Release No. 03-03-70, http://www.centcom.mil/CENTCOMNews/News_Re...se=20030370.txt.
20. Peters.
21. Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), p. 251.
22. BBC News, “‘Friendly Fire’ Hits Kurdish Convoy,” 6 April 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2921743.stm.
23. “Missing ITN Crew May Have Come Under ‘Friendly Fire,’” The Guardian, 23 March 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,919832,00.html.
24. BBC News, “Al Jazeera ‘Hit by Missile,”’ 8 April 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2927527.stm.
25. Dominic Timms, “War Toll Rises to 51,” The Guardian, 27 August 2004.
26. Ciar Byrne, “Iraq: The Most Dangerous War for Journalists,” The Guardian, 9 April 2003.
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Kenneth Payne is a BBC news producer with an academic and professional background in defense issues. He holds a Ph.D. in US foreign policy and has completed a NATO Research Fellowship. Before joining the BBC he ran the European Security program at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, Britain’s leading defense institute. Within the BBC, he specializes in defense, security, and intelligence issues.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...pring/payne.htm
Unintended Alliance:
The Co-option of
Humanitarian Aid in Conflicts
MATTHEW LERICHE
Pillage, plunder, and theft have long been a part of war. Barbarian armies and marauding bandits used these tactics prolifically. The campaigns of Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great are archetypes of mass armies using plunder as a component of logistical systems. The plunder approach to supply has its modern roots in the speed with which Napoleon’s armies raced across Europe during the Napoleonic wars.1 What is new about the plunder technique of supply procurement is how, on occasion, it has been used against aid organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other suppliers of humanitarian assistance. During the Cold War, Western states funded and supplied the enemies of the Soviets, while the Soviets aided the enemies of the United States. When the United States and the Soviet Union began to disengage from the many conflicts spawned by the failure of decolonization, particularly in Africa, insurgents and governments had to find new methods of providing for the supply of their armed forces. An increasing influx of humanitarian aid from independent and even state donors, intended to help the collateral casualties of war, often has been co-opted to fill part of the void left by the superpowers.
In societies characterized by ancient traditions of rebellion and banditry, accompanied by the established military practice of raiding and pillaging, co-option of humanitarian aid has become a natural extension of military doctrine, as is the case with any other available resource. Since the factions involved in such conflicts either believe they are fighting for the well-being
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of their own ethnic or cultural group, are attempting to deny rivals spoils, or are political and economic opportunists, the moral dimension of depriving noncombatants of aid is not an issue for them.
Despite being widely known, the utilization of the humanitarian aid system as a logistical support system for war is one of the most overlooked constituent tactics of modern warfare. As such, it has not received adequate research or public attention. The lack of consideration of this tactic has had a significant effect on the failure of interventions in many of the world’s conflicts. Indeed, this unorthodox approach to military logistics should be considered as one of the factors that contributes to intervention failures, as in Somalia in 1992 or Rwanda in 1994. The cunning co-option of the massively valuable resources of the humanitarian aid system is how many militaries and paramilitaries have continued to support their soldiers and campaigns despite the loss of military assistance. The determination of aid organizations to remain neutral, however noble, enables local commanders to continue to pillage aid resources intended for those who suffer. Those with guns never go hungry.
When compared with the exploitation of natural resources or narcotics, which are geographically dispersed, the co-option of international humanitarian aid has likely become one of the most reliable sources of funding for belligerents. Because people in the West feel guilty, or obligated, when they see suffering masses on their television screens while enjoying their own comfort or even opulence, they open up their checkbooks and send money.2 The well-intentioned aid and relief organizations in turn are determined that regardless of the political situation they will use the donated money or supplies to provide for the many innocents who are harmed by the conflict that rages, for whatever reason (and there are many). Relief organizations may be only marginally successful in reaching a portion of the civilian population; the rest of the time they may be controlled, manipulated, and bullied by the local tyrants (including governments) whose war is producing the suffering that relief providers intend to alleviate. The combatants, well aware of how aid organizations operate, abuse the shortcomings in the system and funnel resources from donors into their war machines. The huge number of aid agencies clamoring for support from the same pool of donation money and material supplies must show how they are aiding those who suffer. Often in their haste to secure funding, aid organizations rush into war zones without
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thoroughly assessing their potential impact. It is this dynamic that the intelligent field commander of a local militia or opposition group exploits.
It is the goal of this article to describe one aspect of the many evolving tactics of war and to provide background for potential interveners, be they military or civilian. This description should not be misconstrued as a disregard for the value and benefit of humanitarian aid.
The Tactical Level
The tactics of misappropriating aid to support war are quite simple.3 The primary tactics employed are direct theft and coercing aid providers to believe that combatants are actually noncombatants. Both of these activities have been widely documented by Human Rights Watch and other aid organizations. In its 1993 report on “Civilian Devastation—Abuses by All Parties in the War in Southern Sudan,” Human Rights Watch described how armed parties, unable to confiscate aid directly, devised schemes such as food diversion and moving civilians near military base locations in order to facilitate access to aid.4 After battles, many fighters arrived at refugee camps or international aid clinics claiming to have been innocently caught in the middle of the fighting.5 Due to the low-tech nature of the wars into which most of humanitarian aid is delivered, commanders of units of platoon size and smaller are given much more freedom to operate than is typical of major state armies. As a result, many criminal acts become a part of the operational effectiveness of the armed force.
Insurgent forces often convince aid workers or journalists of the nobility of their plight. With such support, the small units are able to access resources easily. This is illustrated vividly in the work Emma’s War, which describes the life of an aid worker (Emma McCune) who falls in love with a leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The author writes, “Aid makes itself out to be a practical enterprise, but in Africa at least it’s romantics who do most of the work.”6
Fighters often use the fact that they have easy access to good supplies, most acquired through the means discussed above, as a coercive method of recruitment. In areas where war or natural disasters have caused severe famine, the control of aid supplies is very important, often so significant as to spark wars or escalate them. The images from Operation Iraqi Free-
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dom of Iraqi civilians rioting and fighting over the few supplies the British forces had brought into Basra is the norm, not the exception, when it comes to aid distribution during conflicts.7 When people are hungry, morals are less observed, survival becomes paramount, and people act on instinct; it is human nature to fight to survive. As a member of an armed force, resources can be acquired for oneself and one’s family with more ease than can be done as a noncombatant. As a result (among other reasons) young men are particularly prone to joining militia forces.
Within refugee camps, militant groups often operate in the manner of organized crime, employing extortion and strong-arm tactics to manipulate the refugee population. Dr. Stephen Keller, a former World Food Program aid worker, described the political situation in the camps along the Thai-Kampuchean border during the early 1980s as “similar to Chicago during Prohibition.”8 Armed gangs, constituents of rival warring factions, skirmished for control of the camps. The Thai army would periodically enter the camps located in Thailand and take what they desired. Thai soldiers would erect checkpoints where they would let aid supplies pass only for a consideration. At night, when aid workers were required by the Thai government to leave the camps, armed factions would enter—pillaging, raping, and fulfilling the “needs” of an insurrection force.9
Because of the power that local factions hold over refugee camp administration, they are able to manipulate the system through which food aid is dispersed. Typically, ration cards are used to indicate who is a legitimate recipient of aid. These ration cards are the indicators the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and most aid organizations use to determine the level of aid required at a camp. The number of ration cards rarely reflects the actual number of refugees requiring aid, however. Most often the card numbers are inflated.10 The gap between the number of ration cards and the actual refugee population is caused by several factors. One is double registration, where individuals or families hold more ration cards than they are entitled to. Additionally, sometimes there are many people who obtain ration cards but never take up residence at the camp. Temporary absences and repatriation also skew the numbers. In a report for Save the Children Fund (UK) regarding several refugee camps in Ethiopia during 1989, the authors found that “seventy percent of the families in Hartisheikh [a refugee camp along the Ethiopia-Somaliland border] had more than one ration card.”11 The majority of supplies obtained above basic need are often acquired by the militant factions that control the camps, or are sold on black markets, where illegal trade is often converted into the means for war.
Refugees are not only vital as a catalyst for maintaining aid levels, but they can also function as human shields, protecting garrisons that are spe-
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cifically located near refugee camps for that purpose. In Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa, John Prendergast writes that “civilian feeding centers or distribution points and the agencies serving them act as a protective cover; when they are attacked, the attack is not just against a military garrison but also against the entire aid system.”12
The Strategic Level
The manipulation and co-option of humanitarian aid exists at the strategic as well as the tactical level. Paramount among strategic activity is the use of aid to direct population movements as well as using population movements to influence the locations where aid is provided. Aid organizations base their assessments of need on the number of people in a particular area who require assistance. In order to acquire the resources of NGO aid, militant groups must somehow convince the NGOs that there is a need in the areas that the militants control. They do this by using scare tactics to drive refugees and internally displaced persons into localities they control, thus creating an actual need. They also loot and pillage areas so as to remove the necessities of life for the civilians, leaving the NGOs to provide even more assistance than if there were just a normal refugee population. For example, warring factions often induce drought and famine through the use of scorched-earth tactics. They consequently receive the spoils of the pillaging as well as the subsequent increased aid.
The benefit of having refugee camps as bases of operation and supply is important for many insurrections. Since aid levels are a function of the number of refugees in particular camps, it is in the interest of warring factions to keep camps populated. For insurgents this is important because they directly use the aid resources; for governments, humanitarian aid is important because it frees up finances for the purchase of arms, mercenaries, and the payment of soldiers. In his Foreign Affairs article “Feeding Refugees or War?” Ben Barber documented how in refugee camps “guerrillas used physical and psychological coercion to keep [refugees] in the camps.”13 After the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ousted the genocidal Hutu regime of the late Habyarimana and his Coalition pour la Defense de la Republique (CDR), the Hutu militias, who relied on the refugee camps along the border with the Congo and Zaire, often withheld news of the Rwandan (RPF) government’s promise of safe return and instead spread propaganda, warning that Tutsis would slaughter the Hutus if they tried to return home.14
Another strategic consideration of belligerents is how the injection of humanitarian aid enhances the illicit economies synonymous with war. The borders of warring states are often porous, resulting in heavy illegal trade which in turn can support both sides at conflict, particularly insurgents. In a
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discussion of the economies of the Horn of Africa, Paul Henze described this phenomenon:
Even during the past decade of acute authoritarian mismanagement and consequent deterioration of the economies of all three major countries, extralegal and informal trade (i.e. smuggling) between them has flourished, and borders that central governments have been unable to control have proved economically porous. . . . The same has been true in large part of the borders of Kenya and Uganda and, to some extent of the sea trade between Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia with Yemen. Djibouti has been a major focal point of all this trade and has functioned, in fact, as the hub of an informal Horn of Africa free trade area.15
What has become known as an “aid economy” can develop when people become dependent on large amounts of humanitarian aid for extended periods of time. The aid economy provides work for locals as laborers on aid projects and in supporting positions throughout the aid infrastructure, such as trucking, shipping, protection, or translation. The theft and resale of vehicles and other equipment provides another source of aid-related income in states that become aid dependent. The maintenance and leasing of housing to aid workers also accounts for a significant level of wartime income. Also, as has been seen in East Timor and Somalia, many shops, restaurants, bars, and other entertainment establishments (often prostitution and drug related) tend to follow aid operations. Not only do locals benefit from the needs of the many aid workers and journalists who inundate war-affected states, but as occurred in East Timor once the UN mission began, many foreign business people (which included a mix of profiteers and legitimate businesspersons) set up restaurants, hotels, and other enterprises. Of course, to allow such an economy, the faction that controls the area in which the businesses are established either levies taxes on them or charges for protection. Oftentimes the entertainment businesses, such as brothels and bars, are run directly by organized crime rings that support militant factions.
In similar fashion, refugee camps themselves can be havens for insurrection groups. Much like the hinterland that enables guerrilla factions to establish protected areas, refugee camps can become sanctuaries for combatants. In an essay titled “Refugee Warriors at the Thai-Cambodian Border,” Cortland Robinson describes how insurgent factions utilized the many refugee camps there as sources of medical supply, food, and safe haven for their families. He describes how the Khmer Rouge would relocate camps from the Thai-Cambodia border into more obscure, mountainous regions, making them more suitable as bases from which to launch insurrections. “From September to October 1988,” he writes, “the Khmer Rouge moved more than 5,400 people from O’Trao, an evacuation site in Thailand, to ‘hidden border’
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camps across the border.”16 Aid organization staff can do little to combat the will of the groups that control the camp system. As Tom Stadler, UN Border Relief Organization (UNBRO) co-coordinator commented, “Nobody seems to have the will and/or the power to oppose the DK [Khmer Rouge] in their moving their population back.”17 Oftentimes camps are maintained very near combat zones, and battlefields are even chosen for their adjacency to refugee camps. Refugee camps have even been found to save insurgent movements from defeat, as “in 1988 with the creation of several refugee camps between the Jigjiga [an area of the borderlands of Somalia and Ethiopia] and Somali frontier, which Issaq guerrillas could use as a sanctuary for the usual purposes, such as food supply, recruitment, and medical treatment.”18 When confronted with the choice of turning away injured people due to their likely involvement in fighting, most aid organizations see assisting some combatants as the lesser of two evils—assisting combatants rather than leaving a noncombatant to die. Sadako Ogata explained the reality of having many combatants mixed in with civilians in refugee camps in her address to the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly in 1997. Commenting on the refugee camps of Eastern Zaire, she said:
The civilian nature of refugee camps—a fundamental tenet of refugee conventions—was not compromised by humanitarian action, but by the failure of states to provide political, material, and military support to separate armed elements and political extremists from refugees. It was this failure—not the providing [of] food and shelter to the refugees—which eventually put humanitarian action on an inevitable collision course with the security concerns of states in the region.19
Refugee camps also provide an ideal environment for the recruiting of soldiers—and particularly child soldiers. Although the laws of war prohibit the use of children as soldiers, many children who live in refugee camps are enlisted by the same militaries that have pledged to protect them.20 It is in this manner that child soldiers and the tactics of humanitarian aid co-option are connected. Child soldiers are ideal for many aspects of guerrilla warfare. They are particularly effective in asymmetrical conflicts since they can go places adult soldiers cannot, both because they are smaller and also because the enemy often refuses to see children as a threat. A child soldier from Burma/Myanmar described how he was used in this way: “I was in the front lines the whole time I was with the opposition force. I used to be assigned to plant mines in areas the enemy passed through. They used us [child soldiers] for reconnaissance and other things like that because if you’re a child the enemy doesn’t notice you much; nor do the villagers.”21
Because children are easily intimidated and vulnerable, they make for very obedient soldiers; they can be told to do the riskiest tasks. Often drugged
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into complicity, child soldiers carry out some of the most horrific of tasks, such as burning villages and setting booby-traps. The use of child soldiers is quickly becoming one of the most serious human rights violations currently plaguing conflict-ridden states, and this phenomenon is enhanced by the poverty-stricken reality of the refugee camps and the dependency developed in societies that have grown accustomed to massive influxes of international aid dollars and resources. More widely, the use of child soldiers has become one of the more important tactical elements of nontraditional warfare, much like the co-option of humanitarian aid has become an increasing element of military logistics strategy. The refugee camp system also has been corrupted by the use of rape and scare tactics in order to coerce refugees to locate in certain areas that are strategically important for belligerent factions.22
Another aspect of the strategic nature of the manipulation of the humanitarian aid system is how aid can legitimize local factions. When a local commander or warlord makes it appear he has secured assistance, it makes it seem that his particular warring faction is benevolent, thus resulting in the support and acceptance of the people, particularly when those people are suffering from famine and the ravages of war. The winning of the “hearts and minds” of the local people is essential for insurrections to succeed. Similarly, the support of locals is equally essential for the counter-insurrection efforts of governments. The gaining of local support has become accepted guerrilla and counterinsurgency doctrine. Since the Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960, the notion of mixing repression and reform credited to Sir Gerald Templar has had a significant effect on the military thinking of insurgents and governments alike.23
Regional geopolitical issues also are a component of how warring factions, whether governmental or insurgent, develop a strategy to manipulate the humanitarian aid system for their benefit. By destabilizing states, insurgent groups often convince the governments of sympathetic states to support, or increase support, for their insurgent movement. In a different way, governments can use the logic of maintaining regional stability to legitimize the use of more brutal force, or to persuade regional or international organizations to enter as intermediaries. Often the entrance of international organizations favors the interests of the established state authorities, since the sanctity of borders and the preservation of sovereignty has long been an important international norm.
A 1995 African Rights report, “Imposing Empowerment,” discussed the logic inherent in warring factions’ strategies of aid co-option. When aid is appropriated, significant anger and tension among the local populations rarely erupts because “civilians have weaker property rights over aid supplies than over their own produce.”24 Because humanitarian aid arrives in
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bulk it can be collected in bulk, requiring fewer human and military resources. The administration of bulk supplies also is much easier than if small bands of fighters were dispatched to loot and acquire local produce and livestock. It is also simpler than taxation. By acquiring goods in bulk, often from refugee camp storehouses or dockside warehouses, the control of supplies is centralized at a relatively high level of command and control, which assists in maintaining discipline among combatants who are often accustomed to personal profiteering during war. The report also comments on how “using aid supplies reduces the security risk to the armies of transporting commodities, as regards both the interception and the tracing of suppliers.”25
Insurgents vs. Governmental Authorities
Despite the similarities in the tactics and even the strategies of insurgent forces and government forces, there are important distinctions between how these two groups co-opt the humanitarian aid system. Insurgent strategy is typically a form of guerrilla warfare similar to that developed by Mao Tse-tung.26 What Mao called “protracted war” contains several stages, each of which can be amended to the conditions of a society dependent on foreign aid. Refugee camps can provide the bases from which guerrillas set up sanctuaries. Refugee camps can even be used as sanctuaries. Factions often direct population movements into remote areas of the country suitable for guerrilla bases, such as mountains or jungles, so that aid groups will feel compelled to provide aid to the areas militant groups intend to use as sanctuaries. Some insurgent groups have gone as far as building airstrips near areas where they have diverted refugee movement to make it easier for aid organizations to bring in resources.27 If a movement is intent on framing goals in an ideological, ethnic, or nationalistic manner, refugee camps provide an ideal situation to politicize the population. Just as Giap in Vietnam28 or Castro and Guevara in Cuba,29 the leaders of modern insurrection movements adapt the military strategy of Mao and other guerrilla strategists, like T. E. Lawrence, to fit their particular circumstances.30 In the case of the conflicts where NGO aid is prevalent, military leaders would be remiss if they did not recognize the advantage of readily available resources, and use them.
Governments tend to be less faithful to a particular type of military strategy when it comes to their manipulation of humanitarian aid systems. Some governments attempt to develop programs of counterinsurgency on the British model of “repression and reform” applied with success during the Malay Crisis of 1948-1960. Sometimes governments see aid as an element of the reform aspect of counterinsurgency strategy. Other times, realizing the importance of humanitarian aid for insurgent groups, they manipulate the aid system to repress the population among whom the insurgents find support.
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The movement of refugee camps into centralized locations and sending government troops to patrol and wreak havoc on those who seek refuge in camps are attempts to repress popular insurgent support. Refugee camps enable governments to maintain control of populations, while not spending money on the basic needs of displaced persons in the camps. Governments can view aid as resources that will enable them to divert financial resources into military development. North Korea is often cited as an example of how some governments spend fortunes on military equipment while their people starve. In countries like North Korea, humanitarian aid often becomes a primary source of sustenance for the civilian population, freeing up government resources for military purposes.31
Governments also use aid in a similar fashion to the insurgent groups. They often bolster the work of NGOs or intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), using aid as a tool to convince the people that they should support the government in its struggle. In this sense it is obvious that regardless of side in internal conflict, all factions realize that if they are to gain control of a country they require the acceptance of the population, whether tacit or active. The efforts of the Sudanese government during the late 1990s to bring “Operation Life-Line Sudan” (OLS) more tightly under its control through its “Peace From Within” strategy is reminiscent of hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency strategies used by other governments. By linking the provision of aid, aid workers, and other aspects of humanitarian assistance to the government, the Sudanese government benefitted from the appearance that it was a major reason for the aid, rather than the likely truth that the aid was being received despite the government. “Going beyond the normal liberties taken by governments, the Sudanese regime [deployed] this comprehensive ‘peace from within’ strategy in areas of significant opposition—armed and unarmed—[while] harassing, imprisoning, and executing those who [did not] comply.”32
In considering how governments act in the aid/conflict dynamic, it is important to keep in mind that there are numerous subsidiary objectives and agendas on the part of government actors. For the sake of brevity and clarity of this discussion on strategies and tactics, a wider analysis of these sub-interests is not included. A more in-depth investigation could provide crucial information for practitioners trying to mitigate the flow of aid into the wrong hands.
Bandits, Profiteers, Looters, and Organized Crime
Unlike governments or insurgents that fight for control of states, reform of governments, or secession of territory, there are many people and groups involved in war that are interested solely in personal financial gain. These groups play an important role in the interaction between humanitarian aid and war. They often work on behalf of or in contract with warring factions,
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both governmental and insurgent alike—sometimes both at the same time. Many such individuals become mercenaries; on occasion they are even hired by NGO workers for protection.
The most serious examples of profiteering and banditry during war have occurred in clan or tribal societies, like Somalia, or in countries where there are significant natural resources (including narcotics). In his work “Somali Armed Movements,” Daniel Compagnon comments that when the young militiamen of the revolutionary forces of the United Somali Congress (USC) “had tasted life in the big city [Mogadishu], with almost free license to loot, kill, and rape, and had come to enjoy it, . . . the distinction between USC combatants and bandits (mooryan) became blurred.”33
Even if conflicts begin with revolutionary purpose, they often descend into profiteering ventures. The profits derived from war can motivate leaders to desire its continuation, particularly in localities where there are few natural resources to profit from should a particular group or individual gain control of the state. In some cases pillage and looting predominate because chains of command are weak. In these instances soldiers are not controlled in a manner that prohibits theft, rape, or other crimes of war.34 Officers may use the prospect of confiscated and stolen goods as an incentive to retain forces; otherwise many of the combatants will simply leave or take up arms for the faction that can provide enough reward. Combatants who make decisions in this way can conceptually be considered mercenaries. Aid causes a protraction of war in these situations because as long as war is ongoing, aid flows; if the war ends, so does the aid, and without aid many profiteers lose their livelihoods—thus it is logical for those who benefit to desire a continuation of the conflict. Understanding that most societal forces are driven by some form of economic behavior, the assertion of Clausewitz that “war is a continuation of politics by other means” might be more appropriately phrased as “war is a continuation of economics by other means.”35
Wars themselves often produce a descent into more and more profiteering. Much like the “War Trap” described by Alex De Waal, the more de-
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struction and desolation a war causes, the more likely people are to resort to activities focused on economic gain or sustenance. David Keen explains this cycle in his essay “Incentives and Disincentives for Violence”:
Civil wars are not static over time. A growing proportion of civil wars appear to have started with the aim of taking over or retaining the reins of the state or of breaking away in secessionist revolt and appear to have subsequently mutated (often very quickly) into wars where immediate agendas (notably economic agendas) may significantly prolong civil wars: Not only do they constitute a vested interest in continued conflict, they also tend to create widespread destitution, which itself may feed into economically motivated violence.36
Death Squads, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide
The infrastructure of the humanitarian aid system is often used, unwittingly, as an aspect of the strategy of retribution, ethnic cleansing, and even campaigns of genocide. Refugee camps can, in effect, become concentration camps that facilitate the administration of ethnic cleansing.
