More on revolutionary "contagion"

Being a terminal news junkie, I get excited about historical dramas being played out in real time. Heck, I have a major weakness for Hegelian Grand Theories about history - even though a big part of me suspects that successfully muddling through is what drives most of what we think of as History.

So I'm willing to entertain the idea that we're seeing some new upsurge of revolutionary contagion, or activist contagion, or democratic contagion, or whatever you want to call it.

But I can't help but think that Tom Engelhardt is letting his imagination get away with him in All-American Decline in a New World: Wars, Vampires, Burned Children, and Indelicate Imbalances Tom Dispatch 02/24/2011, when he writes:

But here’s the truth of it: you have to strain to fit this Middle Eastern moment into any previous paradigm, even as -- from Wisconsin to China -- it already threatens to break out of the Arab world and spread like a fever across the planet. Never in memory have so many unjust or simply despicable rulers felt quite so nervous -- or possibly quite so helpless (despite being armed to the teeth) -- in the presence of unarmed humanity. And there has to be joy and hope in that alone. [my emphasis]

The protests movements in Tunisia and Egypt look at me from what I know about them to be an awful lot like what Joschka Fischer called "revolution by implosion" in the former Warsaw Pact countries in Europe. But whether they result in a genuinely democratic trend remains to be seen, or rather to be accomplished by Tunisians and Egyptians.

Gaddafi's Libyan regime seems to be going the same direction. But it may not be so implosion-ready as Mubarak's government in Egypt was. Libya could still turn out to be more "Algeria" (civil war in the 1990s) than "Egypt".

Stephen Walt recently illustrated why you don't see him on TV in the company of Serious People like George Will and Tom "Suck.On.This." Friedman: Walt actually uses his brain, and actually takes some responsibility when he turns out to be wrong in his predictions. He was skeptical of the probabilities of "revolutionary contagion" in connection with the Tunisian unrest. He assesses why his expectations were wrong in that case in What I got wrong about the Arab revolutions and why I'm not losing sleep over it Foreign Policy 02/23/2011:

My post on why the revolution in Tunisia would not spread. To say my prediction was wrong is an understatement, and some of the usual critics have seized on this opportunity to take a shot or two. Fair enough ...

... I still think my reasons for being skeptical about the possibility of contagion were cogent, even if my forecast was clearly wrong in this instance. Large-scale protests are hardly a rare occurrence in many parts of the world, but the vast majority of them do not lead governments to fall. And when a government is toppled, most of the time this does not lead to similar upheavals elsewhere, and certainly not within a few days or weeks. My original prediction was off the mark, but it would have been correct in most cases. [my emphasis]

His estimation of why he was off the mark, with particular reference to Egypt, involves: the intensity of current resentment; the level of anti-government organization; the interaction of new media (Alajzeera) and communication technologies (Facebook, Twitter); the surprising weakness of the regimes in response to protest (the implosion effect); and, "the sense of common identification and cultural resonance that made events in one Arab country significant for many people in others."

There's nothing especially exotic about the latter point, which he expands by saying, "For Arabs, the fact that the initial spark was struck in Tunisia made it far more significant than a similar event in Bolivia or Burma would have been." He doesn't mention language, but the fact that the events in Tunisia were being played out in Arabic, combined with Aljazeera's now-established popularity and reach, surely had an effect. Language alone means that Americans are likely to find political events in Britain, Ireland or Canada to have more resonance than those in Argentina or Bulgaria. (To the extent that Americans take the foreign news seriously at all.)

Tom Engelhardt's thoughts in his article are worth reading, despite the somewhat melodramatic tone of this particular column. But they should be taken more as an example of using the events in the Middle East as a way or rethinking how Washington policymakers process information affecting key aspects of foreign policy. He has an especially good point that recent events should inspire some humility in Washington among both parties about the limits of American power. And provide some caution about the dangers of arrogance in assuming we understand political events in the Middle East perfectly well. One aspect of the latter concern is whether we have enough serious Arabists in the State Department and the intelligence services to provide the kind of information that should be informing our current foreign policies.

Meanwhile, as Engelhardt reminds us, we are fighting a real campaign against revolutionary insurgents in Afghanistan, now lead by our Savior-General David Petraeus. It would be a major advance in democracy and decency if the public were to suddenly lose all confidence in the nightmarish propaganda being used to justify that war:

... on February 19th, just as all hell was breaking loose in Bahrain and Libya, the general visited the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul and, in dismissing Afghan claims that recent American air raids in the country’s northeast had killed scores of civilians, including children, he made a comment that shocked President Hamid Karzai’s aides. We don’t have it verbatim, but the Washington Post reports that, according to "participants," Petraeus suggested "Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties."