With the expansion of the humanitarian aid industry, combatants have adapted their tactics to include utilizing the refugee camp system to facilitate their strategies of genocide and retribution. By directing particular groups into camps that are thus exposed to extreme conditions of deprivation, particular groups can be starved out of existence. An example of such efforts occurred during the 1980s in Sudan, when the regime of the time forced Nuba living in Khartoum off their property and into refugee camps in the south, in many cases back to the rural areas from which they had originally emigrated. It has been estimated that during the 1980s more than 500,000 Nuba were relocated to desert camps, “where, according to a UN official, not even a locust can survive.”37
During the Bosnian War, when aid convoys broke through to the enclave of Srebrenica, the UNHCR decided to evacuate most of the people, which served the purposes of the Serb forces that had laid siege to the city with the intention of removing the Bosnian Muslim population; the ethnic cleansing thus was conducted at little or no expense to the Serbian army. By deciding to evacuate the civilians from Srebrenica, “aid agencies were confronted with the moral predicament that they could contribute to the ethnic cleansing.”38
The registration schemes required to allocate food aid and to effectively organize refugee populations, in particular for future repatriation, also provide an ideal resource to identify specific people or groups for retribution. Refugees who are registered and controlled in a camp setting exist in a reality analogous to the systematic registration and detainment of Jewish people by the Nazis. Death squads can easily acquire the identity of persons at camps
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and wreak their vengeance. Aid organizations have little power to protect the refugees, as they are often controlled by local militia groups or militaries. Often aid workers are not even allowed in the camps after dark, with the logic possibly being that there will be no witnesses to nighttime thefts, killings, or abductions.39
Two Firsthand Accounts
Some aid workers are quite disillusioned by the dilemma they see from day to day in their struggles to provide assistance to those in need. Their disillusionment is often due in no small part to the deception and coercion employed by local commanders and combatants.
In Southeast Asia
Dr. Stephen Keller, who has worked extensively with the World Food Program in Southeast Asia, explains that “in every conflict situation in which I have been involved, food was significantly used as a resource by combatants.” His stories of the relief efforts along the Thai-Cambodian border during the 1980s are particularly telling. At that time, three so-called “liberation” groups (one of which was the Khmer Rouge), along with the Thai army, were competing for aid resources. Keller explains that all these groups used similar tactics to divert and siphon aid into their cause: “All were willing to lie, provide false numbers, and even create sham riots in order to disrupt rational and orderly distribution of food or the ration cards needed to receive it.” Such efforts are not surprising considering the value of food in wartime, famine-stricken economies—Keller noted that there were rumors suggesting that in some parts of Cambodia rice was being traded at par for gold. “Food was valuable enough for many people to risk walking through minefields to take it back into Cambodia to [the] black market,” he wrote. Keller describes how the Thais would blackmail the UN and shut down access to the camps unless something was “coughed up.” According to Keller the abuse, misuse, and direct theft of all aid resources, not just food, was rampant. Vehicles, construction materials, and cash were often confiscated. All this occurs because the local military leaders know that the only threat the aid organizations can make is that they will pull out, and the military leaders know that they will not do this; it is in this scenario where the ethical dilemma of providing aid becomes a troubling factor.
Keller also described similar experiences in Pakistan along the Afghan border:
The Mujahedeen factions controlled the camps and the distribution of ration/ID cards. Without aligning yourself with one thuggish group or another (none of
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which had any substantial legitimacy before the Afghan Diaspora) you couldn’t live at all. Question anything and you were killed. Numbers were greatly inflated and surplus resources marketed to the Pakistani public. Also, people registered with more than one faction, and so on.
He continued to explain that there is no feasible way to determine the accurate number of those in need of aid, and that many organizations are comfortable with inflated numbers because they must show a need to their donors:
Resources for fictitious people are off-the-books, which donors can never check with any accuracy. After, all who is going to see if the Kachigari camp has 10,000 [fewer] people than the “Commander” says? Even if he wouldn’t kill you for trying, how could you check without incredible manpower for a census?
Sacks of food with aid organization logos on them and other obviously stolen aid agency resources frequently turn up in places they shouldn’t, and Keller explained that most aid organizations conclude, “That’s the price of admission, and if anyone makes a fuss all access will be denied.”40
In Ethiopia
Samuel Molla, Oxfam Canada’s project coordinator in Ethiopia, who grew up in Southern Ethiopia, has had firsthand experience with how aid impacts and lengthens war.41 His insights are informative as they represent the perspective of both an aid worker and that of a civilian caught in the middle. He recounted one particularly striking story of how refugee camps can be havens and bases of operations for insurgent groups and violent gangs. He described a family that had just arrived at a camp where he was working, coming from a remote, drought-prone area of the Eritrea-Ethiopian border. The family soon experienced the coercive recruiting tactics of the government forces. The family was approached by recruiters and asked if they would be willing to send their son to the armed forces. When the father abruptly said no, the cadre of the local ruling party challenged him by saying, “How do you say no? After all, your son is grown by the food aid that the government is bringing and your entire family is dependent upon.”42 After being challenged the father ceased his resistance and allowed the soldiers to take his son, who upon hearing his father’s decision angrily said, “You prefer the food aid to your son?”43 This family, as were many, was forced to choose between starvation and sending a child to fight. Fortunately, the young man returned home because of a medical condition that rendered him ineffective as a soldier. If such coercion is not successful, many armed groups resort to violence and scare tactics, including threats to kill or rape family members. Samuel explained that many young boys were forced into service this way, and are forced to remain on the threat that their families would be cut off from support.
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Such stories demonstrate the military tactical realities that have a significant impact on the ability of people to achieve stability. Firsthand accounts of aid co-option by combatants are significant because they provide eyewitness evidence of how combatants usurp and corrupt the humanitarian aid system.
Conclusion
Recognizing that there are significant shifts in how low-intensity warfare is being conducted, particularly in the developing world, more work is needed to understand exactly how humanitarian aid interacts with war. A specific approach to the analysis of war that considers resource and logistical tactics is required. Through developing a typology of new low-intensity tactics, the deeper realities of the aid/war dynamic may be discerned. In many cases, a practical view of war must be taken, considering that many wars are not predominantly “the continuation of politics by other means,”44 but an extension of economic behavior and self-preservation.
The study of the interaction of war and humanitarian aid offers a significant opportunity for the development of empirically based assessment models. By developing such models, the aid community may be able to develop better cost-benefit approaches to the provision of aid. There are many elements critical to developing a better model of the aid/conflict dynamic. The lack of accurate data on the distribution of aid and other resources, along with erratic documentation of refugee camp management, results in significant information gaps that seriously limit the ability to develop new approaches which could mitigate the abuses that occur. However, the assessment of the level of harm relative to the amount of good done will remain a highly subjective exercise. Due to the ethical and practical dilemmas present in providing wartime humanitarian aid, a more comprehensive understanding of how aid and war interact is crucial to doing more good than harm. This article deals with only two of the important actors—combatants and humanitarian aid organizations. There are many other factors and actors involved.
If aid organizations can develop a better understanding of the tactics used to manipulate them, perhaps they can produce more effective counter-strategies. Aid organizations should more actively challenge the principle of impartiality, thus enabling flexible solutions to the problem of aid co-option. This is the first step to developing a truly collaborative effort between governments, NGOs, the UN, militaries, and other local actors. Only through such collaboration can greater steps be taken toward causing more good than harm.
Any suggestions on how to alleviate the problems associated with the provision of wartime humanitarian aid must recognize the associated meth-
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odological and practical difficulties. Gathering the data suggested above is problematic since militant groups are secretive. Also, the conditions within refugee camps and other aid distribution centers are not conducive to methodical record-keeping. There is, however, room for progress to be made between the current state of affairs and the ideal. Also, the collaboration between interveners, although essential, faces the challenge of reconciling various, often conflicting, interests.
Napoleon Bonaparte said that “an army marches on its stomach.” In the case of the combatants in many of the complex wars that have characterized the post-Cold War period, many armies march on the guilt and goodwill behind humanitarian aid. The humanitarian aid system, particularly in the form of food aid, medical aid, and the refugee camp system, has unfortunately provided combatants with significant levels of logistical support. As Oscar Wilde stated in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “Charity creates a multitude of sins.” The challenge for people, nations, and organizations of good will is to mitigate the inevitable sins that plague the provision of humanitarian aid in conflict situations.
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NOTES
1. See Peter Paret, “Napoleon and the Revolution in War,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), pp.127-28.
2. For an interesting discussion, see Michael Ignatieff, “The Stories We Tell: Television and Humanitarian Aid,” in Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention, ed. Jonathan Moore (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
3. In the case of the co-option of foreign aid, the distinction between strategic and tactical becomes important, as the manipulation of humanitarian aid occurs differently at each level of action. Understanding something as strategic or tactical is critical for the analysis of nontraditional warfare. Per Clausewitz, tactics are the use of forces in the battlefield, including maneuver of men and equipment, while strategy is how one uses battles to win a war. Today strategy is more than using battles to win a war, however, especially since the end of the Cold War. It has become the use of tactical victories to achieve a political or economic goal. See Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Anatol Rapaport (London: Penguin Classic edition, 1982).
4. Human Rights Watch, “Civilian Devastation—Abuses by All Parties in the War in Southern Sudan,” Human Rights Watch Report, December 2002, http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/sudan.
5. Daniel Compagnon, “Somali Armed Movements: The Interplay of Political Entrepreneurship and Clan Based Factions,” in African Guerrillas, ed. Christopher Clapham (Oxford, Eng.: James Curry, 1998), p. 77.
6. Deborah Scroggins, Emma’s War (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), pp. 17-20.
7. BBC reports on www.BBC.com, May, June, and July 2003.
8. Stephen Keller, “Kampuchean Refugee Relief,” unpublished paper, p. 5.
9. Interview with Dr. Stephen Keller, former World Food Program coordinator in Southeast Asia, November 2002.
10. See figure in John Ryle, “Notes on the Repatriation of Somali Refugees from Ethiopia,” Disasters, 16 (June 1992), 164.
11. Cited in Ryle, pp. 162-64.
12. Jon Prendergast, Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa (London: Lynne Rienner, 1996), pp. 20-21.
13. Ben Barber, “Feeding Refugees, or War?” Foreign Affairs, 76 (July/August 1997), 11.
14. Ibid., p. 13.
15. Paul Henze, “The Primacy of Economics for the Future of the Horn of Africa,” in The Horn of Africa, ed. Charles Gurdon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp.18-24.
16. Courtland Robinson, “Refugee Warriors at the Thai-Cambodia Border,” Refugee Survey Quarterly, 19 (April 2000), 23-37.
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17. Ibid., pp. 23-24.
18. Compagnon, pp.76-77. Also see George Klay Kieh, Jr., “The Somali Civil War,” in Zones of Conflict in Africa: Theories and Cases, ed. George Klay Kieh, Jr., and Ida Rousseau Mukenge (London: Praeger, 2002), pp.124-36.
19. Joel Boutroue, “Missed Opportunities: The Role of the International Community in the Return of Rwandan Refugees from Eastern Zaire,” cited in Robinson, p. 36.
20. Human Rights Watch, “My Gun Was as Tall as Me: Child Soldiers in Burma,” Human Rights Watch Report, October 2002, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/burma/index.htm.
21. Human Rights Watch, “The Voices of Child Soldiers,” http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/voices.htm. Also see Rachel Brett and Margaret McCallin, Children: The Invisible Soldiers (New York: Radda Baren, 1996), p. 127.
22. See Vincent J. Goulding, Jr., “Back to the Future with Asymmetrical Warfare,” Parameters, 30 (Winter 2000-2001), 21-30. Also, Todd A. Slazman, “Rape Camps as a Means of Ethnic Cleansing: Religious, Cultural, and Ethical Responses to Rape Victims in the Former Yugoslavia,” Human Rights Quarterly, 20 (May 1998), 35.
23. See Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), particularly chaps. 6 and 7.
24. African Rights, “Imposing Empowerment,” Discussion Paper No. 7, December 1995, p. 6, cited in Prendergast.
25. Ibid., p. 54.
26. See Mao Tse-tung, “On Guerrilla Warfare,” in The Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Vol. IX, ed. Brian Basgen (Maoist Documentation Project, 2000), in the Mao Tse-tung Reference Archive at www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/index.htm. Also see Lawrence Stone, “Theories of Revolution,” and Bruno Shaw, “Selections from Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung,” both in Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare, ed. Sam C. Sarkesian (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1976).
27. Prendergast, p. 20.
28. For a discussion of Giap’s strategy, see Sam C. Sarkesian, Unconventional Conflicts in a New Security Era: Lessons from Malay and Vietnam (London: Greenwood Press, 1993), pp. 75-95, 166.
29. For a discussion of Guevara’s and Castro’s strategies, see J. Moreno, “Che Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare: Doctrine Practice, and Evaluation,” in Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare, pp. 395-410.
30. See Charles Townshend, “People’s Wars,” in The Oxford History of Modern War, ed. Charles Townshend (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), pp.178-93.
31. See Mika Aaltola, “Emergency Food Aid as a Means of Political Persuasion in the North Korean Famine,” Third World Quarterly, 20 (No. 2, 1999), 371-86. Also see World Food Program News Service, “Korea: US Food Aid Successful Even if it Feeds the Military (AFP, 28/7/00) and more . . . ” a compilation report of news and other source reporting on North Korea’s use of food aid.
32. Prendergast, pp. 32-33.
33. Compagnon, p. 79.
34. David Keen, “Incentives and Disincentives for Violence,” in Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, ed. Mats Berdal and David M. Malone (London: Rienner Publishers and the International Development Research Centre, 2000), p. 27.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p.25.
37. Cited in Frances Stewart and Emma Samman, “Food Aid During Civil War: Conflicting Conclusions Derived from Alternative Approaches,” in War and Underdevelopment: The Economic and Social Consequences of Conflict, ed. Frances Stewart, Valpy FitzGerald, and associates (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), p. 175.
38. Quoted in David Shearer, “Aiding or Abetting? Humanitarian Aid and its Economic Role in Civil War” in Keen, pp. 192-93.
39. For a discussion of the tactics of death squads in the El-Salvador context, see Neil C. Livingstone “Death Squads,” World Affairs, 146 (No. 3, 1983-1984), 239-48.
40. Material in this section is drawn from interviews with Dr. Keller conducted in November 2002, and from correspondence while he was in the field in Laos until March 2003. The dialogue was conducted in person or via e-mail.
41. Interviews were conducted with Mr. Molla during his visit to St. John’s during the launch of Oxfam’s Fair Trade Coffee campaign, 2002.
42. As recounted by Molla during interview.
43. Ibid.
44. See Clausewitz, On War.
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Matthew LeRiche, from Newfoundland, Canada, is engaged in postgraduate studies at the Department of War Studies, King’s College, University of London. He is an honors graduate of Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, in political science and law and society.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...ing/leriche.htm
The Co-option of
Humanitarian Aid in Conflicts
MATTHEW LERICHE
Pillage, plunder, and theft have long been a part of war. Barbarian armies and marauding bandits used these tactics prolifically. The campaigns of Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great are archetypes of mass armies using plunder as a component of logistical systems. The plunder approach to supply has its modern roots in the speed with which Napoleon’s armies raced across Europe during the Napoleonic wars.1 What is new about the plunder technique of supply procurement is how, on occasion, it has been used against aid organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other suppliers of humanitarian assistance. During the Cold War, Western states funded and supplied the enemies of the Soviets, while the Soviets aided the enemies of the United States. When the United States and the Soviet Union began to disengage from the many conflicts spawned by the failure of decolonization, particularly in Africa, insurgents and governments had to find new methods of providing for the supply of their armed forces. An increasing influx of humanitarian aid from independent and even state donors, intended to help the collateral casualties of war, often has been co-opted to fill part of the void left by the superpowers.
In societies characterized by ancient traditions of rebellion and banditry, accompanied by the established military practice of raiding and pillaging, co-option of humanitarian aid has become a natural extension of military doctrine, as is the case with any other available resource. Since the factions involved in such conflicts either believe they are fighting for the well-being
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of their own ethnic or cultural group, are attempting to deny rivals spoils, or are political and economic opportunists, the moral dimension of depriving noncombatants of aid is not an issue for them.
Despite being widely known, the utilization of the humanitarian aid system as a logistical support system for war is one of the most overlooked constituent tactics of modern warfare. As such, it has not received adequate research or public attention. The lack of consideration of this tactic has had a significant effect on the failure of interventions in many of the world’s conflicts. Indeed, this unorthodox approach to military logistics should be considered as one of the factors that contributes to intervention failures, as in Somalia in 1992 or Rwanda in 1994. The cunning co-option of the massively valuable resources of the humanitarian aid system is how many militaries and paramilitaries have continued to support their soldiers and campaigns despite the loss of military assistance. The determination of aid organizations to remain neutral, however noble, enables local commanders to continue to pillage aid resources intended for those who suffer. Those with guns never go hungry.
When compared with the exploitation of natural resources or narcotics, which are geographically dispersed, the co-option of international humanitarian aid has likely become one of the most reliable sources of funding for belligerents. Because people in the West feel guilty, or obligated, when they see suffering masses on their television screens while enjoying their own comfort or even opulence, they open up their checkbooks and send money.2 The well-intentioned aid and relief organizations in turn are determined that regardless of the political situation they will use the donated money or supplies to provide for the many innocents who are harmed by the conflict that rages, for whatever reason (and there are many). Relief organizations may be only marginally successful in reaching a portion of the civilian population; the rest of the time they may be controlled, manipulated, and bullied by the local tyrants (including governments) whose war is producing the suffering that relief providers intend to alleviate. The combatants, well aware of how aid organizations operate, abuse the shortcomings in the system and funnel resources from donors into their war machines. The huge number of aid agencies clamoring for support from the same pool of donation money and material supplies must show how they are aiding those who suffer. Often in their haste to secure funding, aid organizations rush into war zones without
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thoroughly assessing their potential impact. It is this dynamic that the intelligent field commander of a local militia or opposition group exploits.
It is the goal of this article to describe one aspect of the many evolving tactics of war and to provide background for potential interveners, be they military or civilian. This description should not be misconstrued as a disregard for the value and benefit of humanitarian aid.
The Tactical Level
The tactics of misappropriating aid to support war are quite simple.3 The primary tactics employed are direct theft and coercing aid providers to believe that combatants are actually noncombatants. Both of these activities have been widely documented by Human Rights Watch and other aid organizations. In its 1993 report on “Civilian Devastation—Abuses by All Parties in the War in Southern Sudan,” Human Rights Watch described how armed parties, unable to confiscate aid directly, devised schemes such as food diversion and moving civilians near military base locations in order to facilitate access to aid.4 After battles, many fighters arrived at refugee camps or international aid clinics claiming to have been innocently caught in the middle of the fighting.5 Due to the low-tech nature of the wars into which most of humanitarian aid is delivered, commanders of units of platoon size and smaller are given much more freedom to operate than is typical of major state armies. As a result, many criminal acts become a part of the operational effectiveness of the armed force.
Insurgent forces often convince aid workers or journalists of the nobility of their plight. With such support, the small units are able to access resources easily. This is illustrated vividly in the work Emma’s War, which describes the life of an aid worker (Emma McCune) who falls in love with a leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The author writes, “Aid makes itself out to be a practical enterprise, but in Africa at least it’s romantics who do most of the work.”6
Fighters often use the fact that they have easy access to good supplies, most acquired through the means discussed above, as a coercive method of recruitment. In areas where war or natural disasters have caused severe famine, the control of aid supplies is very important, often so significant as to spark wars or escalate them. The images from Operation Iraqi Free-
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dom of Iraqi civilians rioting and fighting over the few supplies the British forces had brought into Basra is the norm, not the exception, when it comes to aid distribution during conflicts.7 When people are hungry, morals are less observed, survival becomes paramount, and people act on instinct; it is human nature to fight to survive. As a member of an armed force, resources can be acquired for oneself and one’s family with more ease than can be done as a noncombatant. As a result (among other reasons) young men are particularly prone to joining militia forces.
Within refugee camps, militant groups often operate in the manner of organized crime, employing extortion and strong-arm tactics to manipulate the refugee population. Dr. Stephen Keller, a former World Food Program aid worker, described the political situation in the camps along the Thai-Kampuchean border during the early 1980s as “similar to Chicago during Prohibition.”8 Armed gangs, constituents of rival warring factions, skirmished for control of the camps. The Thai army would periodically enter the camps located in Thailand and take what they desired. Thai soldiers would erect checkpoints where they would let aid supplies pass only for a consideration. At night, when aid workers were required by the Thai government to leave the camps, armed factions would enter—pillaging, raping, and fulfilling the “needs” of an insurrection force.9
Because of the power that local factions hold over refugee camp administration, they are able to manipulate the system through which food aid is dispersed. Typically, ration cards are used to indicate who is a legitimate recipient of aid. These ration cards are the indicators the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and most aid organizations use to determine the level of aid required at a camp. The number of ration cards rarely reflects the actual number of refugees requiring aid, however. Most often the card numbers are inflated.10 The gap between the number of ration cards and the actual refugee population is caused by several factors. One is double registration, where individuals or families hold more ration cards than they are entitled to. Additionally, sometimes there are many people who obtain ration cards but never take up residence at the camp. Temporary absences and repatriation also skew the numbers. In a report for Save the Children Fund (UK) regarding several refugee camps in Ethiopia during 1989, the authors found that “seventy percent of the families in Hartisheikh [a refugee camp along the Ethiopia-Somaliland border] had more than one ration card.”11 The majority of supplies obtained above basic need are often acquired by the militant factions that control the camps, or are sold on black markets, where illegal trade is often converted into the means for war.
Refugees are not only vital as a catalyst for maintaining aid levels, but they can also function as human shields, protecting garrisons that are spe-
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cifically located near refugee camps for that purpose. In Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa, John Prendergast writes that “civilian feeding centers or distribution points and the agencies serving them act as a protective cover; when they are attacked, the attack is not just against a military garrison but also against the entire aid system.”12
The Strategic Level
The manipulation and co-option of humanitarian aid exists at the strategic as well as the tactical level. Paramount among strategic activity is the use of aid to direct population movements as well as using population movements to influence the locations where aid is provided. Aid organizations base their assessments of need on the number of people in a particular area who require assistance. In order to acquire the resources of NGO aid, militant groups must somehow convince the NGOs that there is a need in the areas that the militants control. They do this by using scare tactics to drive refugees and internally displaced persons into localities they control, thus creating an actual need. They also loot and pillage areas so as to remove the necessities of life for the civilians, leaving the NGOs to provide even more assistance than if there were just a normal refugee population. For example, warring factions often induce drought and famine through the use of scorched-earth tactics. They consequently receive the spoils of the pillaging as well as the subsequent increased aid.
The benefit of having refugee camps as bases of operation and supply is important for many insurrections. Since aid levels are a function of the number of refugees in particular camps, it is in the interest of warring factions to keep camps populated. For insurgents this is important because they directly use the aid resources; for governments, humanitarian aid is important because it frees up finances for the purchase of arms, mercenaries, and the payment of soldiers. In his Foreign Affairs article “Feeding Refugees or War?” Ben Barber documented how in refugee camps “guerrillas used physical and psychological coercion to keep [refugees] in the camps.”13 After the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ousted the genocidal Hutu regime of the late Habyarimana and his Coalition pour la Defense de la Republique (CDR), the Hutu militias, who relied on the refugee camps along the border with the Congo and Zaire, often withheld news of the Rwandan (RPF) government’s promise of safe return and instead spread propaganda, warning that Tutsis would slaughter the Hutus if they tried to return home.14
Another strategic consideration of belligerents is how the injection of humanitarian aid enhances the illicit economies synonymous with war. The borders of warring states are often porous, resulting in heavy illegal trade which in turn can support both sides at conflict, particularly insurgents. In a
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discussion of the economies of the Horn of Africa, Paul Henze described this phenomenon:
Even during the past decade of acute authoritarian mismanagement and consequent deterioration of the economies of all three major countries, extralegal and informal trade (i.e. smuggling) between them has flourished, and borders that central governments have been unable to control have proved economically porous. . . . The same has been true in large part of the borders of Kenya and Uganda and, to some extent of the sea trade between Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia with Yemen. Djibouti has been a major focal point of all this trade and has functioned, in fact, as the hub of an informal Horn of Africa free trade area.15
What has become known as an “aid economy” can develop when people become dependent on large amounts of humanitarian aid for extended periods of time. The aid economy provides work for locals as laborers on aid projects and in supporting positions throughout the aid infrastructure, such as trucking, shipping, protection, or translation. The theft and resale of vehicles and other equipment provides another source of aid-related income in states that become aid dependent. The maintenance and leasing of housing to aid workers also accounts for a significant level of wartime income. Also, as has been seen in East Timor and Somalia, many shops, restaurants, bars, and other entertainment establishments (often prostitution and drug related) tend to follow aid operations. Not only do locals benefit from the needs of the many aid workers and journalists who inundate war-affected states, but as occurred in East Timor once the UN mission began, many foreign business people (which included a mix of profiteers and legitimate businesspersons) set up restaurants, hotels, and other enterprises. Of course, to allow such an economy, the faction that controls the area in which the businesses are established either levies taxes on them or charges for protection. Oftentimes the entertainment businesses, such as brothels and bars, are run directly by organized crime rings that support militant factions.
In similar fashion, refugee camps themselves can be havens for insurrection groups. Much like the hinterland that enables guerrilla factions to establish protected areas, refugee camps can become sanctuaries for combatants. In an essay titled “Refugee Warriors at the Thai-Cambodian Border,” Cortland Robinson describes how insurgent factions utilized the many refugee camps there as sources of medical supply, food, and safe haven for their families. He describes how the Khmer Rouge would relocate camps from the Thai-Cambodia border into more obscure, mountainous regions, making them more suitable as bases from which to launch insurrections. “From September to October 1988,” he writes, “the Khmer Rouge moved more than 5,400 people from O’Trao, an evacuation site in Thailand, to ‘hidden border’
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camps across the border.”16 Aid organization staff can do little to combat the will of the groups that control the camp system. As Tom Stadler, UN Border Relief Organization (UNBRO) co-coordinator commented, “Nobody seems to have the will and/or the power to oppose the DK [Khmer Rouge] in their moving their population back.”17 Oftentimes camps are maintained very near combat zones, and battlefields are even chosen for their adjacency to refugee camps. Refugee camps have even been found to save insurgent movements from defeat, as “in 1988 with the creation of several refugee camps between the Jigjiga [an area of the borderlands of Somalia and Ethiopia] and Somali frontier, which Issaq guerrillas could use as a sanctuary for the usual purposes, such as food supply, recruitment, and medical treatment.”18 When confronted with the choice of turning away injured people due to their likely involvement in fighting, most aid organizations see assisting some combatants as the lesser of two evils—assisting combatants rather than leaving a noncombatant to die. Sadako Ogata explained the reality of having many combatants mixed in with civilians in refugee camps in her address to the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly in 1997. Commenting on the refugee camps of Eastern Zaire, she said:
The civilian nature of refugee camps—a fundamental tenet of refugee conventions—was not compromised by humanitarian action, but by the failure of states to provide political, material, and military support to separate armed elements and political extremists from refugees. It was this failure—not the providing [of] food and shelter to the refugees—which eventually put humanitarian action on an inevitable collision course with the security concerns of states in the region.19
Refugee camps also provide an ideal environment for the recruiting of soldiers—and particularly child soldiers. Although the laws of war prohibit the use of children as soldiers, many children who live in refugee camps are enlisted by the same militaries that have pledged to protect them.20 It is in this manner that child soldiers and the tactics of humanitarian aid co-option are connected. Child soldiers are ideal for many aspects of guerrilla warfare. They are particularly effective in asymmetrical conflicts since they can go places adult soldiers cannot, both because they are smaller and also because the enemy often refuses to see children as a threat. A child soldier from Burma/Myanmar described how he was used in this way: “I was in the front lines the whole time I was with the opposition force. I used to be assigned to plant mines in areas the enemy passed through. They used us [child soldiers] for reconnaissance and other things like that because if you’re a child the enemy doesn’t notice you much; nor do the villagers.”21
Because children are easily intimidated and vulnerable, they make for very obedient soldiers; they can be told to do the riskiest tasks. Often drugged
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into complicity, child soldiers carry out some of the most horrific of tasks, such as burning villages and setting booby-traps. The use of child soldiers is quickly becoming one of the most serious human rights violations currently plaguing conflict-ridden states, and this phenomenon is enhanced by the poverty-stricken reality of the refugee camps and the dependency developed in societies that have grown accustomed to massive influxes of international aid dollars and resources. More widely, the use of child soldiers has become one of the more important tactical elements of nontraditional warfare, much like the co-option of humanitarian aid has become an increasing element of military logistics strategy. The refugee camp system also has been corrupted by the use of rape and scare tactics in order to coerce refugees to locate in certain areas that are strategically important for belligerent factions.22
Another aspect of the strategic nature of the manipulation of the humanitarian aid system is how aid can legitimize local factions. When a local commander or warlord makes it appear he has secured assistance, it makes it seem that his particular warring faction is benevolent, thus resulting in the support and acceptance of the people, particularly when those people are suffering from famine and the ravages of war. The winning of the “hearts and minds” of the local people is essential for insurrections to succeed. Similarly, the support of locals is equally essential for the counter-insurrection efforts of governments. The gaining of local support has become accepted guerrilla and counterinsurgency doctrine. Since the Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960, the notion of mixing repression and reform credited to Sir Gerald Templar has had a significant effect on the military thinking of insurgents and governments alike.23
Regional geopolitical issues also are a component of how warring factions, whether governmental or insurgent, develop a strategy to manipulate the humanitarian aid system for their benefit. By destabilizing states, insurgent groups often convince the governments of sympathetic states to support, or increase support, for their insurgent movement. In a different way, governments can use the logic of maintaining regional stability to legitimize the use of more brutal force, or to persuade regional or international organizations to enter as intermediaries. Often the entrance of international organizations favors the interests of the established state authorities, since the sanctity of borders and the preservation of sovereignty has long been an important international norm.
A 1995 African Rights report, “Imposing Empowerment,” discussed the logic inherent in warring factions’ strategies of aid co-option. When aid is appropriated, significant anger and tension among the local populations rarely erupts because “civilians have weaker property rights over aid supplies than over their own produce.”24 Because humanitarian aid arrives in
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bulk it can be collected in bulk, requiring fewer human and military resources. The administration of bulk supplies also is much easier than if small bands of fighters were dispatched to loot and acquire local produce and livestock. It is also simpler than taxation. By acquiring goods in bulk, often from refugee camp storehouses or dockside warehouses, the control of supplies is centralized at a relatively high level of command and control, which assists in maintaining discipline among combatants who are often accustomed to personal profiteering during war. The report also comments on how “using aid supplies reduces the security risk to the armies of transporting commodities, as regards both the interception and the tracing of suppliers.”25
Insurgents vs. Governmental Authorities
Despite the similarities in the tactics and even the strategies of insurgent forces and government forces, there are important distinctions between how these two groups co-opt the humanitarian aid system. Insurgent strategy is typically a form of guerrilla warfare similar to that developed by Mao Tse-tung.26 What Mao called “protracted war” contains several stages, each of which can be amended to the conditions of a society dependent on foreign aid. Refugee camps can provide the bases from which guerrillas set up sanctuaries. Refugee camps can even be used as sanctuaries. Factions often direct population movements into remote areas of the country suitable for guerrilla bases, such as mountains or jungles, so that aid groups will feel compelled to provide aid to the areas militant groups intend to use as sanctuaries. Some insurgent groups have gone as far as building airstrips near areas where they have diverted refugee movement to make it easier for aid organizations to bring in resources.27 If a movement is intent on framing goals in an ideological, ethnic, or nationalistic manner, refugee camps provide an ideal situation to politicize the population. Just as Giap in Vietnam28 or Castro and Guevara in Cuba,29 the leaders of modern insurrection movements adapt the military strategy of Mao and other guerrilla strategists, like T. E. Lawrence, to fit their particular circumstances.30 In the case of the conflicts where NGO aid is prevalent, military leaders would be remiss if they did not recognize the advantage of readily available resources, and use them.
Governments tend to be less faithful to a particular type of military strategy when it comes to their manipulation of humanitarian aid systems. Some governments attempt to develop programs of counterinsurgency on the British model of “repression and reform” applied with success during the Malay Crisis of 1948-1960. Sometimes governments see aid as an element of the reform aspect of counterinsurgency strategy. Other times, realizing the importance of humanitarian aid for insurgent groups, they manipulate the aid system to repress the population among whom the insurgents find support.
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The movement of refugee camps into centralized locations and sending government troops to patrol and wreak havoc on those who seek refuge in camps are attempts to repress popular insurgent support. Refugee camps enable governments to maintain control of populations, while not spending money on the basic needs of displaced persons in the camps. Governments can view aid as resources that will enable them to divert financial resources into military development. North Korea is often cited as an example of how some governments spend fortunes on military equipment while their people starve. In countries like North Korea, humanitarian aid often becomes a primary source of sustenance for the civilian population, freeing up government resources for military purposes.31
Governments also use aid in a similar fashion to the insurgent groups. They often bolster the work of NGOs or intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), using aid as a tool to convince the people that they should support the government in its struggle. In this sense it is obvious that regardless of side in internal conflict, all factions realize that if they are to gain control of a country they require the acceptance of the population, whether tacit or active. The efforts of the Sudanese government during the late 1990s to bring “Operation Life-Line Sudan” (OLS) more tightly under its control through its “Peace From Within” strategy is reminiscent of hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency strategies used by other governments. By linking the provision of aid, aid workers, and other aspects of humanitarian assistance to the government, the Sudanese government benefitted from the appearance that it was a major reason for the aid, rather than the likely truth that the aid was being received despite the government. “Going beyond the normal liberties taken by governments, the Sudanese regime [deployed] this comprehensive ‘peace from within’ strategy in areas of significant opposition—armed and unarmed—[while] harassing, imprisoning, and executing those who [did not] comply.”32
In considering how governments act in the aid/conflict dynamic, it is important to keep in mind that there are numerous subsidiary objectives and agendas on the part of government actors. For the sake of brevity and clarity of this discussion on strategies and tactics, a wider analysis of these sub-interests is not included. A more in-depth investigation could provide crucial information for practitioners trying to mitigate the flow of aid into the wrong hands.
Bandits, Profiteers, Looters, and Organized Crime
Unlike governments or insurgents that fight for control of states, reform of governments, or secession of territory, there are many people and groups involved in war that are interested solely in personal financial gain. These groups play an important role in the interaction between humanitarian aid and war. They often work on behalf of or in contract with warring factions,
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both governmental and insurgent alike—sometimes both at the same time. Many such individuals become mercenaries; on occasion they are even hired by NGO workers for protection.
The most serious examples of profiteering and banditry during war have occurred in clan or tribal societies, like Somalia, or in countries where there are significant natural resources (including narcotics). In his work “Somali Armed Movements,” Daniel Compagnon comments that when the young militiamen of the revolutionary forces of the United Somali Congress (USC) “had tasted life in the big city [Mogadishu], with almost free license to loot, kill, and rape, and had come to enjoy it, . . . the distinction between USC combatants and bandits (mooryan) became blurred.”33
Even if conflicts begin with revolutionary purpose, they often descend into profiteering ventures. The profits derived from war can motivate leaders to desire its continuation, particularly in localities where there are few natural resources to profit from should a particular group or individual gain control of the state. In some cases pillage and looting predominate because chains of command are weak. In these instances soldiers are not controlled in a manner that prohibits theft, rape, or other crimes of war.34 Officers may use the prospect of confiscated and stolen goods as an incentive to retain forces; otherwise many of the combatants will simply leave or take up arms for the faction that can provide enough reward. Combatants who make decisions in this way can conceptually be considered mercenaries. Aid causes a protraction of war in these situations because as long as war is ongoing, aid flows; if the war ends, so does the aid, and without aid many profiteers lose their livelihoods—thus it is logical for those who benefit to desire a continuation of the conflict. Understanding that most societal forces are driven by some form of economic behavior, the assertion of Clausewitz that “war is a continuation of politics by other means” might be more appropriately phrased as “war is a continuation of economics by other means.”35
Wars themselves often produce a descent into more and more profiteering. Much like the “War Trap” described by Alex De Waal, the more de-
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struction and desolation a war causes, the more likely people are to resort to activities focused on economic gain or sustenance. David Keen explains this cycle in his essay “Incentives and Disincentives for Violence”:
Civil wars are not static over time. A growing proportion of civil wars appear to have started with the aim of taking over or retaining the reins of the state or of breaking away in secessionist revolt and appear to have subsequently mutated (often very quickly) into wars where immediate agendas (notably economic agendas) may significantly prolong civil wars: Not only do they constitute a vested interest in continued conflict, they also tend to create widespread destitution, which itself may feed into economically motivated violence.36
Death Squads, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide
The infrastructure of the humanitarian aid system is often used, unwittingly, as an aspect of the strategy of retribution, ethnic cleansing, and even campaigns of genocide. Refugee camps can, in effect, become concentration camps that facilitate the administration of ethnic cleansing.
With the expansion of the humanitarian aid industry, combatants have adapted their tactics to include utilizing the refugee camp system to facilitate their strategies of genocide and retribution. By directing particular groups into camps that are thus exposed to extreme conditions of deprivation, particular groups can be starved out of existence. An example of such efforts occurred during the 1980s in Sudan, when the regime of the time forced Nuba living in Khartoum off their property and into refugee camps in the south, in many cases back to the rural areas from which they had originally emigrated. It has been estimated that during the 1980s more than 500,000 Nuba were relocated to desert camps, “where, according to a UN official, not even a locust can survive.”37
During the Bosnian War, when aid convoys broke through to the enclave of Srebrenica, the UNHCR decided to evacuate most of the people, which served the purposes of the Serb forces that had laid siege to the city with the intention of removing the Bosnian Muslim population; the ethnic cleansing thus was conducted at little or no expense to the Serbian army. By deciding to evacuate the civilians from Srebrenica, “aid agencies were confronted with the moral predicament that they could contribute to the ethnic cleansing.”38
The registration schemes required to allocate food aid and to effectively organize refugee populations, in particular for future repatriation, also provide an ideal resource to identify specific people or groups for retribution. Refugees who are registered and controlled in a camp setting exist in a reality analogous to the systematic registration and detainment of Jewish people by the Nazis. Death squads can easily acquire the identity of persons at camps
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and wreak their vengeance. Aid organizations have little power to protect the refugees, as they are often controlled by local militia groups or militaries. Often aid workers are not even allowed in the camps after dark, with the logic possibly being that there will be no witnesses to nighttime thefts, killings, or abductions.39
Two Firsthand Accounts
Some aid workers are quite disillusioned by the dilemma they see from day to day in their struggles to provide assistance to those in need. Their disillusionment is often due in no small part to the deception and coercion employed by local commanders and combatants.
In Southeast Asia
Dr. Stephen Keller, who has worked extensively with the World Food Program in Southeast Asia, explains that “in every conflict situation in which I have been involved, food was significantly used as a resource by combatants.” His stories of the relief efforts along the Thai-Cambodian border during the 1980s are particularly telling. At that time, three so-called “liberation” groups (one of which was the Khmer Rouge), along with the Thai army, were competing for aid resources. Keller explains that all these groups used similar tactics to divert and siphon aid into their cause: “All were willing to lie, provide false numbers, and even create sham riots in order to disrupt rational and orderly distribution of food or the ration cards needed to receive it.” Such efforts are not surprising considering the value of food in wartime, famine-stricken economies—Keller noted that there were rumors suggesting that in some parts of Cambodia rice was being traded at par for gold. “Food was valuable enough for many people to risk walking through minefields to take it back into Cambodia to [the] black market,” he wrote. Keller describes how the Thais would blackmail the UN and shut down access to the camps unless something was “coughed up.” According to Keller the abuse, misuse, and direct theft of all aid resources, not just food, was rampant. Vehicles, construction materials, and cash were often confiscated. All this occurs because the local military leaders know that the only threat the aid organizations can make is that they will pull out, and the military leaders know that they will not do this; it is in this scenario where the ethical dilemma of providing aid becomes a troubling factor.
Keller also described similar experiences in Pakistan along the Afghan border:
The Mujahedeen factions controlled the camps and the distribution of ration/ID cards. Without aligning yourself with one thuggish group or another (none of
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which had any substantial legitimacy before the Afghan Diaspora) you couldn’t live at all. Question anything and you were killed. Numbers were greatly inflated and surplus resources marketed to the Pakistani public. Also, people registered with more than one faction, and so on.
He continued to explain that there is no feasible way to determine the accurate number of those in need of aid, and that many organizations are comfortable with inflated numbers because they must show a need to their donors:
Resources for fictitious people are off-the-books, which donors can never check with any accuracy. After, all who is going to see if the Kachigari camp has 10,000 [fewer] people than the “Commander” says? Even if he wouldn’t kill you for trying, how could you check without incredible manpower for a census?
Sacks of food with aid organization logos on them and other obviously stolen aid agency resources frequently turn up in places they shouldn’t, and Keller explained that most aid organizations conclude, “That’s the price of admission, and if anyone makes a fuss all access will be denied.”40
In Ethiopia
Samuel Molla, Oxfam Canada’s project coordinator in Ethiopia, who grew up in Southern Ethiopia, has had firsthand experience with how aid impacts and lengthens war.41 His insights are informative as they represent the perspective of both an aid worker and that of a civilian caught in the middle. He recounted one particularly striking story of how refugee camps can be havens and bases of operations for insurgent groups and violent gangs. He described a family that had just arrived at a camp where he was working, coming from a remote, drought-prone area of the Eritrea-Ethiopian border. The family soon experienced the coercive recruiting tactics of the government forces. The family was approached by recruiters and asked if they would be willing to send their son to the armed forces. When the father abruptly said no, the cadre of the local ruling party challenged him by saying, “How do you say no? After all, your son is grown by the food aid that the government is bringing and your entire family is dependent upon.”42 After being challenged the father ceased his resistance and allowed the soldiers to take his son, who upon hearing his father’s decision angrily said, “You prefer the food aid to your son?”43 This family, as were many, was forced to choose between starvation and sending a child to fight. Fortunately, the young man returned home because of a medical condition that rendered him ineffective as a soldier. If such coercion is not successful, many armed groups resort to violence and scare tactics, including threats to kill or rape family members. Samuel explained that many young boys were forced into service this way, and are forced to remain on the threat that their families would be cut off from support.
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Such stories demonstrate the military tactical realities that have a significant impact on the ability of people to achieve stability. Firsthand accounts of aid co-option by combatants are significant because they provide eyewitness evidence of how combatants usurp and corrupt the humanitarian aid system.
Conclusion
Recognizing that there are significant shifts in how low-intensity warfare is being conducted, particularly in the developing world, more work is needed to understand exactly how humanitarian aid interacts with war. A specific approach to the analysis of war that considers resource and logistical tactics is required. Through developing a typology of new low-intensity tactics, the deeper realities of the aid/war dynamic may be discerned. In many cases, a practical view of war must be taken, considering that many wars are not predominantly “the continuation of politics by other means,”44 but an extension of economic behavior and self-preservation.
The study of the interaction of war and humanitarian aid offers a significant opportunity for the development of empirically based assessment models. By developing such models, the aid community may be able to develop better cost-benefit approaches to the provision of aid. There are many elements critical to developing a better model of the aid/conflict dynamic. The lack of accurate data on the distribution of aid and other resources, along with erratic documentation of refugee camp management, results in significant information gaps that seriously limit the ability to develop new approaches which could mitigate the abuses that occur. However, the assessment of the level of harm relative to the amount of good done will remain a highly subjective exercise. Due to the ethical and practical dilemmas present in providing wartime humanitarian aid, a more comprehensive understanding of how aid and war interact is crucial to doing more good than harm. This article deals with only two of the important actors—combatants and humanitarian aid organizations. There are many other factors and actors involved.