One Afghan at the meeting responded: "I was dizzy. My head was spinning. This was shocking. Would any father do this to his children? This is really absurd."

In the American echo-chamber, the general's comments may sound, if not reasonable, then understandably exuberant and emphatic: We’ve got the enemy by the throat! We didn’t create Afghan casualties; they did it to themselves! Elsewhere, they surely sound obtusely tone deaf or simply vampiric, evidence that those inside the echo chamber have no sense of how they look in a shape-shifting world.

This recalls for me that segregationists in the Deep South in the early 1960s would try to excuse arson attacks by the Ku Klux Klan or similar Christian terrorist groups by saying some civil rights worker set the fire to make the Klan look bad. This kind of alibi isn't serious. It's an expression of complete contempt for anyone criticizing the actual perpetrators. In this case, our Savior-General Petraeus is running a counterinsurgency campaign that inevitably produces large numbers of civilian casualties.

Engelhardt also discusses the important case of Raymond Davis, a CIA employee who murdered two people in Pakistan and has become the subject of a dispute between Pakistan and the US, because the Obama Administration doesn't think the Pakistani government should complain where Americans murder their citizens on the streets of Lahore.

Tags: afghanistan war, pakistan, stephen walt, tom engelhardt

More tempations to headbanging

Headbanging in the Tollhaus, Passau, Germany

It's not only politicians that give me that old headbanging urge.

Several years ago, I took a course in Genesis taught by a professor who was also a rabbi. She illustrated some theological point with a humorous line, "The Jews are the people who can't take 'yes' for an answer."

I thought of that when I read this TomDispatch.com article by Tom Engelhardt, The Bureaucracy, the March, and the War: American Disengagement 10/28/07. Don't get me wrong. Engelhardt has been one of the best commentators on the Iraq War, and he has provided us access to a wealth of solid analysis from his guest commentators at TomDispatch.com. I normally agree with him on most issues, bless his heart. (To use that Deep South pre-criticism phrase.)

But this piece really is a case of someone not being able to take "yes" for an answer. Short version of Engelhardt's article: Sure, 70% or so of the American people are opposed to the Iraq War and want to get out as soon as possible; but where's the antiwar movement?

My short answer is, the antiwar movement is the 70% of the people that oppose the war.

Taking it in a bit more detail, Engelhardt recalls the demonstrations against the Vietnam War back in the day, and he thinks those were way cool. And the anti-Iraq War demonstrations of 2002-3 reminded him of that, and he's bummed that he's not seeing those mass demonstrations any more.

This is where I find Tom Hayden's perspective from his long experience in both electoral politics and popular protest to be particularly helpful. In his book Ending the War in Iraq (2007), he devotes a full chapter (58 pages) to looking at the real existing antiwar movement, which neither the Establishment press nor those looking at today's world through a haze of excessive '60s nostalgia seem to be able to recognize. The chapter is titled, "What Noble Cause? The Rise of the Antiwar Movement, 2001-2007".

Best of all, Hayden in his book rags repeatedly on John Mueller, the political scientist whose very flawed analysis of what generates opposition to wars in the United States is a staple of both those who want to debunk the power of antiwar movements and of air power zealots who use his findings to justify maximizing civilian casualties in a target country in order to supposedly minimize American military casualties.

Hayden does cite Mueller's article The Iraq Syndrome in Foreign Affairs Nov/Dec 2005 for its factual information on public opinion on the Iraq War. But he also makes clear that the "conservative" John Mueller is off the tracks in his notion of what a "movement" really is in the real world of politics. Hayden writes:

[T]he question is how, not whether, the peace movement participated in shaping antiwar opinion between 2003-07. The numbers of anti-Iraq War protesters in the streets - 100,000-500,000 at least eight times in five years, plus ten million globally on one occasion—are comparable to the numbers during the 1965-68 period of Vietnam. Mueller, [Mike] Davis, and others arbitrarily exclude electoral campaigns from their definition of movements; but if one considers the grassroots participation in the Dean, Kerry, Kucinich, Lamont, and other local campaigns, plus antiwar ballot initiatives in San Francisco, Chicago, and Vermont; and if one adds 165 city council resolutions passed against this war within a broader definition of "movement," then this has been a movement of historic proportions. (my emphasis in bold)

No one who is seriously concerned about how damaging the Iraq War is to the United States and the Middle East is likely to think that even a majority antiwar movement like we have today is going to be good enough until the US is out of that war. And we're are a long way from that point still. But it is important to recognize progress when it occurs, and the shift in public opinion against this war is real progress in more ways than one.