If aid organizations can develop a better understanding of the tactics used to manipulate them, perhaps they can produce more effective counter-strategies. Aid organizations should more actively challenge the principle of impartiality, thus enabling flexible solutions to the problem of aid co-option. This is the first step to developing a truly collaborative effort between governments, NGOs, the UN, militaries, and other local actors. Only through such collaboration can greater steps be taken toward causing more good than harm.
Any suggestions on how to alleviate the problems associated with the provision of wartime humanitarian aid must recognize the associated meth-
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odological and practical difficulties. Gathering the data suggested above is problematic since militant groups are secretive. Also, the conditions within refugee camps and other aid distribution centers are not conducive to methodical record-keeping. There is, however, room for progress to be made between the current state of affairs and the ideal. Also, the collaboration between interveners, although essential, faces the challenge of reconciling various, often conflicting, interests.
Napoleon Bonaparte said that “an army marches on its stomach.” In the case of the combatants in many of the complex wars that have characterized the post-Cold War period, many armies march on the guilt and goodwill behind humanitarian aid. The humanitarian aid system, particularly in the form of food aid, medical aid, and the refugee camp system, has unfortunately provided combatants with significant levels of logistical support. As Oscar Wilde stated in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “Charity creates a multitude of sins.” The challenge for people, nations, and organizations of good will is to mitigate the inevitable sins that plague the provision of humanitarian aid in conflict situations.
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NOTES
1. See Peter Paret, “Napoleon and the Revolution in War,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), pp.127-28.
2. For an interesting discussion, see Michael Ignatieff, “The Stories We Tell: Television and Humanitarian Aid,” in Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention, ed. Jonathan Moore (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
3. In the case of the co-option of foreign aid, the distinction between strategic and tactical becomes important, as the manipulation of humanitarian aid occurs differently at each level of action. Understanding something as strategic or tactical is critical for the analysis of nontraditional warfare. Per Clausewitz, tactics are the use of forces in the battlefield, including maneuver of men and equipment, while strategy is how one uses battles to win a war. Today strategy is more than using battles to win a war, however, especially since the end of the Cold War. It has become the use of tactical victories to achieve a political or economic goal. See Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Anatol Rapaport (London: Penguin Classic edition, 1982).
4. Human Rights Watch, “Civilian Devastation—Abuses by All Parties in the War in Southern Sudan,” Human Rights Watch Report, December 2002, http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/sudan.
5. Daniel Compagnon, “Somali Armed Movements: The Interplay of Political Entrepreneurship and Clan Based Factions,” in African Guerrillas, ed. Christopher Clapham (Oxford, Eng.: James Curry, 1998), p. 77.
6. Deborah Scroggins, Emma’s War (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), pp. 17-20.
7. BBC reports on www.BBC.com, May, June, and July 2003.
8. Stephen Keller, “Kampuchean Refugee Relief,” unpublished paper, p. 5.
9. Interview with Dr. Stephen Keller, former World Food Program coordinator in Southeast Asia, November 2002.
10. See figure in John Ryle, “Notes on the Repatriation of Somali Refugees from Ethiopia,” Disasters, 16 (June 1992), 164.
11. Cited in Ryle, pp. 162-64.
12. Jon Prendergast, Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa (London: Lynne Rienner, 1996), pp. 20-21.
13. Ben Barber, “Feeding Refugees, or War?” Foreign Affairs, 76 (July/August 1997), 11.
14. Ibid., p. 13.
15. Paul Henze, “The Primacy of Economics for the Future of the Horn of Africa,” in The Horn of Africa, ed. Charles Gurdon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp.18-24.
16. Courtland Robinson, “Refugee Warriors at the Thai-Cambodia Border,” Refugee Survey Quarterly, 19 (April 2000), 23-37.
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17. Ibid., pp. 23-24.
18. Compagnon, pp.76-77. Also see George Klay Kieh, Jr., “The Somali Civil War,” in Zones of Conflict in Africa: Theories and Cases, ed. George Klay Kieh, Jr., and Ida Rousseau Mukenge (London: Praeger, 2002), pp.124-36.
19. Joel Boutroue, “Missed Opportunities: The Role of the International Community in the Return of Rwandan Refugees from Eastern Zaire,” cited in Robinson, p. 36.
20. Human Rights Watch, “My Gun Was as Tall as Me: Child Soldiers in Burma,” Human Rights Watch Report, October 2002, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/burma/index.htm.
21. Human Rights Watch, “The Voices of Child Soldiers,” http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/voices.htm. Also see Rachel Brett and Margaret McCallin, Children: The Invisible Soldiers (New York: Radda Baren, 1996), p. 127.
22. See Vincent J. Goulding, Jr., “Back to the Future with Asymmetrical Warfare,” Parameters, 30 (Winter 2000-2001), 21-30. Also, Todd A. Slazman, “Rape Camps as a Means of Ethnic Cleansing: Religious, Cultural, and Ethical Responses to Rape Victims in the Former Yugoslavia,” Human Rights Quarterly, 20 (May 1998), 35.
23. See Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), particularly chaps. 6 and 7.
24. African Rights, “Imposing Empowerment,” Discussion Paper No. 7, December 1995, p. 6, cited in Prendergast.
25. Ibid., p. 54.
26. See Mao Tse-tung, “On Guerrilla Warfare,” in The Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Vol. IX, ed. Brian Basgen (Maoist Documentation Project, 2000), in the Mao Tse-tung Reference Archive at www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/index.htm. Also see Lawrence Stone, “Theories of Revolution,” and Bruno Shaw, “Selections from Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung,” both in Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare, ed. Sam C. Sarkesian (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1976).
27. Prendergast, p. 20.
28. For a discussion of Giap’s strategy, see Sam C. Sarkesian, Unconventional Conflicts in a New Security Era: Lessons from Malay and Vietnam (London: Greenwood Press, 1993), pp. 75-95, 166.
29. For a discussion of Guevara’s and Castro’s strategies, see J. Moreno, “Che Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare: Doctrine Practice, and Evaluation,” in Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare, pp. 395-410.
30. See Charles Townshend, “People’s Wars,” in The Oxford History of Modern War, ed. Charles Townshend (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), pp.178-93.
31. See Mika Aaltola, “Emergency Food Aid as a Means of Political Persuasion in the North Korean Famine,” Third World Quarterly, 20 (No. 2, 1999), 371-86. Also see World Food Program News Service, “Korea: US Food Aid Successful Even if it Feeds the Military (AFP, 28/7/00) and more . . . ” a compilation report of news and other source reporting on North Korea’s use of food aid.
32. Prendergast, pp. 32-33.
33. Compagnon, p. 79.
34. David Keen, “Incentives and Disincentives for Violence,” in Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, ed. Mats Berdal and David M. Malone (London: Rienner Publishers and the International Development Research Centre, 2000), p. 27.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p.25.
37. Cited in Frances Stewart and Emma Samman, “Food Aid During Civil War: Conflicting Conclusions Derived from Alternative Approaches,” in War and Underdevelopment: The Economic and Social Consequences of Conflict, ed. Frances Stewart, Valpy FitzGerald, and associates (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), p. 175.
38. Quoted in David Shearer, “Aiding or Abetting? Humanitarian Aid and its Economic Role in Civil War” in Keen, pp. 192-93.
39. For a discussion of the tactics of death squads in the El-Salvador context, see Neil C. Livingstone “Death Squads,” World Affairs, 146 (No. 3, 1983-1984), 239-48.
40. Material in this section is drawn from interviews with Dr. Keller conducted in November 2002, and from correspondence while he was in the field in Laos until March 2003. The dialogue was conducted in person or via e-mail.
41. Interviews were conducted with Mr. Molla during his visit to St. John’s during the launch of Oxfam’s Fair Trade Coffee campaign, 2002.
42. As recounted by Molla during interview.
43. Ibid.
44. See Clausewitz, On War.
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Matthew LeRiche, from Newfoundland, Canada, is engaged in postgraduate studies at the Department of War Studies, King’s College, University of London. He is an honors graduate of Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, in political science and law and society.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...ing/leriche.htm
Fear and Loathing in the Barracks – And the Heart of Leadership
LARRY H. INGRAHAM
The smart guys have taken the United States Army about as far as we can go with respect to weapon systems that bust up things and hurt people. The next advance in creating a more effective army will be done with people. People require leadership. That’s what worries me, and lots of others.
The Army is now in the throes of a blizzard of memos, manuals, and pamphlets on leadership. But they miss the point. What gets left out is the heart of leadership, which cannot be taught from the platform. To make you understand what I’m talking about, I have to tell you a story told to me by some wise old NCOs who understood the heart of leadership, and how we lost it.1
Once upon a time, long ago, there was an army. It was a pretty good army, too, by world standards. One day it got committed to the jungles of Southeast Asia. It was committed with an unclear mission by a commander-in-chief who hoped to wage a major war without pain to his people. He therefore refused to call up the reserves. To further reduce pain he agreed to a 12-month rotation and increasingly heavy draft calls. Within five years the Army was bloated on rapid promotions. Repeated tours wore down the NCO corps, adding the burned-out to the killed and the wounded. But the war continued. Draft standards were lowered to spare the sons of the middle class. Project 100,000 scraped the bottom of the nation’s poor and disadvantaged to man that once-magnificent army.
Many dedicated NCOs and officers tried to carry on, but the task became increasingly difficult. War protests eroded essential civilian support for the war, and soldiers became “pigs” to their fellow citizens. Racial violence flared throughout the country and spilled over into the Army. Drug use permeated both civilian and military sectors. And, on top of all of this, the legal system of the country took a sharp turn in support of individual rights over collective obligations. Charlie Company refused to move out when ordered. Discipline broke. The army and the nation trembled in disgust and
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frustration at revelations of atrocities symbolized by My Lai. Senior officers looked the other way. The war continued.
The 12-month rotation cycle worked reasonably well, except for one small problem—the Army quickly ran out of junior NCOs. Developing sergeants takes time. More time than 12 months. The Army tried to solve the problem by school-training junior NCOs, who were derisively called “shake and bakes.” The scorn was not altogether deserved. They were well-trained at school, and got a few months jump on learning to be a sergeant in the jungle. Unfortunately, while they knew how to lay a Claymore, they often had trouble getting others to follow their example. Telling somebody else where to go and what to do (and having them respect you for it)—that’s something you don’t learn in any school. You have to learn by watching somebody with the knack and then trying to copy. Well you can imagine the time those NCOs had when all hell broke loose in the Army, when discipline collapsed, and when nobody could tell anybody anything.
Those were times when many NCOs and officers were more afraid of their own troops than the enemy. Those were days of fraggings, and of racial protests on the commanding general’s front lawn. Those were days when in some units in Germany no officer or NCO dared go above the first floor of the barracks. Those were days of hassling over haircuts, of confiscating drugs only to be told the seizure was illegal, and of being verbally assaulted as a “lifer” for giving a legitimate order.
When the war finally ended, the Army was in damn sorry shape. It was combat ineffective throughout the world. It was morally rotten. The jungle massacres were bad enough, but on top of that the Sergeant Major of the Army and the Provost Marshal General so much as admitted to being crooks. Oh, it looked like an army on the outside, but inside it was hollow. All the depots had been picked clean, operations and maintenance funds diverted, and serious unit training eliminated. What was left of the Army sat in ratty facilities maintaining worn out equipment, with no funds to practice being an army with.
Many experienced senior NCOs quit in disgust at what had become of the Army they had grown up in. The Army they loved lay in shambles around them, a paper model of its former self. They quit for many reasons. The end of the draft reduced the pay differentials between privates and sergeants. The “New Volunteer Army” marched to the tune, “The Army Wants to Join You.” It seemed like the privates got every benefit, everything but standards and discipline.
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Others quit because their work had been contracted out to civilians during the war. Others found the MOS reclassifications difficult to swallow, while still others found it more profitable to retire than to continue to serve. They left with heavy hearts. The spirit of their army was gone. And with them went not man-years, but man-centuries of experience.
These centuries of experience included an understanding of the difference between recruit billets and the barracks of real soldiers; how to inspect a mess hall; drill ceremonies for fun; full field layouts; little pocket books with personal data on each soldier; how to housebreak lieutenants so you could show them off in company as captains; how to teach and how to train; when to joke and when to growl; and, most important, how to love soldiers and the Army.
The NCOs who stayed to put the Army back together again had a hell of a job on their hands. Remember, too, that they were comparatively inexperienced. They had gone to the jungle, done well, been promoted fast, and returned home. But they didn’t know all the tricks of the old sergeants. Why, some of them couldn’t march a squad to the motor pool when the formation was directly outside the gate! Sure, they could lay down indirect fires in the jungle, but nobody had shown them how to keep floor buffers operational in garrison (“You gotta teach ’em not to snap that long cord or it’ll rip the socket right outta the wall and ruin the plug, too”).
To make matters worse, the officer corps lost confidence in the NCO corps, and blamed it directly for all the trouble. It didn’t seem like things could possibly get any more confusing and discouraging. But they did. The Army in its wisdom put male and female soldiers in the same barracks. Sometimes with only a week’s notice and no guidance other than “do it,” the NCOs had to sort out latrine and shower facilities, kitchens and sewing machines, visitation and inspection policies. It was bad enough getting the men to make their beds and keep the place looking like an army barracks, but allowing teddy bears and bedspreads was going too far!
So the Army up and did something smart. If NCOs could be school-trained for the jungle, then they ought to be school-trained for garrison, too. From that little insight grew a whole new concept in developing noncommissioned officers, the Noncommissioned Officers Education System. Slowly, painfully over the years, with the help of the remaining senior NCOs who remembered how a good army was put together, the young pups learned the technical skills required. Schools are good for teaching technical how-to’s, and the young sergeants took the opportunity and ran with it.
There was one important thing, however, that the schools either didn’t or couldn’t teach. That was the heart of leadership. Caring for soldiers was an aspect of leadership the schools weren’t very good at teaching. They taught sergeants to record birthdays, but they didn’t teach them why. The old sergeants knew the value of greeting a private, “So, Smitty, how does it feel to be 19
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today?” And they knew how to arrange for a steak at the mess hall. They knew this because these things happened to them when they were 19. The schools taught how to inspect a wall locker, but not how to sit on a footlocker and get a soldier to pour out his heartache. The schools taught about caring for soldiers, but nobody said that meant caring for their wives and kids, too. And the schools never mentioned a sergeant getting his goof-offs out of jail in the middle of the night, for no other reason than that he was responsible for them. Good or bad, for better or for worse, they were their sergeant’s responsibility. These things are not learned from the platform; they must be learned from example in the school of hard knocks, with demonstration, imitation, practice, and critique being the key ingredients. The old sergeants knew there was no limit to what they could ask of soldiers when there were no limits to NCO concern for their troops. But too many old sergeants were gone.
There was all that rah-rah stuff about teamwork, morale, and esprit that was taught in school. The words were right, but the rhythm was wrong. Again, these things had to be experienced coming up before they could be practiced going down. Oh sure, some of the old timers remembered how competition could make even the most disagreeable work seem tolerable. Those old first shirts could set one platoon against another until it looked like they’d destroy each other, but just in the nick of time they’d set them all against the company next door. The old-timers also knew they were players on the team, not just coaches on the sidelines. They could manage a drink with the guys, or even a poker game, without compromising their authority. They too could have fun at unit socials, because both work and play were just different aspects of family life. The youngsters who grew up in the jungle, especially after 1969, seemed to forget, or not to have understood to begin with. The only lesson they seemed to bring home was to be an adversary of their own soldiers. They weren’t dumb. They were inexperienced. And the times were against them.
Remember the difference between laying the Claymore yourself and ensuring somebody else did it right? The same thing happened in garrison. The senior sergeants didn’t have much time to teach their juniors a patient, caring, coaching leadership style. They had to act fast. They taught the shortcut, the “Poor Protoplasm Theory of Leadership.” The troops were just no damn good; the only solution was to kick ass and take names, yell and holler, be strict and arbitrary, even capricious, if necessary—whatever it took to maintain authority and discipline.
Back in the early ’70s, when the Army was flat on its back, sergeants had a real enemy, all right: their own soldiers. The difference between an army and a mob is discipline. The first order of business amid the racial incidents, drug use, and thuggery was to reestablish good order and discipline. They succeeded, too, with the tried and true ways that scared leaders always use: social distance and the whip. NCOs despised privates as dirtballs and scumbags because they feared them. They whipped them with chickenshit inspections,
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extra duties, expeditious discharges, and both judicial and nonjudicial punishments. They sought additional administrative ways to get rid of the riffraff. And, by golly, they got their soldiers’ attention. They surely did, and the Army knew discipline once more.
Those who brought the Army back from chaos have a lot to be proud of, and their country owes them a debt that will never be acknowledged. But the Army paid dearly for the restoration of discipline. In the process, something happened to the noncommissioned officer corps and the officer corps, something that grew more worrisome the more healthy the Army appeared.
Previously the NCOs had always prided themselves in making the Army work, despite their officers. Now they started picking up all the bad habits of the officer corps. They weren’t sure enough of their own authority to talk to either their soldiers or their officers. They talked only to each other, mostly about their insecurities (but of course they didn’t use that term). They said they were “professionals” (which nobody who ever knew the Army ever doubted for a minute), but they confused professionalism with status symbols like office furniture and having a tactical vehicle. They equated school learning with professional competence, but sometimes a little learning is a dangerous thing. They became obsessed with whistle-clean efficiency reports required by centralized promotion boards.
Saddest of all, when they stopped talking to their soldiers, unwritten rules got set. Rules like, “professionals” don’t drink a beer with the unit after work. And “professionals” don’t have the unit over to the house for a cookout, because that’s fraternization. “Professionals” attend to the barracks, because that’s where the rater looks, but pay no mind to where married soldiers live. “Professionals” leave work at a reasonable hour, but the junior NCOs and privates stay until the work is finished. Scheming to give soldiers time off just isn’t “professional.” Since a “professional” tells other people what to do, he has to maintain a sharp image; “professionals” don’t have to get their hands dirty any more. A “professional” is loyal and never laughs at the turkeys at headquarters (especially if he hopes to be a turkey himself, someday!). A “professional” doesn’t laugh much at all; soldiering is serious business. If “professionals” laugh at all, it’s at the expense of the troops, not the officers or the crazy Army bureaucracy.
It’s not the fault of the NCOs, really. It’s not the fault of the officer corps. It’s not the system’s fault, either. It’s nobody’s fault, at least nobody who’s identifiable and still around. Things just turned out that way. Not all NCOs turned “professional.” The Sergeant Morales Club represents NCOs who were nurtured in the old ways.2 Many of the other sergeants we see now weren’t so fortunate, for whatever reasons, to have had superb role models. They are good products considering their times and circumstances. But they may not be good enough for war.
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They grew up fearing their troops; in war they must trust them. They grew up despising their soldiers; in war they must love them. They grew up whipping the unit into shape; in war they must lead it. They grew up commanding respect; in war they must command devotion. They grew up keeping their distance and maintaining their proper place; in war they must hold the hands of the uncertain, cradle the anguished, and change the underwear of the scared, all without a second thought, because they’re all family.
In the long march back from the days of the mutinous mob, the Army got confused about intimacy and authority, maybe for good reasons at the time. Leaders saw intimacy and authority as opposites and incompatible. They confused camaraderie with fraternization, equal opportunity with coed living, training-by-example with instruction from the podium, and soldierly irreverence with insubordination. They assumed social relations with their soldiers should be different in garrison than in combat. Maybe they’re right. Maybe everything will be different in combat. Maybe the troops will come together when the fighting starts, just like they were supposed to in the jungle, before Charlie Company said, “We won’t go.” Maybe it’s all bull that as an army practices in peace so will it perform in war. Maybe. I hope so for the sake of the Army and the Republic. But, maybe it’s not all bull.
I wish this story had a happy ending, but it has no ending at all. The story is still being written, unfortunately by NCOs and officers who grew up in an army that lacked heart. If you doubt me, look at the way we act in our leader training schools, not at what we say. We fail to teach the heart of leadership as the old-timers understood it, in terms of the four Cs: Competence, Candor, Compassion, and Commitment. That is the heart of leadership. I send my young NCOs to school. They learn to buff floors, but not to build cohesion. They learn to file counseling statements, but not to console a troop in the face of a “Dear John” or a dead buddy. They learn to instill fear, but not to inspire affection.
The head learns from the platform, but the heart learns from practice. We have forgotten the heart in our leadership training. The Army once knew how to teach that kind of leadership, and how to grow sergeants and officers who could practice it. Maybe the Army could teach that kind of leadership again, while there’s still time, before it’s too late.
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NOTES
1. This article is based on the “NCO Career Histories Project,” funded by the US Army Medical Research and Development Command. The project included some 500 hours of interviewing 20 senior noncommissioned officers.
2. The Sergeant Morales Club, open only to NCOs who demonstrate exemplary professionalism, originated in Europe several years ago. Each club nominee goes before a board of five to seven command sergeants major, who examine the nominee’s record, appearance, and conformity to the Morales ideal, epitomized by an NCO’s dedicated attention to the needs of his soldiers throughout the 24-hour day (“Focus on People.” Soldiers, 41 [October 1986], 26).
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Colonel Larry H. Ingraham, Medical Service Corps, is with the Department of Military Psychiatry at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, in Washington, D.C., where he also served from 1970 to 1976. Holding a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Iowa, he previously commanded the US Army Medical Research Unit (Europe) in Heidelberg, a special overseas activity of the Institute of Research.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...88/ingraham.htm
LARRY H. INGRAHAM
The smart guys have taken the United States Army about as far as we can go with respect to weapon systems that bust up things and hurt people. The next advance in creating a more effective army will be done with people. People require leadership. That’s what worries me, and lots of others.
The Army is now in the throes of a blizzard of memos, manuals, and pamphlets on leadership. But they miss the point. What gets left out is the heart of leadership, which cannot be taught from the platform. To make you understand what I’m talking about, I have to tell you a story told to me by some wise old NCOs who understood the heart of leadership, and how we lost it.1
Once upon a time, long ago, there was an army. It was a pretty good army, too, by world standards. One day it got committed to the jungles of Southeast Asia. It was committed with an unclear mission by a commander-in-chief who hoped to wage a major war without pain to his people. He therefore refused to call up the reserves. To further reduce pain he agreed to a 12-month rotation and increasingly heavy draft calls. Within five years the Army was bloated on rapid promotions. Repeated tours wore down the NCO corps, adding the burned-out to the killed and the wounded. But the war continued. Draft standards were lowered to spare the sons of the middle class. Project 100,000 scraped the bottom of the nation’s poor and disadvantaged to man that once-magnificent army.
Many dedicated NCOs and officers tried to carry on, but the task became increasingly difficult. War protests eroded essential civilian support for the war, and soldiers became “pigs” to their fellow citizens. Racial violence flared throughout the country and spilled over into the Army. Drug use permeated both civilian and military sectors. And, on top of all of this, the legal system of the country took a sharp turn in support of individual rights over collective obligations. Charlie Company refused to move out when ordered. Discipline broke. The army and the nation trembled in disgust and
75/76
frustration at revelations of atrocities symbolized by My Lai. Senior officers looked the other way. The war continued.
The 12-month rotation cycle worked reasonably well, except for one small problem—the Army quickly ran out of junior NCOs. Developing sergeants takes time. More time than 12 months. The Army tried to solve the problem by school-training junior NCOs, who were derisively called “shake and bakes.” The scorn was not altogether deserved. They were well-trained at school, and got a few months jump on learning to be a sergeant in the jungle. Unfortunately, while they knew how to lay a Claymore, they often had trouble getting others to follow their example. Telling somebody else where to go and what to do (and having them respect you for it)—that’s something you don’t learn in any school. You have to learn by watching somebody with the knack and then trying to copy. Well you can imagine the time those NCOs had when all hell broke loose in the Army, when discipline collapsed, and when nobody could tell anybody anything.
Those were times when many NCOs and officers were more afraid of their own troops than the enemy. Those were days of fraggings, and of racial protests on the commanding general’s front lawn. Those were days when in some units in Germany no officer or NCO dared go above the first floor of the barracks. Those were days of hassling over haircuts, of confiscating drugs only to be told the seizure was illegal, and of being verbally assaulted as a “lifer” for giving a legitimate order.
When the war finally ended, the Army was in damn sorry shape. It was combat ineffective throughout the world. It was morally rotten. The jungle massacres were bad enough, but on top of that the Sergeant Major of the Army and the Provost Marshal General so much as admitted to being crooks. Oh, it looked like an army on the outside, but inside it was hollow. All the depots had been picked clean, operations and maintenance funds diverted, and serious unit training eliminated. What was left of the Army sat in ratty facilities maintaining worn out equipment, with no funds to practice being an army with.
Many experienced senior NCOs quit in disgust at what had become of the Army they had grown up in. The Army they loved lay in shambles around them, a paper model of its former self. They quit for many reasons. The end of the draft reduced the pay differentials between privates and sergeants. The “New Volunteer Army” marched to the tune, “The Army Wants to Join You.” It seemed like the privates got every benefit, everything but standards and discipline.
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Others quit because their work had been contracted out to civilians during the war. Others found the MOS reclassifications difficult to swallow, while still others found it more profitable to retire than to continue to serve. They left with heavy hearts. The spirit of their army was gone. And with them went not man-years, but man-centuries of experience.
These centuries of experience included an understanding of the difference between recruit billets and the barracks of real soldiers; how to inspect a mess hall; drill ceremonies for fun; full field layouts; little pocket books with personal data on each soldier; how to housebreak lieutenants so you could show them off in company as captains; how to teach and how to train; when to joke and when to growl; and, most important, how to love soldiers and the Army.
The NCOs who stayed to put the Army back together again had a hell of a job on their hands. Remember, too, that they were comparatively inexperienced. They had gone to the jungle, done well, been promoted fast, and returned home. But they didn’t know all the tricks of the old sergeants. Why, some of them couldn’t march a squad to the motor pool when the formation was directly outside the gate! Sure, they could lay down indirect fires in the jungle, but nobody had shown them how to keep floor buffers operational in garrison (“You gotta teach ’em not to snap that long cord or it’ll rip the socket right outta the wall and ruin the plug, too”).
To make matters worse, the officer corps lost confidence in the NCO corps, and blamed it directly for all the trouble. It didn’t seem like things could possibly get any more confusing and discouraging. But they did. The Army in its wisdom put male and female soldiers in the same barracks. Sometimes with only a week’s notice and no guidance other than “do it,” the NCOs had to sort out latrine and shower facilities, kitchens and sewing machines, visitation and inspection policies. It was bad enough getting the men to make their beds and keep the place looking like an army barracks, but allowing teddy bears and bedspreads was going too far!
So the Army up and did something smart. If NCOs could be school-trained for the jungle, then they ought to be school-trained for garrison, too. From that little insight grew a whole new concept in developing noncommissioned officers, the Noncommissioned Officers Education System. Slowly, painfully over the years, with the help of the remaining senior NCOs who remembered how a good army was put together, the young pups learned the technical skills required. Schools are good for teaching technical how-to’s, and the young sergeants took the opportunity and ran with it.
There was one important thing, however, that the schools either didn’t or couldn’t teach. That was the heart of leadership. Caring for soldiers was an aspect of leadership the schools weren’t very good at teaching. They taught sergeants to record birthdays, but they didn’t teach them why. The old sergeants knew the value of greeting a private, “So, Smitty, how does it feel to be 19
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today?” And they knew how to arrange for a steak at the mess hall. They knew this because these things happened to them when they were 19. The schools taught how to inspect a wall locker, but not how to sit on a footlocker and get a soldier to pour out his heartache. The schools taught about caring for soldiers, but nobody said that meant caring for their wives and kids, too. And the schools never mentioned a sergeant getting his goof-offs out of jail in the middle of the night, for no other reason than that he was responsible for them. Good or bad, for better or for worse, they were their sergeant’s responsibility. These things are not learned from the platform; they must be learned from example in the school of hard knocks, with demonstration, imitation, practice, and critique being the key ingredients. The old sergeants knew there was no limit to what they could ask of soldiers when there were no limits to NCO concern for their troops. But too many old sergeants were gone.
There was all that rah-rah stuff about teamwork, morale, and esprit that was taught in school. The words were right, but the rhythm was wrong. Again, these things had to be experienced coming up before they could be practiced going down. Oh sure, some of the old timers remembered how competition could make even the most disagreeable work seem tolerable. Those old first shirts could set one platoon against another until it looked like they’d destroy each other, but just in the nick of time they’d set them all against the company next door. The old-timers also knew they were players on the team, not just coaches on the sidelines. They could manage a drink with the guys, or even a poker game, without compromising their authority. They too could have fun at unit socials, because both work and play were just different aspects of family life. The youngsters who grew up in the jungle, especially after 1969, seemed to forget, or not to have understood to begin with. The only lesson they seemed to bring home was to be an adversary of their own soldiers. They weren’t dumb. They were inexperienced. And the times were against them.
Remember the difference between laying the Claymore yourself and ensuring somebody else did it right? The same thing happened in garrison. The senior sergeants didn’t have much time to teach their juniors a patient, caring, coaching leadership style. They had to act fast. They taught the shortcut, the “Poor Protoplasm Theory of Leadership.” The troops were just no damn good; the only solution was to kick ass and take names, yell and holler, be strict and arbitrary, even capricious, if necessary—whatever it took to maintain authority and discipline.
Back in the early ’70s, when the Army was flat on its back, sergeants had a real enemy, all right: their own soldiers. The difference between an army and a mob is discipline. The first order of business amid the racial incidents, drug use, and thuggery was to reestablish good order and discipline. They succeeded, too, with the tried and true ways that scared leaders always use: social distance and the whip. NCOs despised privates as dirtballs and scumbags because they feared them. They whipped them with chickenshit inspections,
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extra duties, expeditious discharges, and both judicial and nonjudicial punishments. They sought additional administrative ways to get rid of the riffraff. And, by golly, they got their soldiers’ attention. They surely did, and the Army knew discipline once more.
Those who brought the Army back from chaos have a lot to be proud of, and their country owes them a debt that will never be acknowledged. But the Army paid dearly for the restoration of discipline. In the process, something happened to the noncommissioned officer corps and the officer corps, something that grew more worrisome the more healthy the Army appeared.
Previously the NCOs had always prided themselves in making the Army work, despite their officers. Now they started picking up all the bad habits of the officer corps. They weren’t sure enough of their own authority to talk to either their soldiers or their officers. They talked only to each other, mostly about their insecurities (but of course they didn’t use that term). They said they were “professionals” (which nobody who ever knew the Army ever doubted for a minute), but they confused professionalism with status symbols like office furniture and having a tactical vehicle. They equated school learning with professional competence, but sometimes a little learning is a dangerous thing. They became obsessed with whistle-clean efficiency reports required by centralized promotion boards.
Saddest of all, when they stopped talking to their soldiers, unwritten rules got set. Rules like, “professionals” don’t drink a beer with the unit after work. And “professionals” don’t have the unit over to the house for a cookout, because that’s fraternization. “Professionals” attend to the barracks, because that’s where the rater looks, but pay no mind to where married soldiers live. “Professionals” leave work at a reasonable hour, but the junior NCOs and privates stay until the work is finished. Scheming to give soldiers time off just isn’t “professional.” Since a “professional” tells other people what to do, he has to maintain a sharp image; “professionals” don’t have to get their hands dirty any more. A “professional” is loyal and never laughs at the turkeys at headquarters (especially if he hopes to be a turkey himself, someday!). A “professional” doesn’t laugh much at all; soldiering is serious business. If “professionals” laugh at all, it’s at the expense of the troops, not the officers or the crazy Army bureaucracy.
It’s not the fault of the NCOs, really. It’s not the fault of the officer corps. It’s not the system’s fault, either. It’s nobody’s fault, at least nobody who’s identifiable and still around. Things just turned out that way. Not all NCOs turned “professional.” The Sergeant Morales Club represents NCOs who were nurtured in the old ways.2 Many of the other sergeants we see now weren’t so fortunate, for whatever reasons, to have had superb role models. They are good products considering their times and circumstances. But they may not be good enough for war.
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They grew up fearing their troops; in war they must trust them. They grew up despising their soldiers; in war they must love them. They grew up whipping the unit into shape; in war they must lead it. They grew up commanding respect; in war they must command devotion. They grew up keeping their distance and maintaining their proper place; in war they must hold the hands of the uncertain, cradle the anguished, and change the underwear of the scared, all without a second thought, because they’re all family.
In the long march back from the days of the mutinous mob, the Army got confused about intimacy and authority, maybe for good reasons at the time. Leaders saw intimacy and authority as opposites and incompatible. They confused camaraderie with fraternization, equal opportunity with coed living, training-by-example with instruction from the podium, and soldierly irreverence with insubordination. They assumed social relations with their soldiers should be different in garrison than in combat. Maybe they’re right. Maybe everything will be different in combat. Maybe the troops will come together when the fighting starts, just like they were supposed to in the jungle, before Charlie Company said, “We won’t go.” Maybe it’s all bull that as an army practices in peace so will it perform in war. Maybe. I hope so for the sake of the Army and the Republic. But, maybe it’s not all bull.
I wish this story had a happy ending, but it has no ending at all. The story is still being written, unfortunately by NCOs and officers who grew up in an army that lacked heart. If you doubt me, look at the way we act in our leader training schools, not at what we say. We fail to teach the heart of leadership as the old-timers understood it, in terms of the four Cs: Competence, Candor, Compassion, and Commitment. That is the heart of leadership. I send my young NCOs to school. They learn to buff floors, but not to build cohesion. They learn to file counseling statements, but not to console a troop in the face of a “Dear John” or a dead buddy. They learn to instill fear, but not to inspire affection.
The head learns from the platform, but the heart learns from practice. We have forgotten the heart in our leadership training. The Army once knew how to teach that kind of leadership, and how to grow sergeants and officers who could practice it. Maybe the Army could teach that kind of leadership again, while there’s still time, before it’s too late.
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NOTES
1. This article is based on the “NCO Career Histories Project,” funded by the US Army Medical Research and Development Command. The project included some 500 hours of interviewing 20 senior noncommissioned officers.
2. The Sergeant Morales Club, open only to NCOs who demonstrate exemplary professionalism, originated in Europe several years ago. Each club nominee goes before a board of five to seven command sergeants major, who examine the nominee’s record, appearance, and conformity to the Morales ideal, epitomized by an NCO’s dedicated attention to the needs of his soldiers throughout the 24-hour day (“Focus on People.” Soldiers, 41 [October 1986], 26).
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Colonel Larry H. Ingraham, Medical Service Corps, is with the Department of Military Psychiatry at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, in Washington, D.C., where he also served from 1970 to 1976. Holding a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Iowa, he previously commanded the US Army Medical Research Unit (Europe) in Heidelberg, a special overseas activity of the Institute of Research.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...88/ingraham.htm
Politics are dull. Usually there's no getting around it but thanks to all the different parties and manifestos and whatnot the whole thing can kick off into a huge global bun fight without much provocation. Here's a short description of the major ideologies or at least the ones I can think of now.
WARNING: May not be factually correct.
Capitalism - Capitalism is basically the political equivalent of the Crystal Dome at the end of the Crystal Maze. Everyone has to grab as many gold tokens as they can no matter how many people they elbow in the throat before they all drown or whatever the rules were for the end of the Crystal Maze. The main advantage with Capitalism is that you make a big pile of money and buy a load of cool stuff. The main disadvantage is that is really easy to starve in a ditch with no one caring.
In theory capitalism means you get to be pretty free, and usually comes with some kind of freedom of expression clause at some point. Unfortunately most people, what with them being "expletive deleted"ing morons and that, take this to be an invitation to dress the same as one another and put the windows of bus shelters through. I don't think anyone would have got offended if the Nazis wanted to gas these people.
Capitalism runs well because it thrives on a bit of corruption, something you're always sure of with this kind of thing.
Fascism - Everyone hates fascism, those guys suck. I'm not convinced that anyone actually know what fascism involves because we're always to busy bombing people free or something and fascism sort of evolves to suit whoever's in power and how many fast cars he wants. The annoying thing with fascism is that it sort of creeps up on you so that one day you're mowing the lawn and the next day you're burning Jews and half way up the ""epithet deleted" Kicking Leader Board". If you went and asked the Italians if they were fascists before they got cool they'd probably say no.
Generally, fascism is great as long as you're agree with everything the fascists say and you don't like free speech, otherwise you're in gassy town; population: you. Usually this doesn't matter because fascism only really appeals to stupid people and who cares what those guys think?
Getting back to the definition, fascism is when you think your country is "the "expletive deleted"" to the point where you want to set fire to all the other countries or something. The system is wide open to hipocracy as proved by Hitler, a little dark haired Pole who wanted to kill any one who wasn't a tall, blonde German, yeah I know. Generally no one cares because they're too busy making sure everyone can see they love their leader.
Fascism is great at making people's eyes glaze over. Even the people against it; I found this out when I searched Google and found a page and half of links to sites which contained no more information that "Fascism is way uncool".
Famous fascists include Adolf "Sweet Cheeks" Hitler and Jeanette Krankie.
Communism - As with all political ideologies Communism is flawed to buggery. It runs on the principle that everyone is completely equal in every way from social class to wealth. The motto "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" acts as a byword for the whole system but this is always spoil slightly by the fact that the leader who is preaching this motto usually lives in a big castle where he has money fights with his friends.
Communism is really really vulnerable to corruption and only takes one complete "expletive deleted"er to mess the whole system up for everyone. Generally the corruption runs along these lines:
"There is no money now so I tell you what, I'll look after it. No, that's everyone's Sports Car. No you can't drive it or sell it for potatoes"
Communism doesn't really encourage individualism but everyone dresses and thinks basically the same anyway so would you miss it? Bus shelters would be safer because in essence they're "everyone's bus shelters" and you probably lost out on three potatoes to pay for it.
However, should anyone ever get Communism to work it would be a great system due to the fact that everyone gets a beret with a star on and get to call each other "Comrade".
Anarchism - Now this one is just plain silly. You know how there's always a load of morons about to kick bus shelters in and steal your bike? Well think how much worse they would be under Anarchism, a system that essentially HAS NO RULES! That's killa dood!
The obvious attraction here is that you get to be totally free but I don't even trust my friends to take the bins out so I certainly wouldn't trust them not to murder me in my sleep and steal all my stuff.
The best way to piss off an Anarchist is to point out that its a bit silly to make an organised gang out of an ideology that is entirely opposed to organisation and rules of any kind.
Eddie says: "It would be nice but I'm just to damn cynical to believe that people wouldn't just murder everyone given half the chance".
Anarchists of note include Alexi Sayle and Former Chief Constable of the West Midlands Police, Edward "Winky" Crew.
Terrorism - Not an ideology but since its taken the place of Communism as the new "Official Pepsi sponsored Enemy of the Free World ™" I thought I'd mention it. In the old days everyone who got up to shenanigans was a Communist, even when they weren't. Now these people are terrorists. Murders, rapists and mimes are all classed as Terrorists now that someone noticed it looked good in a headline.
Well those are the basics. I'm sure I've missed a load but I can be bothered to write anymore. Feel free to correct me on any glaring omissions or mistakes here.
NOTE TO STUDENTS: I realise its cool to go to anti-war marches and "We Hate Fascism" parties but I really want to give the customary "hay dood, anarchism is cool, yo. you just don't get it" mail a miss. I don't give a "expletive deleted" what you think because more than likely you'll be working for an ad agency and be churning out healthy Capitalist babies before the decade's out. If you really believe in one of the above, you're probably on the wrong site but I'd be glad to hear from you in relation to the many factual errors displayed above. If you just happen to be a political equivalent of a "We get our spells off of Buffy" Wicca keep it to yourself.
Christian intolerance or a few angry old people?
Category: Politics
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/20/...ain612805.shtml
Not being the most enlightened person when events and news happen, this happened to catch my eye on the telly.
Simply summed: A Mosque wants to have the call to worship played for about 1 1/2 minutes 5 times a day between 6 am and 10 pm. The City counsel seems open to the idea, but angry resident (There are always a few) are adverse to the idea. The TV report showed several, er, rude messages to the only Muslim Counselman while the article listed only makes light of the more civil responses.
Now, this is pretty much a non-issue in real life, as Detroit already has Mosques doing this and the issue will probably be approved despite the complaints. But the issue I raise is how does this actually effect anything? What sort of testy control freak must you be, to be offended by Arabic Chanting?
I liken this to playing Taps at the raising of the flag......Do you, should you care if you piss off an Anarchist? What about the Jesus stickers? The always irritating Jesus fishes? How about my "My God is bigger than your God" bumper sticker? The Jehovah's Witness knocking your door? The sound of bland Hymns exuding from the Methodist Church next door? Should all that be ended just to keep the Call to Worship from offending 80 year old Poles?
Seems to me this is a moot point under the Constitution.
All religious group shave some form of Public call for worship. Whether the Bells of the cathedral or the annoying door to door method. I mean it is protected under the first amendment. I don't see why anyone would have a problem with this type of public announcement as all religions are based in personal choice. Under that premise, those affected or impacted by a Muslim "Call to Worship" would infact be those of the Muslim Faith.
In my opinion this seems like a racially motivated resistance from all the media coverage and controversy surrounding the Middle East.
First of all, when I was in Cairo, the call to prayer was one of my favorite things of the day. Just like you said, five times a day, you hear this call for maybe a minute and a half. It was beautiful, I thought...it just kind of blended into the noises of the city and gave it this mystical quality.
Thanatos, if you want to talk about noise, instead of those obnoxious bumper stickers, how about the church bells that ring during weddings, services, on the hour, etc., etc., etc.? Open your mind a little bit.
Christians don't bother me. That means I don't hear church bells, pretty much ever. Apparently you live someplace with a demented bell-ringer that decides to ring it every day for hours on end.
PS not saying I think they shouldn't have the right to do it, I just think it would be annoying.
Category: Politics
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/20/...ain612805.shtml
Not being the most enlightened person when events and news happen, this happened to catch my eye on the telly.
Simply summed: A Mosque wants to have the call to worship played for about 1 1/2 minutes 5 times a day between 6 am and 10 pm. The City counsel seems open to the idea, but angry resident (There are always a few) are adverse to the idea. The TV report showed several, er, rude messages to the only Muslim Counselman while the article listed only makes light of the more civil responses.
Now, this is pretty much a non-issue in real life, as Detroit already has Mosques doing this and the issue will probably be approved despite the complaints. But the issue I raise is how does this actually effect anything? What sort of testy control freak must you be, to be offended by Arabic Chanting?
I liken this to playing Taps at the raising of the flag......Do you, should you care if you piss off an Anarchist? What about the Jesus stickers? The always irritating Jesus fishes? How about my "My God is bigger than your God" bumper sticker? The Jehovah's Witness knocking your door? The sound of bland Hymns exuding from the Methodist Church next door? Should all that be ended just to keep the Call to Worship from offending 80 year old Poles?
Seems to me this is a moot point under the Constitution.
All religious group shave some form of Public call for worship. Whether the Bells of the cathedral or the annoying door to door method. I mean it is protected under the first amendment. I don't see why anyone would have a problem with this type of public announcement as all religions are based in personal choice. Under that premise, those affected or impacted by a Muslim "Call to Worship" would infact be those of the Muslim Faith.
In my opinion this seems like a racially motivated resistance from all the media coverage and controversy surrounding the Middle East.
First of all, when I was in Cairo, the call to prayer was one of my favorite things of the day. Just like you said, five times a day, you hear this call for maybe a minute and a half. It was beautiful, I thought...it just kind of blended into the noises of the city and gave it this mystical quality.
Thanatos, if you want to talk about noise, instead of those obnoxious bumper stickers, how about the church bells that ring during weddings, services, on the hour, etc., etc., etc.? Open your mind a little bit.
Christians don't bother me. That means I don't hear church bells, pretty much ever. Apparently you live someplace with a demented bell-ringer that decides to ring it every day for hours on end.
PS not saying I think they shouldn't have the right to do it, I just think it would be annoying.
Iran in Iraq’s Shadow:
Dealing with Tehran’s
Nuclear Weapons Bid
RICHARD L. RUSSELL
As the old military adage has it, no good deed ever goes unpunished. And so it would seem with American security interests in the Persian Gulf. Soon after the United States has removed a major threat to American and regional interests with the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Washington has to come to terms with the looming challenge of Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. The good news is that assertive multilateral diplomacy still has some running room for negotiating a stall or derailment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The bad news is that the prospects are dim for achieving this end without the resort to force over the coming years.