Amazingly, Engelhardt cites both Mueller's faulty theory about what drives American public opinion on war and Mueller's statement of why that theory is hosed, though neither Engelhardt nor Mueller seem to recognize it:

As John Mueller, an expert on public opinion and American wars, pointed out back in November 2005, Americans turned against the Iraq War in a pattern recognizable from the Vietnam era (as well as the Korean one) - initial, broad post-invasion support that eroded irreversibly as American casualties rose. "The only thing remarkable about the current war in Iraq," Mueller wrote, "is how precipitously American public support has dropped off. Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War." He added, quite correctly, as it turned out: "And if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline." (my emphasis)

Mueller's argument is that American casualties and only American casualties make the US public turn against a war. The only reason he finds it "remarkable" that "support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War" is that he was proceeding from the false assumption that American casualties and only American casualties make the US public turn against a war.

I've commented on Mueller's detailed argument on this point in the post linked above, and also about how the polling data on the Second World War also don't fit his assumption.

Mueller was correct about support for the war not springing back. Mueller has a better handle on what drive public support for a war than Dick Cheney and George Bush seem to have. But talk about setting the bar low...

Hayden summarizes his argument about the nature of the real existing antiwar movement as follows:

...[W]hile the new post-'60s antiwar movement is given little credit as a factor in turning public opinion against the war, it is a powerful force. On eight occasions the movement has produced over 100,000 protesters in the streets, including three in which more than a half-million turned out to demonstrate. Public opinion has shifted against this conflict more rapidly than it did during the Vietnam War. At least 165 city councils and state legislatures have passed referendums against the war. Internet activism far surpasses the membership drives of antiwar groups in the '60s. The 2003-04 Howard Dean presidential campaign was in many ways similar to Eugene McCarthy's unsuccessful bid for the White House in 1967-68. And in November 2006, for the first time in U.S. history, American voters resolutely marched to the polls to reject an ongoing war.

Yet to many people, including activists, this war seems unstoppable and the opposition movement marginal or irrelevant. This is in part due to the media, but also to the Pentagon's strategy of lessening the direct impact of Iraq on the lives of most American citizens. There is no draft, we pay no direct taxes, the casualty rate of U.S. troops is one-fifteenth that of Vietnam. The perception of political impotence is also affected by anachronistic paradigms that contain romantic images of clashes in the streets of Chicago and the like. Bloggers against the war simply are not as dashing and photogenic as young men burning their draft cards in Central Park.

But this argument should be turned upside down: It is remarkable that the antiwar movement has become a catalyst of public opinion given all the resources expended on selling the Iraq War as cheap, easy, and non-intrusive in the lives of most Americans. It is a mistake to define the antiwar movement as narrowly confined to the streets, as political activism since the 1960s has opened up a space for working within a previously closed system. Bloggers and "netroots" have further developed this space, in a literal sense, through online activism.

It is necessary to write the antiwar movement into the history of this time. (my emphasis)

Shoot, I think us bloggers are pretty "dashing", but that's a topic for another day.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, iraq war, john mueller, tom engelhardt, tom hayden

Conventional press script from a surprising source

TomDispatch for 09/20/07 features Glued to Our Seats in the Theater of War: Tall Tales from the Annals of the Bush Administration by Ira Chernus, with an introduction by Tom Engelhardt. (The titles at that site can be confusing, because Engelhardt puts a title at the top before his introductions that are often different than on the main article.)

Engelhardt has researched what he calls American "victory culture" extensively. And his introduction is good. For instance:

Here's something I suspect goes with the above. With rare exceptions, the fiercest post-9/11 "warriors" of this administration were never in the military. They had, in the Vice President's words, "other priorities in the ‘60s." Hence that old (and not very useful) term "chickenhawks." On the other hand, a surprising number of Democrats in Congress had actually served in the military - not that, from Senators Max Cleland to Jack Reed, it did them much political good. Americans have preferred, it seems, to hear their war stories from the men who sat out the wars.