The Iraq war is the backdrop for the evolving policy debate on Iran. The Iraq situation pits competing views of American national security strategy after 11 September 2001 against one another. On one side, critics of the Iraq war are posturing that if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) failed to be a sufficient justification for waging war against Iraq, then concerns about WMD have even less merit for forcibly challenging the Iranian regime over its nuclear weapons aspirations. On the other side, the threat posed by WMD—with the associated risk that terrorists might get their hands on WMD—is emerging as a worldview to replace the grand unifying scheme of containment which governed American and Western policy during the Cold War. Those in this camp view the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq as models for other policy challenges that involve WMD and potential support for terrorist groups coming from the likes of Iran and North Korea.
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There are pitfalls, though, of viewing the Iran policy debate entirely through the Iraq policy prism. Just as a prism bends rays of light, Iraq and Iran, while they share many features, are distinct problems that require the modulation of policy tools. This article seeks to illuminate the commonalities and variations between past Iraq and today’s Iran as well as the strengths and weaknesses of American policy options for dealing with the growing security challenge posed by Tehran’s quest for nuclear weapons.
Iran’s Decrepit Armed Forces and Squeezed Geopolitical Space
Iran shares with Iraq geopolitical aspirations in the Persian Gulf in which weapons of mass destruction play a critical role. Iraq’s past drive for WMD was fueled by Saddam’s lust for power and his will to politically and militarily dominate the Gulf. Although Iraq’s behavior over the past decade captured the most international attention, Iran too has hegemonic ambitions in the Gulf. Khomeni’s revolutionary goal was to remake the region in Iran’s own self-image, governed by clerics and Islamic law. Iraq’s 1990-91 war pushed into the far background the premier security concern of the United States and the Arab Gulf states in the 1980s—that Iran would emerge as the winner of the war with Iraq to become the dominant power capable of directly threatening Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Iran’s geographic girth lends itself to a country with large standing armed forces, but Iran’s military today is weaker than it was in the wake of the revolutionary euphoria of 1979.1 The Iranians militarily lived off the Shah’s US-provided arms and equipment to survive the Iran-Iraq War, but the war nearly exhausted their inventories and put enormous wear and tear on equipment holdings. They have managed to make due, in part, by cannibalizing American equipment to keep fewer armaments running, but these stopgap efforts are increasingly more difficult to muster to prolong the longevity of the military inventory. The Iranians also are using illicit means to bypass US restrictions on the export of military equipment to Iran.2 Iran has been hard-pressed to find direct external weapon suppliers to replace the United States. Michael Eisenstadt observes that in recent years Russia has been Iran’s main source of conventional arms, but Moscow has agreed not to conclude any new arms deals and to halt all conventional weapons transfers since September 1999.3 The Iranians have made efforts to fill the void with indigenously pro-
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duced weapons, but Tehran lacks the ability to produce high-performance conventional weapons platforms.
Tehran must have shuddered when witnessing the American military slashing through Saddam’s forces in the 2003 war. Iran already had a sense of its conventional military inferiority compared to American forces. Years ago Tehran received a direct taste of that from the American re-flagging operations in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War, when the US Navy readily destroyed much of Iran’s conventional naval capabilities, leaving Iran to harass shipping with irregular hit-and-run gunboat attacks. In the spring 2003 war, American and British forces accomplished in about a month what Iranian forces had failed to do in eight years of war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988. Tehran cannot fail to appreciate that Iranian conventional forces would have little chance of resisting a US military assault.
In Iran’s geopolitical landscape and strategic calculus, the United States looms large and its “demonization” remains a central feature of the cleric regime’s worldview. As Anoushiravan Ehteshami observes, “Iran holds an almost paranoid and conspiratorial view of the United States’ role and actions in the Middle East and sees almost every US initiative as a direct or indirect assault on Iran’s regional interests.”4 Just as George Kennan in his Cold War analysis of the Soviet Union judged that the regime in Moscow needed to politically manufacture an enemy in the United States to justify its ruthless reign at home, so do the clerics in Tehran need a political opponent in the United States on which to heap the blame and deflect public attention from their own inability to deliver political freedom, basic living standards, and an adequate economic livelihood to its people. As part and parcel of its efforts to deflect domestic criticism toward outside targets, the regime portrayed numerous student demonstrations in Iran in June and July 2003—during which Tehran felt compelled to arrest about 4,000 demonstrators—as being the result of American instigation in Iranian affairs.
American military endeavors in the greater Middle East region necessitated by 9/11 have fueled Iran’s insecurity and geopolitical sense of encirclement. As Ray Takeyh notes, “The paradox of the post-September 11 Middle East is that although Iran’s security has improved through the removal of Saddam and the Taliban in Afghanistan, its feelings of insecurity have intensified.”5 The United States used its military presence in the Persian Gulf to support operations both in Afghanistan and Iraq, even if host-country partners were reticent about publicly discussing their support, which cut against the grain of Arab public opinion. In its campaign against al Qaeda, much to Iran’s chagrin, the United States also has had hubs of military activity or transit rights in several countries in Central Asia, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan.6
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Glimpses of Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Bid
Iran sees WMD and ballistic missiles as means to fill the void in military and deterrent capabilities. Tehran suffered under barrages of Iraqi ballistic missiles during the Iran-Iraq War and wants to have the option of using ballistic missiles that are faster and more reliable than Iran’s air force for penetrating enemy airspaces to deliver both conventional and WMD warheads. In July 2003 Iran successfully tested the Shahab-3 missile, which achieved a range of about 1,000 km. Iran is suspected of having an unspecified number of operational Shahab missiles, which are based on North Korea’s No Dong-1 missile that is reportedly capable of carrying an 800 kg warhead. Iran also is working on a 2,000-km Shahab-4 based on Russian technology, as well as a 5,000-km Shahab-5 missile.7 These missiles probably are too inaccurate to be of much military utility if armed with conventional warheads, but they would be sufficiently accurate to deliver WMD, particularly nuclear warheads.8 According to a foreign intelligence official and a former Iranian intelligence officer, the North Koreans are working on the Shahab-4 and providing assistance on designs for a nuclear warhead.9
The destructive power of chemical and biological weapons pales in comparison to that of nuclear weapons, which, unfortunately, often are considered the coin of the realm for major-power status in international relations.10 The Iranian clerics almost certainly want nuclear weapons to compensate for conventional military shortcomings to deter potential adversaries and enhance the security of their regime: “The powerful Revolutionary Guards and military strategists are convinced that only a nuclear Iran can assume its place as a major regional power and adequately deter a possible attack from the United States or Israel, said [a] policy adviser to a senior conservative cleric, who spoke on condition of anonymity.”11
The Iranians have learned that the road to nuclear weapons is best paved with ambiguity. The Israelis, Pakistanis, Indians, and apparently the North Koreans successfully acquired nuclear weapons by cloaking their research, development, procurement, and deployment efforts with cover stories that their efforts were all geared to civilian nuclear energy programs, not to be harnessed for military applications. Tehran could not have failed to notice that once these states acquired nuclear weapons mated with aircraft and missile delivery systems, they escaped—so far, at least—military preemptive and preventive action by rival states. In marked contrast, the Iraqis suffered as the result of Israeli and American preventive military actions, in part because Baghdad was not fast enough in acquiring nuclear weapons. The Israeli strike on an Iraqi nuclear research plant in 1981 and the American wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 might have been deterred had Iraq managed to acquire nuclear weapons.
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The Iranians therefore consistently and loudly proclaim that their pursuit of nuclear power is strictly for peaceful civilian purposes. President Muhammad Khatami, for example, said in February 2003, “I assure all peace-loving individuals in the world that Iran’s efforts in the field of nuclear technology are focused on civilian application and nothing else.”12 The Iranians argue that they need electric power produced by nuclear plants to meet domestic energy needs and to free up oil for export and foreign currency. The Iranian claims have a hollow ring, however. Iran’s oil industry could be modernized and made more cost-efficient and productive with the expenditure of far fewer economic resources than those needed for nuclear power, to better deliver energy to the Iranian population at lower costs while increasing production for the international market.
The Iranians are working closely with the Russians, who have an $800 million contract with the Iranians to build the 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor at Bushehr.13 Although spent nuclear fuel at Bushehr could be diverted to use in nuclear weapons, Moscow has traditionally put more weight on near-term economic interests than on longer-term strategic interests in dealing with Iran. The Russians have adapted a Keynesian approach to Iran: damn the long-run strategic threat of an Iran armed with ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads hostile to Russian political interests, because in the long run we’ll all be dead anyway.
The Iranians also are interested in building a heavy-water reactor, which the international community considers as more of a nuclear proliferation risk than light-water reactors such as the one at Bushehr. Tehran has announced plans to build a 40-megawatt heavy-water research reactor, and it already has a heavy-water plant at Arak that could provide heavy water to the planned research reactor. Heavy water allows a heavy-water reactor to operate with natural uranium as its fuel and to produce plutonium.14 Spent fuel from the planned heavy-water reactor would be ideal for extracting bomb-grade plutonium. North Korea, for example, claims to have made its weapons from the plutonium-rich spent fuel of its 5-megawatt reactor.15 Gary Milhollin, writing in a New York Times article, puts the planned Iranian reactor in perspective by noting that it is too small for electricity and larger than needed for research, and is the type providing fuel for nuclear weapons programs in India, Israel, and Pakistan.16
Iran also is developing domestic uranium production capabilities, ostensibly to fuel its “civilian-use” nuclear power plants. In February 2003, Khatami announced that Iran had begun mining uranium near Yazd.17 The Russians, however, claim that the Bushehr contract includes “provisions for Russia to supply fresh fuel for the life of the reactor and to take spent fuel back to Russia, thus denying Iran any potential access to the plutonium contained in the spent fuel.”18 The Iranians claim that the production facility is needed for self-sufficiency to
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enrich uranium for nuclear power plants, but again, as with most Iranian claims regarding their ostensible “civilian” uses for nuclear power, it would be cheaper for them to purchase uranium for civilian power needs on the international market than to indigenously develop uranium production capabilities.
Perhaps most alarming are the recent international exposures of Iran’s emerging uranium enrichment capabilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in February 2002 discovered that Iran is building a sophisticated uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, about 200 miles south of Tehran. The IAEA found that 160 centrifuges were installed at a pilot plant at Natanz and 5,000 more centrifuges are to be completed at a neighboring production facility by 2005. After completion of the plant, Iran will be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs per year.19 In a June 2003 visit to Iran, moreover, the IAEA discovered traces of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium on centrifuges at the Natanz plant and the Kalaye Electric Company, raising the international concern that Iran’s centrifuges are intended to support a nuclear weapons program.20
Iranian uranium enrichment capabilities appear to also have benefited from Pakistani assistance. The centrifuges inspected at Natanz by IAEA officials in February 2002 were reportedly based on a Pakistani design. The now-infamous Pakistani official widely regarded as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, A. Q. Khan, reportedly traveled frequently to Tehran to share his expertise about centrifuges and nuclear weapons design. A former Iranian diplomat turned defector claims that the Iranians gave Khan a villa near the Caspian Sea as a token of thanks for his support of Iran’s endeavors.21
Some scholars and observers of Iranian politics dismiss the foregoing as evidence that Iran has embarked on a full-fledged nuclear weapons program. It is curious that they should have confidence in making such an assessment, given that the secretive regime in Tehran is not likely to publicly broadcast a decision to acquire nuclear weapons. Such a decision would be tightly held in a small circle of regime insiders. After all, many observers were surprised by the breadth, depth, and sophistication of the Iranian uranium enrichment discovered by the IAEA inspectors because the regime’s decision to pursue these activities was not publicly announced. The Iranians would be foolhardy to undermine their civilian nuclear power cover story and announce their quest for nuclear weapons, only to increase their vulnerability to American and Israeli preventive military action.
Diplomatic Options for Stalling Iranian Nuclear Weapons
American diplomacy is encouraging energetic and assertive IAEA inspections of Iran under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. The specter of the US use of force against another pillar of the “axis of evil,”
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coupled with Europe’s belated doubts about the efficacy of engagement to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program, has worked to coax Iran to accept no-notice IAEA inspections. The Europeans—the French and Germans, in particular—who had long resisted US efforts to isolate Iran and favored diplomatic and economic engagement of Tehran, were apparently taken aback by the scope of Iran’s work on uranium enrichment and disregard for the NPT. The French, Germans, and British are rightly trying to exchange trade discussions for Iran’s cooperation on no-notice inspections and ending its pursuit of the nuclear fuel cycle, which would give Iran the capability to pursue nuclear weapons in short order.22 The European Union Foreign Minister declared publicly in June 2003 that if diplomatic efforts to deal with Iran’s WMD should fail, coercive measures could be envisioned.23 Obviously such bravado is in marked contrast to European opposition to the American use of force against Saddam’s regime, and should push come to shove in dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the Europeans may well revert to their aversion to the exercise of American military power. It is easy for the Europeans to argue theoretically that force may have to be used when that contingency appears well over the horizon, but it would be politically more unpalatable for European capitals when the concrete decision time for the resort to force beckons.
Tehran for its part probably calculates that its acceptance of the no-notice inspections will buy Iran more time to work on its clandestine nuclear weapons program by politically diffusing international support for an assertive American stance. At the same time, Tehran probably is betting that it can work on nuclear weapons undetected by IAEA inspectors. Iran has had plenty of opportunity to learn lessons on beating the IAEA inspection regime from watching Iraq and North Korea, which both cheated successfully against IAEA inspectors. Both Iraq and North Korea worked feverishly on nuclear weapons programs while officially considered “in good standing” in the eyes of the IAEA inspectors and their governing NPT. Only US intelligence was able to catch North Korea covertly working on a uranium enrichment program, which led to a chain of events that resulted in Pyongyang formally withdrawing from the NPT. The massive scope of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was revealed only after Iraq’s 1991 battlefield defeat and intrusive UN weapons inspections. UN inspectors found the Iraqis to be expert in denial and deception efforts that allowed them to vigorously pursue a nuclear weapons program despite years of IAEA inspections. If IAEA inspectors were on their way to a sensitive Iranian site, Tehran’s security services could manufacture all kinds of obstacles to slow the IAEA team or misdirect them, just as the Iraqis did with IAEA and UN weapons inspections.
To hedge against these potential Iranian calculations, IAEA inspectors would have to demand an unparalleled level of sustained and rapid access
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to Iranian facilities and personnel, with full Iranian cooperation. No-notice and intrusive IAEA inspections should be regularly and routinely mounted without international apology. IAEA inspectors should have routine, widespread, and unencumbered debriefing access to any and all Iranian scientists and technicians, who could be debriefed outside of Iran and without Iranian minders present. Such measures were only faintheartedly implemented by the United Nations under Hans Blix in the run-up to the 2003 war against Iraq.
Washington could further use international sanctions to cut Iran’s trading access to the global market, particularly for oil exports, to increase pressure on Tehran to accept assertive IAEA inspections and a stoppage in Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle efforts, but that course could suffer from numerous pitfalls. Sanctions would have to be sustained for a prolonged period of time before they began to hurt Iran’s economy, and after that time, much like the sanctions implemented against Saddam’s regime, they would hurt the livelihood of the general populace more than regime elites. As a consequence the United States might undercut its objective of looking to the Iranian population to usher in a political change in Tehran—under the stress of such international sanctions, the population could rally around the regime rather than taking up political actions against it.
A better alternative might be for Washington to offer to sweeten the diplomatic tea with a variety of options to encourage Iran to accept an unprecedented level of intrusive IAEA inspections and to stop its nuclear fuel cycle efforts. For example, Washington could offer the resumption of diplomatic ties with Tehran severed after the 1979 revolution; the release of frozen Iranian assets in the United States; and the easing of trade sanctions that would facilitate Iranian access to the international marketplace, technology, and business, thus helping to modernize Iran’s oil industry. As Takeyh observes, “The economic dimension is particularly important as, in the past decade, Tehran has grudgingly come to realize that Iran’s tense relations with the United States preclude its effective integration into the global economy and access to needed technology.”24 These positive incentives, however, might still not be sufficient to reverse Iran’s hostile policy toward the United States given the factions competing for power in Tehran. As Geoffrey Kemp points out, “Opponents can be counted upon to do all they can to prevent such a thing from happening, including strategic leaks designed to undermine any diplomacy in prospect.”25
The uncertainty over the Iranian internal power structure would make it difficult for American policymakers to establish “rules of the road” in any diplomatic dialogue designed to gain a degree of confidence that Tehran could exercise responsible and stringent controls over future nuclear weapon stocks. Notwithstanding past Iranian public support for the Iranian President, the wind in Khatami’s reform-minded sails is dying. And the Iranian elections in February 2004 in which conservatives barred moderates from being placed
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on ballots have stranded the reformers at sea without fresh water. While many in the West hope that the counterrevolutionary winds will grow stronger with public demonstrations and cast aside the conservative clerics, such a desirable course of events may await the longer run. In the short to medium terms, there are greater prospects for hard-line clerics ousting the more pragmatic clerics in the regime power struggle.
Military Options for Disrupting
Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program
American diplomatic support for robust IAEA inspections is reducing widespread European and Middle Eastern criticism that the United States acts unilaterally or hegemonically in the international arena. Such criticism reached shrill heights during the lead-up to the war against Saddam’s Iraq. The United States needs to work to heal those wounds to garner political support from Europe and the greater Middle East region to complement diplomacy with military force in a concerted policy to derail Iran’s train ride toward nuclear weapons.
Military options could be employed to physically disrupt, delay, and destroy key components of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Such military options would be geared toward causing the Tehran regime pain and inflicting costs for Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. They could be aimed at changing Tehran’s strategic calculus, so that Iran views nuclear weapons not as something that enhances the security of the regime, but as a liability that increases prospects for conflict with the United States and threatens the clerical regime’s hold on power.
Obviously military options would entail less risk if exercised before Iran acquires nuclear weapons. American policymakers would have to be concerned that if military options are employed after Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the Iranians could retaliate for US conventional military strikes by targeting American forces in the region with nuclear weapons or by using clandestine means to attack American civilians, perhaps via the Iranian intelligence services or collaborating transnational actors, especially Hezbollah. While such risks may not ultimately preclude the decision to use force, Iranian possession of nuclear weapons would make the decision a heavy burden.
American military superiority over Iran gives Washington a wide spectrum of military options for coercing Tehran. These options range from limited strikes against Iran’s political, military, internal security, and WMD-related infrastructure. For example, the United States could target Iran’s nuclear power infrastructure—to include the Bushehr nuclear power plant as well as any future nuclear power plants, heavy-water facilities, future plutonium reprocessing plants, and uranium production and enrichment plants—with
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cruise missiles or combat aircraft strikes. An American air campaign mounted from regional support hubs in the small Gulf Arab states could make short work of Iran’s air force and air defense forces to gain air superiority for attacks against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Such strikes could serve the practical purposes of disrupting Iran’s means for developing nuclear weapons as well as constituting a symbolic, political demonstration of American resolve to use whatever means are available to block Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations.
The United States would be operating with a less-than-perfect intelligence picture of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, however. The Iranians cannot have escaped learning the importance of diversifying and building redundancies into their nuclear weapons program components in light of Israel’s preemptive strike on Iraq’s nuclear power facility. They managed to hide Iranian uranium reprocessing developments from the outside world for some time and have undoubtedly tightened security to stem further exposures of their nuclear weapons program. In the aftermath of any American air strikes against their nuclear infrastructure, Iran undoubtedly also would redouble its efforts to conceal and build redundancies into its nuclear weapons infrastructure to make follow-on American attacks more difficult.
American aircraft and cruise missiles also could target Iran’s key political, security, and military infrastructures to harm the power of the regime in Tehran. Strikes could target government buildings and even the homes of clerics; facilities and compounds used by internal security and policy forces; assets of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij forces; major army units and garrisons; and WMD delivery vehicles, such as aircraft and ballistic missiles, as well as their production facilities. Targeting internal security organs would be particularly useful because that might allow the disgruntled populace more freedom to demonstrate against the regime and substantially increase the pressure on clerics to forgo their nuclear weapons aspirations.
The threat of a US invasion of Iran should not be taken off the table, because it could be used to bolster the strength of coercive diplomacy to compel the Iranians to desist on nuclear weapons and to accept robust and intrusive international inspections to help ensure their compliance with the NPT. The most imprudent step a statesman can make is to let his adversary know what he is not prepared to do; that profoundly undermines his political leverage to achieve interests without resort to force. President Clinton made this critical mistake in the 1999 Kosovo war, in which he declared that US ground forces would not be used against Serbia.
Nevertheless, the US military presence in the greater Middle East that brackets Iran would be insufficient to stage the type of massive ground campaign that would be required to occupy Iran’s major cities. Iraq is a comparatively easy occupational task in comparison to Iran; it is smaller and has
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fewer citizens. Iraq is twice the size of Idaho and populated with about 25 million people, while Iran is nearly four times the size of Iraq with approximately 67 million people.26 The American and British forces in neighboring Iraq are likely to be fully preoccupied with Iraq’s internal security for the coming years, and without significant augmentation they would be unavailable for a cross-border invasion of Iran. US forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan are much smaller and more suited for special operations that would augment, rather than spearhead, the massive ground force campaign that would be necessitated by Iran’s sheer geographic size.
American decisionmakers have to weigh political ends against military means as a basis for formulating strategy. The United States now has a significant portion of its total ground forces committed to Iraq and would be hard-pressed to mount a comparable or larger operation simultaneously against Iran. The United States also needs to keep its forces ready to meet contingencies elsewhere in the world, particularly in Asia where potential clashes could emerge on the Korean Peninsula or over Taiwan. The weighing of these concerns, however, would best be done in the minds of policymakers and not shared aloud in the public domain for the ears of Iran’s clerics.
The domestic Iranian political fallout from American military operations could cut two ways. On one hand, US operations could undermine the regime politically as many Iranians would see them as more evidence that the nature of the regime works to prolong Iran’s isolation from the world community and its economic stagnation and political retardation. On the other hand, the clerics would seize on the strikes as evidence of a hegemonic American campaign to conquer the Middle East and its oil, and use that perception as justification for repressive domestic security measures to hold onto power. In the final analysis, the United States could have to just wait and see which of these competing forces would prove to be stronger as it vigilantly monitored Iran’s efforts to reconstitute its infrastructure and made follow-on strikes over a period of years to perpetually “kick the can down the road” and delay Tehran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
As has been the case in the war against Iraq, the United States would have to ride out the international political fallout from any military actions
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against Iran. At first glance, Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan probably would politically protest “American unilateralism” out of concern over economic losses as a result of attacks on Iranian facilities that those countries are supporting. But then again, from a more cynical view, those states might work to economically exploit the situation and seek additional contracts to rebuild all that the Americans had destroyed. Military operations too would come with a tide of regional outcries against the United States. Many would accuse the United States of the all-too-familiar refrain that Washington holds a double-standard in the region by ignoring Israeli nuclear weapons while taking military actions against Muslim states such as Iraq and Iran, which were seeking to arm themselves to balance Israeli and American nuclear power. As hard as it is for American observers to appreciate, many in the region—officers, diplomats, officials, as well as the general public—harbor the view that a nuclear-armed Iran could be useful to counterbalance Israeli as well as American nuclear power.
Running Risks with Iranian Nuclear Weapons
And what if these diplomatic and military options were unsuccessful? What could Iran do with nuclear weapons? Would Iranian nuclear weapons pose a profound security challenge for the United States? Or would an Iranian nuclear weapons inventory be manageable for Washington? Could the United States accept Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities, much as Washington has accepted those possessed by Israel, Pakistan, India, and perhaps North Korea?
A grave concern is that Iran could transfer nuclear weapons to non-state actors, because for the past 20 years Tehran has consistently used non-state actors as instruments of statecraft to advance Iranian political interests and objectives. Indeed, the prospects for the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-state actors is greater in the case of Iran than it was for Saddam’s regime, because Tehran has been much more active than Baghdad had been in the sponsorship of terrorist operations, particularly those orchestrated by Hezbollah, against the United States.27 Jeffrey Goldberg reports in The New Yorker, “Hezbollah has an annual budget of more than a hundred million dollars, which is supplied by the Iranian government directly and by a complex system of finance cells scattered around the world.”28
Some observers argue that the revolutionary steam has run out of Iran’s regime and that Iranian sponsorship of terrorist operations against US interests has diminished. Iran’s complicity and support for the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, the American military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American servicemen, belies arguments that Iran’s government has tempered its opposition to the United States, however. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh has publicly and directly linked Iran to the Khobar
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Towers attack: “Over the course of our investigation the evidence became clear that while the attack was staged by Saudi Hezbollah members, the entire operation was planned, funded and coordinated by Iran’s security services, the IRGC and MOIS [Ministry of Intelligence and Security], acting on orders from the highest levels of the regime in Tehran.”29 More recently, Iran has shown an interest in maintaining links to al Qaeda by harboring its operatives, some of whom had fled neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan in the midst of the October 2001 American military campaign in Afghanistan.30
Some observers are inclined to give the Iranian regime the benefit of the doubt regarding allegations of complicity in the Khobar Towers bombing by arguing that “rogue elements” or conservative hardliners in the regime, not President Khatami and like-minded supporters in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and parliament, supported the operations. Conclusive evidence to bolster this argument is elusive, but even if it were found to be the case, such a fact would be of little solace to American policymakers and the public coming to terms with the potential dangers posed by Iranian possession of nuclear weapons. Policymakers would have to be concerned that hardliners in the future could control or direct transfers of nuclear weapons even if it were not the consensus policy of the regime. If an American city were to suffer from the detonation of a Hezbollah-planted Iranian nuclear weapon, it would be largely irrelevant whether or not it came about via rogue or mainstream elements of the Tehran government.
Tehran might calculate that a nuclear deterrent would give it more leeway for supporting militants in the Middle East, including Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. The Iranians, even without nuclear weapons, are moving in this policy direction. As Daniel Byman observes in an article in Foreign Affairs, “Since the outbreak of the al Aqsa intifada in October 2000, Hezbollah has provided guerrilla training, bomb-building expertise, propaganda, and tactical tips to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other anti-Israeli groups.”31
Tehran might judge that even if its hand were revealed in supporting terrorist operations via these groups against American interests and partners among the Gulf Arab states, Iranian nuclear weapons would deter military reprisals against Iran. American and Israeli contemplation of retaliatory strikes against Iran would be substantially riskier if Iran had the means to retaliate with nuclear weapons. The Iranian clerics are not well schooled in the ins and outs of the elaborate Western strategic literature formulated during the Cold War. The clerics probably would be more influenced by their Islamic ideological worldviews than by a rational calculation of national interests. As George Perkovich argues, “Political leaders like Khamene’i and Rafsanjani see nuclear weapons as an almost magical source of national power and autonomy. These men are political clerics, not international strategists or technologists.
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They intuit that the bomb will keep all outside powers, including Israel and the US, from thinking they can dictate to Iran or invade it.”32 In short, a nuclear-armed Tehran might fear the prospect of American and Israeli nuclear retaliation less than Western strategists would hope.
The Iranians could elect to rely more heavily on integrating nuclear weapons into their war-fighting strategies. They undoubtedly have ingrained into their political and military thinking the premise to never again be caught in a prolonged war of attrition as was the case in the Iran-Iraq War that Tehran ultimately lost. The Iranians might come to view nuclear weapons as useful, or even essential, battlefield instruments for destroying the armed forces of an adversary, particularly those of Iraq. As Gary Sick points out, Iran’s past use of unconventional hit-and-run speedboat attacks in the Persian Gulf during its war with Iran demonstrate Tehran’s willingness to “use unconventional, even terrorist, methods to pursue a political and military strategy, even if that meant confronting the United States.”33 Along these lines, Tehran might be tempted to harness the threat of nuclear weapons for leverage in the political-military struggle against the United States for power and influence in the Persian Gulf.
Iranian nuclear weapons would give Tehran greater political and military prestige that could translate into leverage over the Arab Gulf states. As Kenneth Pollack warns, “Tehran appears to want nuclear weapons principally to deter an American attack. Once it gets them, however, its strategic calculus might change and it might be emboldened to pursue a more aggressive foreign policy.”34 The Arab Gulf states would be more vulnerable to Iranian political pressure to reduce security cooperation with the United States, particularly in the event of a regional contingency. Finally, an Iranian nuclear bomb also would increase the already high incentives for Arab states to procure nuclear weapons.
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NOTES
The author is indebted to his Near East-South Asia Center colleagues Ray Takeyh, for his tutelage on Iranian politics, and Danielle Debroux, for her able research assistance. A thanks is also due to Henry Sokolski for comments on an earlier draft as well as for his Nonproliferation Policy Education Center’s project on Iran that instigated the author’s interest in the topic.
1. Tehran’s regular armed forces consist of about 325,000 in the army, 18,000 in the navy, and 52,000 in the air force. It has a parallel force structure in the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with about 125,000 soldiers, including about 100,000 ground troops, 20,000 naval, 5,000 marines, and an unknown number in an air force. Tehran also has a paramilitary force, the Popular Mobilization Army or Basij, with about 40,000 active troops. See International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), The Military Balance, 2002-2003 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), p. 104.
2. In July 2003, the United States issued search warrants and grand jury subpoenas to 18 US companies in a massive raid against illegal export of American-built military components to a London front company for Iran. The front company was procuring components for the Hawk air defense system, F-14, F-4, F-5 combat aircraft, C-130 transport aircraft, and radar as well as other equipment. California police in July 2003 arrested two men trying to export military technology—including components for the F-4, F-5, and F-14 aircraft, and Hawk surface-to-air missiles—to China. These items are not in the Chinese military inventory, however, but are in the Iranian military’s inventory, strongly suggesting that China is acting as a middle man for Iran’s clandestine re-
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pair parts pipeline. See Christine Hanley, “Two Men Tried to Illegally Export Military Parts to China, U.S. Says,” Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2003, p. B5.
3. Michael Eisenstadt, “Living with a Nuclear Iran?” Survival, 41 (Autumn 1999), 140.
4. Anoushiravan Ehteshami, “Tehran’s Tocsin,” in Contemporary Nuclear Debates: Missile Defense, Arms Control, and Arms Races in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alexander T. J. Lennon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 152.
5. Ray Takeyh, “Iran’s Nuclear Calculations,” World Policy Journal, 20 (Summer 2003), 23.
6. See “A Survey of Central Asia: At the Crossroads,” The Economist, 26 July 2003, p. 3.
7. Alon Ben-David, “Iran Successfully Tests Shahab 3,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, 9 July 2003, http://jdw.janes.com/.
8. See “Iran’s Ballistic Missiles: Upgrades Underway,” Strategic Comments, 9 (London: IISS, 2003).
9. Douglas Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” Los Angeles Times, 4 August 2003, p. A6.
10. The Iranians developed a chemical warfare program in the 1980s to match Iraq’s chemical weapons capabilities demonstrated during the Iran-Iraq War and are suspected of harboring a biological warfare program. This is despite Tehran’s signature on the chemical and biological weapons conventions that prohibit such programs. See Joseph Cirincione with John B. Wolfsthal and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals (Washington: The Brookings Institution, for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), pp. 255-56.
11. Azadeh Moaveni and Douglas Frantz, “Are Iran’s Nuclear Promises Real?” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 2003.
12. Quoted in Nazila Fathi, “Iran Says It Has Developed Ability to Fuel Nuclear Plants But Won’t Seek Weapons,” The New York Times, 10 February 2003, p. A12.
13. David Holley, “Iran Sets Its Sights on More Reactors,” Los Angeles Times, 3 July 2003, p. A3.
14. Douglas Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” Los Angeles Times, 4 August 2003, p. A7. Heavy water (D2O) is “water containing significantly more than the natural proportion . . . of heavy hydrogen (deuterium, D) atoms to ordinary hydrogen atoms.” US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/gl...y-water-d2.html.
15. “Fissionable: Iran’s Nuclear Program,” The Economist, 14 June 2003, p. 24.
16. Gary Milhollin, “The Mullahs and the Bomb,” The New York Times, 23 October 2003.
17. Fathi, p. A12.
18. Robert J. Einhorn and Gary Samore, “Ending Russian Assistance to Iran’s Nuclear Bomb,” Survival, 44 (Summer 2002), 53.
19. Joby Warrick and Glenn Kessler, “Iran’s Nuclear Program Speeds Ahead,” The Washington Post, 10 March 2003, p. A1.
20. Douglas Frantz, “Iran Discloses Nuclear Activities,” Los Angeles Times, 24 October 2003; and Douglas Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” Los Angeles Times, 4 August 2003, p. A1.
21. Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” p. A7.
22. The author is indebted to Henry Sokolski for these important points.
23. “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Europe Spies a Threat,” The Economist, 21 June 2003, p. 27.
24. Takeyh, p. 25.
25. Geoffrey Kemp, “How to Stop the Iranian Bomb,” The National Interest, 72 (Summer 2003), 54.
26. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook, http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html and http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ir.html.
27. Hezbollah was responsible for the bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in October 1983 that killed 241 marines, the April 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, killed the CIA Beirut station chief in 1985, and killed a US Navy diver on hijacked TWA Flight 847 that landed in Beirut in 1985. For an argument against using Iraqi ties to terrorist groups as a strategic rationale for waging war against Saddam, see Richard L. Russell, “War and the Iraq Dilemma: Facing Harsh Realities,” Parameters, 32 (Autumn 2002), 47-48.
28. Jeffrey Goldberg, “In the Party of God: Are Terrorists in Lebanon Preparing for a Larger War?” The New Yorker, 14 October 2002, p. 183.
29. Louis J. Freeh, “A
Dealing with Tehran’s
Nuclear Weapons Bid
RICHARD L. RUSSELL
As the old military adage has it, no good deed ever goes unpunished. And so it would seem with American security interests in the Persian Gulf. Soon after the United States has removed a major threat to American and regional interests with the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Washington has to come to terms with the looming challenge of Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. The good news is that assertive multilateral diplomacy still has some running room for negotiating a stall or derailment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The bad news is that the prospects are dim for achieving this end without the resort to force over the coming years.
The Iraq war is the backdrop for the evolving policy debate on Iran. The Iraq situation pits competing views of American national security strategy after 11 September 2001 against one another. On one side, critics of the Iraq war are posturing that if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) failed to be a sufficient justification for waging war against Iraq, then concerns about WMD have even less merit for forcibly challenging the Iranian regime over its nuclear weapons aspirations. On the other side, the threat posed by WMD—with the associated risk that terrorists might get their hands on WMD—is emerging as a worldview to replace the grand unifying scheme of containment which governed American and Western policy during the Cold War. Those in this camp view the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq as models for other policy challenges that involve WMD and potential support for terrorist groups coming from the likes of Iran and North Korea.
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There are pitfalls, though, of viewing the Iran policy debate entirely through the Iraq policy prism. Just as a prism bends rays of light, Iraq and Iran, while they share many features, are distinct problems that require the modulation of policy tools. This article seeks to illuminate the commonalities and variations between past Iraq and today’s Iran as well as the strengths and weaknesses of American policy options for dealing with the growing security challenge posed by Tehran’s quest for nuclear weapons.
Iran’s Decrepit Armed Forces and Squeezed Geopolitical Space
Iran shares with Iraq geopolitical aspirations in the Persian Gulf in which weapons of mass destruction play a critical role. Iraq’s past drive for WMD was fueled by Saddam’s lust for power and his will to politically and militarily dominate the Gulf. Although Iraq’s behavior over the past decade captured the most international attention, Iran too has hegemonic ambitions in the Gulf. Khomeni’s revolutionary goal was to remake the region in Iran’s own self-image, governed by clerics and Islamic law. Iraq’s 1990-91 war pushed into the far background the premier security concern of the United States and the Arab Gulf states in the 1980s—that Iran would emerge as the winner of the war with Iraq to become the dominant power capable of directly threatening Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Iran’s geographic girth lends itself to a country with large standing armed forces, but Iran’s military today is weaker than it was in the wake of the revolutionary euphoria of 1979.1 The Iranians militarily lived off the Shah’s US-provided arms and equipment to survive the Iran-Iraq War, but the war nearly exhausted their inventories and put enormous wear and tear on equipment holdings. They have managed to make due, in part, by cannibalizing American equipment to keep fewer armaments running, but these stopgap efforts are increasingly more difficult to muster to prolong the longevity of the military inventory. The Iranians also are using illicit means to bypass US restrictions on the export of military equipment to Iran.2 Iran has been hard-pressed to find direct external weapon suppliers to replace the United States. Michael Eisenstadt observes that in recent years Russia has been Iran’s main source of conventional arms, but Moscow has agreed not to conclude any new arms deals and to halt all conventional weapons transfers since September 1999.3 The Iranians have made efforts to fill the void with indigenously pro-
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duced weapons, but Tehran lacks the ability to produce high-performance conventional weapons platforms.
Tehran must have shuddered when witnessing the American military slashing through Saddam’s forces in the 2003 war. Iran already had a sense of its conventional military inferiority compared to American forces. Years ago Tehran received a direct taste of that from the American re-flagging operations in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War, when the US Navy readily destroyed much of Iran’s conventional naval capabilities, leaving Iran to harass shipping with irregular hit-and-run gunboat attacks. In the spring 2003 war, American and British forces accomplished in about a month what Iranian forces had failed to do in eight years of war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988. Tehran cannot fail to appreciate that Iranian conventional forces would have little chance of resisting a US military assault.
In Iran’s geopolitical landscape and strategic calculus, the United States looms large and its “demonization” remains a central feature of the cleric regime’s worldview. As Anoushiravan Ehteshami observes, “Iran holds an almost paranoid and conspiratorial view of the United States’ role and actions in the Middle East and sees almost every US initiative as a direct or indirect assault on Iran’s regional interests.”4 Just as George Kennan in his Cold War analysis of the Soviet Union judged that the regime in Moscow needed to politically manufacture an enemy in the United States to justify its ruthless reign at home, so do the clerics in Tehran need a political opponent in the United States on which to heap the blame and deflect public attention from their own inability to deliver political freedom, basic living standards, and an adequate economic livelihood to its people. As part and parcel of its efforts to deflect domestic criticism toward outside targets, the regime portrayed numerous student demonstrations in Iran in June and July 2003—during which Tehran felt compelled to arrest about 4,000 demonstrators—as being the result of American instigation in Iranian affairs.
American military endeavors in the greater Middle East region necessitated by 9/11 have fueled Iran’s insecurity and geopolitical sense of encirclement. As Ray Takeyh notes, “The paradox of the post-September 11 Middle East is that although Iran’s security has improved through the removal of Saddam and the Taliban in Afghanistan, its feelings of insecurity have intensified.”5 The United States used its military presence in the Persian Gulf to support operations both in Afghanistan and Iraq, even if host-country partners were reticent about publicly discussing their support, which cut against the grain of Arab public opinion. In its campaign against al Qaeda, much to Iran’s chagrin, the United States also has had hubs of military activity or transit rights in several countries in Central Asia, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan.6
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Glimpses of Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Bid
Iran sees WMD and ballistic missiles as means to fill the void in military and deterrent capabilities. Tehran suffered under barrages of Iraqi ballistic missiles during the Iran-Iraq War and wants to have the option of using ballistic missiles that are faster and more reliable than Iran’s air force for penetrating enemy airspaces to deliver both conventional and WMD warheads. In July 2003 Iran successfully tested the Shahab-3 missile, which achieved a range of about 1,000 km. Iran is suspected of having an unspecified number of operational Shahab missiles, which are based on North Korea’s No Dong-1 missile that is reportedly capable of carrying an 800 kg warhead. Iran also is working on a 2,000-km Shahab-4 based on Russian technology, as well as a 5,000-km Shahab-5 missile.7 These missiles probably are too inaccurate to be of much military utility if armed with conventional warheads, but they would be sufficiently accurate to deliver WMD, particularly nuclear warheads.8 According to a foreign intelligence official and a former Iranian intelligence officer, the North Koreans are working on the Shahab-4 and providing assistance on designs for a nuclear warhead.9
The destructive power of chemical and biological weapons pales in comparison to that of nuclear weapons, which, unfortunately, often are considered the coin of the realm for major-power status in international relations.10 The Iranian clerics almost certainly want nuclear weapons to compensate for conventional military shortcomings to deter potential adversaries and enhance the security of their regime: “The powerful Revolutionary Guards and military strategists are convinced that only a nuclear Iran can assume its place as a major regional power and adequately deter a possible attack from the United States or Israel, said [a] policy adviser to a senior conservative cleric, who spoke on condition of anonymity.”11
The Iranians have learned that the road to nuclear weapons is best paved with ambiguity. The Israelis, Pakistanis, Indians, and apparently the North Koreans successfully acquired nuclear weapons by cloaking their research, development, procurement, and deployment efforts with cover stories that their efforts were all geared to civilian nuclear energy programs, not to be harnessed for military applications. Tehran could not have failed to notice that once these states acquired nuclear weapons mated with aircraft and missile delivery systems, they escaped—so far, at least—military preemptive and preventive action by rival states. In marked contrast, the Iraqis suffered as the result of Israeli and American preventive military actions, in part because Baghdad was not fast enough in acquiring nuclear weapons. The Israeli strike on an Iraqi nuclear research plant in 1981 and the American wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 might have been deterred had Iraq managed to acquire nuclear weapons.
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The Iranians therefore consistently and loudly proclaim that their pursuit of nuclear power is strictly for peaceful civilian purposes. President Muhammad Khatami, for example, said in February 2003, “I assure all peace-loving individuals in the world that Iran’s efforts in the field of nuclear technology are focused on civilian application and nothing else.”12 The Iranians argue that they need electric power produced by nuclear plants to meet domestic energy needs and to free up oil for export and foreign currency. The Iranian claims have a hollow ring, however. Iran’s oil industry could be modernized and made more cost-efficient and productive with the expenditure of far fewer economic resources than those needed for nuclear power, to better deliver energy to the Iranian population at lower costs while increasing production for the international market.
The Iranians are working closely with the Russians, who have an $800 million contract with the Iranians to build the 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor at Bushehr.13 Although spent nuclear fuel at Bushehr could be diverted to use in nuclear weapons, Moscow has traditionally put more weight on near-term economic interests than on longer-term strategic interests in dealing with Iran. The Russians have adapted a Keynesian approach to Iran: damn the long-run strategic threat of an Iran armed with ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads hostile to Russian political interests, because in the long run we’ll all be dead anyway.
The Iranians also are interested in building a heavy-water reactor, which the international community considers as more of a nuclear proliferation risk than light-water reactors such as the one at Bushehr. Tehran has announced plans to build a 40-megawatt heavy-water research reactor, and it already has a heavy-water plant at Arak that could provide heavy water to the planned research reactor. Heavy water allows a heavy-water reactor to operate with natural uranium as its fuel and to produce plutonium.14 Spent fuel from the planned heavy-water reactor would be ideal for extracting bomb-grade plutonium. North Korea, for example, claims to have made its weapons from the plutonium-rich spent fuel of its 5-megawatt reactor.15 Gary Milhollin, writing in a New York Times article, puts the planned Iranian reactor in perspective by noting that it is too small for electricity and larger than needed for research, and is the type providing fuel for nuclear weapons programs in India, Israel, and Pakistan.16
Iran also is developing domestic uranium production capabilities, ostensibly to fuel its “civilian-use” nuclear power plants. In February 2003, Khatami announced that Iran had begun mining uranium near Yazd.17 The Russians, however, claim that the Bushehr contract includes “provisions for Russia to supply fresh fuel for the life of the reactor and to take spent fuel back to Russia, thus denying Iran any potential access to the plutonium contained in the spent fuel.”18 The Iranians claim that the production facility is needed for self-sufficiency to
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enrich uranium for nuclear power plants, but again, as with most Iranian claims regarding their ostensible “civilian” uses for nuclear power, it would be cheaper for them to purchase uranium for civilian power needs on the international market than to indigenously develop uranium production capabilities.
Perhaps most alarming are the recent international exposures of Iran’s emerging uranium enrichment capabilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in February 2002 discovered that Iran is building a sophisticated uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, about 200 miles south of Tehran. The IAEA found that 160 centrifuges were installed at a pilot plant at Natanz and 5,000 more centrifuges are to be completed at a neighboring production facility by 2005. After completion of the plant, Iran will be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs per year.19 In a June 2003 visit to Iran, moreover, the IAEA discovered traces of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium on centrifuges at the Natanz plant and the Kalaye Electric Company, raising the international concern that Iran’s centrifuges are intended to support a nuclear weapons program.20
Iranian uranium enrichment capabilities appear to also have benefited from Pakistani assistance. The centrifuges inspected at Natanz by IAEA officials in February 2002 were reportedly based on a Pakistani design. The now-infamous Pakistani official widely regarded as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, A. Q. Khan, reportedly traveled frequently to Tehran to share his expertise about centrifuges and nuclear weapons design. A former Iranian diplomat turned defector claims that the Iranians gave Khan a villa near the Caspian Sea as a token of thanks for his support of Iran’s endeavors.21
Some scholars and observers of Iranian politics dismiss the foregoing as evidence that Iran has embarked on a full-fledged nuclear weapons program. It is curious that they should have confidence in making such an assessment, given that the secretive regime in Tehran is not likely to publicly broadcast a decision to acquire nuclear weapons. Such a decision would be tightly held in a small circle of regime insiders. After all, many observers were surprised by the breadth, depth, and sophistication of the Iranian uranium enrichment discovered by the IAEA inspectors because the regime’s decision to pursue these activities was not publicly announced. The Iranians would be foolhardy to undermine their civilian nuclear power cover story and announce their quest for nuclear weapons, only to increase their vulnerability to American and Israeli preventive military action.