The reason, I suspect, is simple enough. I'm about George Bush's age. My father, like his, fought in Asia in World War II. In the 1950s, my childhood years, that generation of fathers - the ones I knew, anyway - were remarkably silent on their actual war experiences, but to us kids that made no difference. All we had to do was walk to the nearest neighborhood movie theater, catch Merrill's Marauders, or some other war flick, and it was obvious enough just what heroic things they had accomplished. George Bush and I both sat in the dark, enveloped in the same American mythic tradition - already then a couple of hundred years old - that I've called "victory culture"; we knew Americans deserved to, and would, triumph against savage enemies out on some distant frontier; we both thrilled to the sound of the bugle as the blue coats charged; we both felt the chills run up our spine as, with the Marine Hymn welling up, the Marines advanced victoriously while "The End" flashed on the screen.

Here's the difference: I left that movie theater in the Vietnam era. Much of the Bush administration seems to have remained in the dark.

I'm always dubious about arguments that wander onto the turf of "national character", a concept that historians largely abandoned decades ago. But Engelhardt is careful, and in what I've read of his work, he seems to stop short of "national character" assumptions.

Still, I worry whenever someone starts talking about the movies as somehow a symptom of the national Zeitgeist or something along those lines that it sounds convincing because it's an attractive literary device used in service of some argument with which I'm inclined to agree.

Chernus' piece, though, I found to be uncharacteristic of TomDispatch articles because it's essentially yet another version of conventional Establishment press corps assumptions about American politics. At first glance, it sounds like a "left" argument, referring early on to antiwar "activists who despair of the spineless Democrats". And he seems to argue that Democrats and Republicans have reached some kind of secret pact on the Iraq War. Which lets him smugly pronounce how foolish it is for those rubes known as voters (sometimes even as "citizens") to think that anything they do or say can make a difference.

For example, he writes:

All theater, all storytelling, rests on the power of illusion and the willing suspension of disbelief. ... the Democrats have given millions of doubters a chance to suspend their disbelief that the will of the people can make any difference whatsoever.

Short version: dumb-ass voters, they think their opinion is worth considering.

Chernus is not exactly what I would call a Jacksonian Democrat. In fact, that sounds more like High Federalism to me. (High Federalism being the 1820s version of robber baron rule.)

Despite the "left' posturing, he actually argues a slight variant on Big Pundit Conventional Wisdom: that no matter how much public opinion has shifted or will shift against the Iraq War, It's good for the Republicans!

It's really a weird perception. It's one thing to marvel at the phenomenon of the Democrats falling for a petty stunt like the anti-MoveOn.org Senate resolution. But Chernus seems to think that no matter what happens, deep down all red-blooded Americans secretly sympathize with Cheneyist militarism. And that no matter what the Democrats do in the future, It's good for the Republicans!

Apparently oblivious to the polls and past experience of wars that the public has rejected, he declares that "opposition to the war is spread wide but not necessarily deep". His main argument is that Bush's appeals to heroic wartime rhetoric will trump the Democrats' arguments for withdrawal every time. Using Sen. Jack Reed's response to Bush's big address on the Iraq War endorsing the "Petraeus plan" as an example, he says that no matter what the Dems say or do, they're really just a bunch of dirty hippies and losers:

But like so many Democrats, including legless former Senator Max Cleland and Vietnam veteran John Kerry, he found himself mysteriously unable to turn his real-life experience into an effective post-9/11 narrative. A powerful drama creates a world of its own, one that can easily feel more real than reality. Even after so many years of disaster and so much repetition, against Bush's rich drama, Reed could still offer only a thin script with feeble characters, little if any plot, and no sense of direction. Mostly he carped at the commander-in-chief of what the Democrats themselves acclaim to be the finest fighting force in the world. So he left his party open to the same criticism thrown at Sixties radicals: "You only know what you're against. You don't know what you're for." (my emphasis)

I though Reed's response was pretty darn good, myself. I was actually pleasantly surprised. I would never have known that Reed was just another dirty filthy hippie if Chernus hadn't explained it. Oh, and even the manliest of Democrats is always going to come off looking and sounding wimpy, confused and flip-floppy ("feeble characters, little if any plot, and no sense of direction").

Nor would I have realized the higher truth that our betters obviously know, that Bush's "narrative" for the war present "rich drama". Here's what Chernus cites as "rich drama":

Bush put on yet another performance of that morality play on September 13th, ending with the almost obligatory tragic message from grieving parents: "We believe this is a war of good and evil and we must win. ... even if it cost the life of our own son. Freedom is not free." That sums up the essence of the drama. Coming from people whose child is dead, it's seems like a show stopper. What else can you say?