Diplomatic Options for Stalling Iranian Nuclear Weapons
American diplomacy is encouraging energetic and assertive IAEA inspections of Iran under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. The specter of the US use of force against another pillar of the “axis of evil,”
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coupled with Europe’s belated doubts about the efficacy of engagement to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program, has worked to coax Iran to accept no-notice IAEA inspections. The Europeans—the French and Germans, in particular—who had long resisted US efforts to isolate Iran and favored diplomatic and economic engagement of Tehran, were apparently taken aback by the scope of Iran’s work on uranium enrichment and disregard for the NPT. The French, Germans, and British are rightly trying to exchange trade discussions for Iran’s cooperation on no-notice inspections and ending its pursuit of the nuclear fuel cycle, which would give Iran the capability to pursue nuclear weapons in short order.22 The European Union Foreign Minister declared publicly in June 2003 that if diplomatic efforts to deal with Iran’s WMD should fail, coercive measures could be envisioned.23 Obviously such bravado is in marked contrast to European opposition to the American use of force against Saddam’s regime, and should push come to shove in dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the Europeans may well revert to their aversion to the exercise of American military power. It is easy for the Europeans to argue theoretically that force may have to be used when that contingency appears well over the horizon, but it would be politically more unpalatable for European capitals when the concrete decision time for the resort to force beckons.
Tehran for its part probably calculates that its acceptance of the no-notice inspections will buy Iran more time to work on its clandestine nuclear weapons program by politically diffusing international support for an assertive American stance. At the same time, Tehran probably is betting that it can work on nuclear weapons undetected by IAEA inspectors. Iran has had plenty of opportunity to learn lessons on beating the IAEA inspection regime from watching Iraq and North Korea, which both cheated successfully against IAEA inspectors. Both Iraq and North Korea worked feverishly on nuclear weapons programs while officially considered “in good standing” in the eyes of the IAEA inspectors and their governing NPT. Only US intelligence was able to catch North Korea covertly working on a uranium enrichment program, which led to a chain of events that resulted in Pyongyang formally withdrawing from the NPT. The massive scope of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was revealed only after Iraq’s 1991 battlefield defeat and intrusive UN weapons inspections. UN inspectors found the Iraqis to be expert in denial and deception efforts that allowed them to vigorously pursue a nuclear weapons program despite years of IAEA inspections. If IAEA inspectors were on their way to a sensitive Iranian site, Tehran’s security services could manufacture all kinds of obstacles to slow the IAEA team or misdirect them, just as the Iraqis did with IAEA and UN weapons inspections.
To hedge against these potential Iranian calculations, IAEA inspectors would have to demand an unparalleled level of sustained and rapid access
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to Iranian facilities and personnel, with full Iranian cooperation. No-notice and intrusive IAEA inspections should be regularly and routinely mounted without international apology. IAEA inspectors should have routine, widespread, and unencumbered debriefing access to any and all Iranian scientists and technicians, who could be debriefed outside of Iran and without Iranian minders present. Such measures were only faintheartedly implemented by the United Nations under Hans Blix in the run-up to the 2003 war against Iraq.
Washington could further use international sanctions to cut Iran’s trading access to the global market, particularly for oil exports, to increase pressure on Tehran to accept assertive IAEA inspections and a stoppage in Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle efforts, but that course could suffer from numerous pitfalls. Sanctions would have to be sustained for a prolonged period of time before they began to hurt Iran’s economy, and after that time, much like the sanctions implemented against Saddam’s regime, they would hurt the livelihood of the general populace more than regime elites. As a consequence the United States might undercut its objective of looking to the Iranian population to usher in a political change in Tehran—under the stress of such international sanctions, the population could rally around the regime rather than taking up political actions against it.
A better alternative might be for Washington to offer to sweeten the diplomatic tea with a variety of options to encourage Iran to accept an unprecedented level of intrusive IAEA inspections and to stop its nuclear fuel cycle efforts. For example, Washington could offer the resumption of diplomatic ties with Tehran severed after the 1979 revolution; the release of frozen Iranian assets in the United States; and the easing of trade sanctions that would facilitate Iranian access to the international marketplace, technology, and business, thus helping to modernize Iran’s oil industry. As Takeyh observes, “The economic dimension is particularly important as, in the past decade, Tehran has grudgingly come to realize that Iran’s tense relations with the United States preclude its effective integration into the global economy and access to needed technology.”24 These positive incentives, however, might still not be sufficient to reverse Iran’s hostile policy toward the United States given the factions competing for power in Tehran. As Geoffrey Kemp points out, “Opponents can be counted upon to do all they can to prevent such a thing from happening, including strategic leaks designed to undermine any diplomacy in prospect.”25
The uncertainty over the Iranian internal power structure would make it difficult for American policymakers to establish “rules of the road” in any diplomatic dialogue designed to gain a degree of confidence that Tehran could exercise responsible and stringent controls over future nuclear weapon stocks. Notwithstanding past Iranian public support for the Iranian President, the wind in Khatami’s reform-minded sails is dying. And the Iranian elections in February 2004 in which conservatives barred moderates from being placed
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on ballots have stranded the reformers at sea without fresh water. While many in the West hope that the counterrevolutionary winds will grow stronger with public demonstrations and cast aside the conservative clerics, such a desirable course of events may await the longer run. In the short to medium terms, there are greater prospects for hard-line clerics ousting the more pragmatic clerics in the regime power struggle.
Military Options for Disrupting
Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program
American diplomatic support for robust IAEA inspections is reducing widespread European and Middle Eastern criticism that the United States acts unilaterally or hegemonically in the international arena. Such criticism reached shrill heights during the lead-up to the war against Saddam’s Iraq. The United States needs to work to heal those wounds to garner political support from Europe and the greater Middle East region to complement diplomacy with military force in a concerted policy to derail Iran’s train ride toward nuclear weapons.
Military options could be employed to physically disrupt, delay, and destroy key components of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Such military options would be geared toward causing the Tehran regime pain and inflicting costs for Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. They could be aimed at changing Tehran’s strategic calculus, so that Iran views nuclear weapons not as something that enhances the security of the regime, but as a liability that increases prospects for conflict with the United States and threatens the clerical regime’s hold on power.
Obviously military options would entail less risk if exercised before Iran acquires nuclear weapons. American policymakers would have to be concerned that if military options are employed after Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the Iranians could retaliate for US conventional military strikes by targeting American forces in the region with nuclear weapons or by using clandestine means to attack American civilians, perhaps via the Iranian intelligence services or collaborating transnational actors, especially Hezbollah. While such risks may not ultimately preclude the decision to use force, Iranian possession of nuclear weapons would make the decision a heavy burden.
American military superiority over Iran gives Washington a wide spectrum of military options for coercing Tehran. These options range from limited strikes against Iran’s political, military, internal security, and WMD-related infrastructure. For example, the United States could target Iran’s nuclear power infrastructure—to include the Bushehr nuclear power plant as well as any future nuclear power plants, heavy-water facilities, future plutonium reprocessing plants, and uranium production and enrichment plants—with
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cruise missiles or combat aircraft strikes. An American air campaign mounted from regional support hubs in the small Gulf Arab states could make short work of Iran’s air force and air defense forces to gain air superiority for attacks against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Such strikes could serve the practical purposes of disrupting Iran’s means for developing nuclear weapons as well as constituting a symbolic, political demonstration of American resolve to use whatever means are available to block Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations.
The United States would be operating with a less-than-perfect intelligence picture of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, however. The Iranians cannot have escaped learning the importance of diversifying and building redundancies into their nuclear weapons program components in light of Israel’s preemptive strike on Iraq’s nuclear power facility. They managed to hide Iranian uranium reprocessing developments from the outside world for some time and have undoubtedly tightened security to stem further exposures of their nuclear weapons program. In the aftermath of any American air strikes against their nuclear infrastructure, Iran undoubtedly also would redouble its efforts to conceal and build redundancies into its nuclear weapons infrastructure to make follow-on American attacks more difficult.
American aircraft and cruise missiles also could target Iran’s key political, security, and military infrastructures to harm the power of the regime in Tehran. Strikes could target government buildings and even the homes of clerics; facilities and compounds used by internal security and policy forces; assets of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij forces; major army units and garrisons; and WMD delivery vehicles, such as aircraft and ballistic missiles, as well as their production facilities. Targeting internal security organs would be particularly useful because that might allow the disgruntled populace more freedom to demonstrate against the regime and substantially increase the pressure on clerics to forgo their nuclear weapons aspirations.
The threat of a US invasion of Iran should not be taken off the table, because it could be used to bolster the strength of coercive diplomacy to compel the Iranians to desist on nuclear weapons and to accept robust and intrusive international inspections to help ensure their compliance with the NPT. The most imprudent step a statesman can make is to let his adversary know what he is not prepared to do; that profoundly undermines his political leverage to achieve interests without resort to force. President Clinton made this critical mistake in the 1999 Kosovo war, in which he declared that US ground forces would not be used against Serbia.
Nevertheless, the US military presence in the greater Middle East that brackets Iran would be insufficient to stage the type of massive ground campaign that would be required to occupy Iran’s major cities. Iraq is a comparatively easy occupational task in comparison to Iran; it is smaller and has
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fewer citizens. Iraq is twice the size of Idaho and populated with about 25 million people, while Iran is nearly four times the size of Iraq with approximately 67 million people.26 The American and British forces in neighboring Iraq are likely to be fully preoccupied with Iraq’s internal security for the coming years, and without significant augmentation they would be unavailable for a cross-border invasion of Iran. US forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan are much smaller and more suited for special operations that would augment, rather than spearhead, the massive ground force campaign that would be necessitated by Iran’s sheer geographic size.
American decisionmakers have to weigh political ends against military means as a basis for formulating strategy. The United States now has a significant portion of its total ground forces committed to Iraq and would be hard-pressed to mount a comparable or larger operation simultaneously against Iran. The United States also needs to keep its forces ready to meet contingencies elsewhere in the world, particularly in Asia where potential clashes could emerge on the Korean Peninsula or over Taiwan. The weighing of these concerns, however, would best be done in the minds of policymakers and not shared aloud in the public domain for the ears of Iran’s clerics.
The domestic Iranian political fallout from American military operations could cut two ways. On one hand, US operations could undermine the regime politically as many Iranians would see them as more evidence that the nature of the regime works to prolong Iran’s isolation from the world community and its economic stagnation and political retardation. On the other hand, the clerics would seize on the strikes as evidence of a hegemonic American campaign to conquer the Middle East and its oil, and use that perception as justification for repressive domestic security measures to hold onto power. In the final analysis, the United States could have to just wait and see which of these competing forces would prove to be stronger as it vigilantly monitored Iran’s efforts to reconstitute its infrastructure and made follow-on strikes over a period of years to perpetually “kick the can down the road” and delay Tehran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
As has been the case in the war against Iraq, the United States would have to ride out the international political fallout from any military actions
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against Iran. At first glance, Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan probably would politically protest “American unilateralism” out of concern over economic losses as a result of attacks on Iranian facilities that those countries are supporting. But then again, from a more cynical view, those states might work to economically exploit the situation and seek additional contracts to rebuild all that the Americans had destroyed. Military operations too would come with a tide of regional outcries against the United States. Many would accuse the United States of the all-too-familiar refrain that Washington holds a double-standard in the region by ignoring Israeli nuclear weapons while taking military actions against Muslim states such as Iraq and Iran, which were seeking to arm themselves to balance Israeli and American nuclear power. As hard as it is for American observers to appreciate, many in the region—officers, diplomats, officials, as well as the general public—harbor the view that a nuclear-armed Iran could be useful to counterbalance Israeli as well as American nuclear power.
Running Risks with Iranian Nuclear Weapons
And what if these diplomatic and military options were unsuccessful? What could Iran do with nuclear weapons? Would Iranian nuclear weapons pose a profound security challenge for the United States? Or would an Iranian nuclear weapons inventory be manageable for Washington? Could the United States accept Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities, much as Washington has accepted those possessed by Israel, Pakistan, India, and perhaps North Korea?
A grave concern is that Iran could transfer nuclear weapons to non-state actors, because for the past 20 years Tehran has consistently used non-state actors as instruments of statecraft to advance Iranian political interests and objectives. Indeed, the prospects for the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-state actors is greater in the case of Iran than it was for Saddam’s regime, because Tehran has been much more active than Baghdad had been in the sponsorship of terrorist operations, particularly those orchestrated by Hezbollah, against the United States.27 Jeffrey Goldberg reports in The New Yorker, “Hezbollah has an annual budget of more than a hundred million dollars, which is supplied by the Iranian government directly and by a complex system of finance cells scattered around the world.”28
Some observers argue that the revolutionary steam has run out of Iran’s regime and that Iranian sponsorship of terrorist operations against US interests has diminished. Iran’s complicity and support for the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, the American military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American servicemen, belies arguments that Iran’s government has tempered its opposition to the United States, however. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh has publicly and directly linked Iran to the Khobar
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Towers attack: “Over the course of our investigation the evidence became clear that while the attack was staged by Saudi Hezbollah members, the entire operation was planned, funded and coordinated by Iran’s security services, the IRGC and MOIS [Ministry of Intelligence and Security], acting on orders from the highest levels of the regime in Tehran.”29 More recently, Iran has shown an interest in maintaining links to al Qaeda by harboring its operatives, some of whom had fled neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan in the midst of the October 2001 American military campaign in Afghanistan.30
Some observers are inclined to give the Iranian regime the benefit of the doubt regarding allegations of complicity in the Khobar Towers bombing by arguing that “rogue elements” or conservative hardliners in the regime, not President Khatami and like-minded supporters in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and parliament, supported the operations. Conclusive evidence to bolster this argument is elusive, but even if it were found to be the case, such a fact would be of little solace to American policymakers and the public coming to terms with the potential dangers posed by Iranian possession of nuclear weapons. Policymakers would have to be concerned that hardliners in the future could control or direct transfers of nuclear weapons even if it were not the consensus policy of the regime. If an American city were to suffer from the detonation of a Hezbollah-planted Iranian nuclear weapon, it would be largely irrelevant whether or not it came about via rogue or mainstream elements of the Tehran government.
Tehran might calculate that a nuclear deterrent would give it more leeway for supporting militants in the Middle East, including Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. The Iranians, even without nuclear weapons, are moving in this policy direction. As Daniel Byman observes in an article in Foreign Affairs, “Since the outbreak of the al Aqsa intifada in October 2000, Hezbollah has provided guerrilla training, bomb-building expertise, propaganda, and tactical tips to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other anti-Israeli groups.”31
Tehran might judge that even if its hand were revealed in supporting terrorist operations via these groups against American interests and partners among the Gulf Arab states, Iranian nuclear weapons would deter military reprisals against Iran. American and Israeli contemplation of retaliatory strikes against Iran would be substantially riskier if Iran had the means to retaliate with nuclear weapons. The Iranian clerics are not well schooled in the ins and outs of the elaborate Western strategic literature formulated during the Cold War. The clerics probably would be more influenced by their Islamic ideological worldviews than by a rational calculation of national interests. As George Perkovich argues, “Political leaders like Khamene’i and Rafsanjani see nuclear weapons as an almost magical source of national power and autonomy. These men are political clerics, not international strategists or technologists.
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They intuit that the bomb will keep all outside powers, including Israel and the US, from thinking they can dictate to Iran or invade it.”32 In short, a nuclear-armed Tehran might fear the prospect of American and Israeli nuclear retaliation less than Western strategists would hope.
The Iranians could elect to rely more heavily on integrating nuclear weapons into their war-fighting strategies. They undoubtedly have ingrained into their political and military thinking the premise to never again be caught in a prolonged war of attrition as was the case in the Iran-Iraq War that Tehran ultimately lost. The Iranians might come to view nuclear weapons as useful, or even essential, battlefield instruments for destroying the armed forces of an adversary, particularly those of Iraq. As Gary Sick points out, Iran’s past use of unconventional hit-and-run speedboat attacks in the Persian Gulf during its war with Iran demonstrate Tehran’s willingness to “use unconventional, even terrorist, methods to pursue a political and military strategy, even if that meant confronting the United States.”33 Along these lines, Tehran might be tempted to harness the threat of nuclear weapons for leverage in the political-military struggle against the United States for power and influence in the Persian Gulf.
Iranian nuclear weapons would give Tehran greater political and military prestige that could translate into leverage over the Arab Gulf states. As Kenneth Pollack warns, “Tehran appears to want nuclear weapons principally to deter an American attack. Once it gets them, however, its strategic calculus might change and it might be emboldened to pursue a more aggressive foreign policy.”34 The Arab Gulf states would be more vulnerable to Iranian political pressure to reduce security cooperation with the United States, particularly in the event of a regional contingency. Finally, an Iranian nuclear bomb also would increase the already high incentives for Arab states to procure nuclear weapons.
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NOTES
The author is indebted to his Near East-South Asia Center colleagues Ray Takeyh, for his tutelage on Iranian politics, and Danielle Debroux, for her able research assistance. A thanks is also due to Henry Sokolski for comments on an earlier draft as well as for his Nonproliferation Policy Education Center’s project on Iran that instigated the author’s interest in the topic.
1. Tehran’s regular armed forces consist of about 325,000 in the army, 18,000 in the navy, and 52,000 in the air force. It has a parallel force structure in the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with about 125,000 soldiers, including about 100,000 ground troops, 20,000 naval, 5,000 marines, and an unknown number in an air force. Tehran also has a paramilitary force, the Popular Mobilization Army or Basij, with about 40,000 active troops. See International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), The Military Balance, 2002-2003 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), p. 104.
2. In July 2003, the United States issued search warrants and grand jury subpoenas to 18 US companies in a massive raid against illegal export of American-built military components to a London front company for Iran. The front company was procuring components for the Hawk air defense system, F-14, F-4, F-5 combat aircraft, C-130 transport aircraft, and radar as well as other equipment. California police in July 2003 arrested two men trying to export military technology—including components for the F-4, F-5, and F-14 aircraft, and Hawk surface-to-air missiles—to China. These items are not in the Chinese military inventory, however, but are in the Iranian military’s inventory, strongly suggesting that China is acting as a middle man for Iran’s clandestine re-
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pair parts pipeline. See Christine Hanley, “Two Men Tried to Illegally Export Military Parts to China, U.S. Says,” Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2003, p. B5.
3. Michael Eisenstadt, “Living with a Nuclear Iran?” Survival, 41 (Autumn 1999), 140.
4. Anoushiravan Ehteshami, “Tehran’s Tocsin,” in Contemporary Nuclear Debates: Missile Defense, Arms Control, and Arms Races in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alexander T. J. Lennon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 152.
5. Ray Takeyh, “Iran’s Nuclear Calculations,” World Policy Journal, 20 (Summer 2003), 23.
6. See “A Survey of Central Asia: At the Crossroads,” The Economist, 26 July 2003, p. 3.
7. Alon Ben-David, “Iran Successfully Tests Shahab 3,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, 9 July 2003, http://jdw.janes.com/.
8. See “Iran’s Ballistic Missiles: Upgrades Underway,” Strategic Comments, 9 (London: IISS, 2003).
9. Douglas Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” Los Angeles Times, 4 August 2003, p. A6.
10. The Iranians developed a chemical warfare program in the 1980s to match Iraq’s chemical weapons capabilities demonstrated during the Iran-Iraq War and are suspected of harboring a biological warfare program. This is despite Tehran’s signature on the chemical and biological weapons conventions that prohibit such programs. See Joseph Cirincione with John B. Wolfsthal and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals (Washington: The Brookings Institution, for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), pp. 255-56.
11. Azadeh Moaveni and Douglas Frantz, “Are Iran’s Nuclear Promises Real?” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 2003.
12. Quoted in Nazila Fathi, “Iran Says It Has Developed Ability to Fuel Nuclear Plants But Won’t Seek Weapons,” The New York Times, 10 February 2003, p. A12.
13. David Holley, “Iran Sets Its Sights on More Reactors,” Los Angeles Times, 3 July 2003, p. A3.
14. Douglas Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” Los Angeles Times, 4 August 2003, p. A7. Heavy water (D2O) is “water containing significantly more than the natural proportion . . . of heavy hydrogen (deuterium, D) atoms to ordinary hydrogen atoms.” US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/gl...y-water-d2.html.
15. “Fissionable: Iran’s Nuclear Program,” The Economist, 14 June 2003, p. 24.
16. Gary Milhollin, “The Mullahs and the Bomb,” The New York Times, 23 October 2003.
17. Fathi, p. A12.
18. Robert J. Einhorn and Gary Samore, “Ending Russian Assistance to Iran’s Nuclear Bomb,” Survival, 44 (Summer 2002), 53.
19. Joby Warrick and Glenn Kessler, “Iran’s Nuclear Program Speeds Ahead,” The Washington Post, 10 March 2003, p. A1.
20. Douglas Frantz, “Iran Discloses Nuclear Activities,” Los Angeles Times, 24 October 2003; and Douglas Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” Los Angeles Times, 4 August 2003, p. A1.
21. Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” p. A7.
22. The author is indebted to Henry Sokolski for these important points.
23. “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Europe Spies a Threat,” The Economist, 21 June 2003, p. 27.
24. Takeyh, p. 25.
25. Geoffrey Kemp, “How to Stop the Iranian Bomb,” The National Interest, 72 (Summer 2003), 54.
26. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook, http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html and http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ir.html.
27. Hezbollah was responsible for the bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in October 1983 that killed 241 marines, the April 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, killed the CIA Beirut station chief in 1985, and killed a US Navy diver on hijacked TWA Flight 847 that landed in Beirut in 1985. For an argument against using Iraqi ties to terrorist groups as a strategic rationale for waging war against Saddam, see Richard L. Russell, “War and the Iraq Dilemma: Facing Harsh Realities,” Parameters, 32 (Autumn 2002), 47-48.
28. Jeffrey Goldberg, “In the Party of God: Are Terrorists in Lebanon Preparing for a Larger War?” The New Yorker, 14 October 2002, p. 183.
29. Louis J. Freeh, “A