Gee, I thought it came off as a cheaply exploitive attempt to use the words of a grieving parent - who happens to share the Republicans' unpopular view of the Iraq War policy - to make his own point. Hiding behind a bereaved woman's skirts, as it were.

And, you know, there's also the polls that show he and Saviour-General Petraeus essentially didn't change anyone minds about the Iraq War. How was I to know that this was "rich drama" that inevitably came off better than any girly-man, wiffle-waffling, hippie pot-smoking Democrat could ever do?

Chernus' article is a good example of regurgitated conventional wisdom that sometimes gets interpreted as "left". Why? I'm not sure. I guess because he affects a "been there, done that" cynicism - but, no, that's the Republican posture, isn't it? Heck, I guess I don't know why. Because it reads like the stock GOP-friendly press script to me.

The bottom line is, whatever happens: It's good for the Republicans!

Tags: establishment press, ira chernus, mainstream media, mainstream press, tom engelhardt

Counterinsurgency

Edward Luttwak's article on counterinsurgency in the February 2007 Harper's is now available online, Dead End. A large part of his argument is that nationalism, or in a less pleasant form, hatred of foreigners, is a powerful motivator for insurgent operations against foreign armies. In other words, a counterinsurgency by a native government can be successful where one directed by a foreign power can't.

This problem is painfully obvious in Iraq, though the same problem at a lower level of death and destruction faces NATO forces in Afghanistan. How anyone imagined such missions could be accomplished without large numbers of Arabic speakers (for Iraq) and Pashto and Dari and speakers for Afghanistan is mind-boggling to consider. Luttwak writes:

It is a sad story indeed when the astonishing linguistic incapacity of U.S. military forces and intelligence organizations is contrasted with the abundance of American civilians who speak all known foreign languages, and the brilliant record of foreign-language education in the U.S. Army and Navy, which used to produce as many good Chinese and Japanese speakers as they wanted by selecting for natural aptitude in the recruit pool, giving them a year of intensive courses (eight hours a day, six days a week), and quickly sending away those who failed to keep up with their classes. Nothing prevents the military from doing the same for Arabic, Persian and, say, Azeri now, except for an unwillingness to invest in the future, and probably a lack of disciplined volunteers willing to learn a language eight hours a day, six days a week, for a whole year or more.

Note that this is not primarily a problem of civilian interference or Presidential incompetence or lack of Will among the American public or any of the other alibis that the generals are already using to duck blame for their own failures in the Iraq War and Afghanistan. Prioritizing language instruction, at least for Arabic, is something that should have been obvious even as early as the Gulf War of 1991. It was obvious to military decision-makers by the end of 2003 latest that the occupation of Iraq was going to be a long haul. If they had started such year-long crash courses in Arabic even in 2004, they would have many more Arabic speakers available by now. The generals screwed that one up.

Luttwak also explains the limitations of the high-tech weapons and gadgets in fighting insurgents. This, by the way, is a feature of all wars. There's always some new techie device or super-duper new weapon that is going to change everything. The airplane, for example, was going to make war obsolete by creating such devastating destruction on the enemy that no one could consider having a war. Oddly enough, multiple experiments over decades and many wars don't seem to be able to wipe that particular fantasy aware from even otherwise reasonable minds. Luttwak writes:

Naturally, every form of technical intelligence and every possible sensor is being employed to supplant the lack of very elementary but indispensable human intelligence, including synthetic-aperture radars aboard big four-engine aircraft and the infrared and video sensors of the latest targeting pods on two-seat heavyweight jet fighters. The expense of these flights alone is huge, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars a month, but the results are very meager. The aim, of course, is to gather immediately actionable imagery, especially at night, showing such things as insurgents placing side bombs alongside U.S. patrol routes or approaching oil pipelines bearing explosives. Failing that, it is at least hoped that possible insurgent activities could be detected for further investigation; for example, people furtively bringing things to isolated buildings at night. But in practice, unless insurgents carry recognizable weapons, it is simply impossible to differentiate between them and innocent people going about their peaceful business. In the meantime, very elaborate equipment that is very costly to operate, and very effective in identifying armored vehicles, bunkers, missile launchers, and any other readily recognizable target of classic form, is still being employed every day in futile attempts to detect deliveries of a few dollars of food, or the emplacement of readily improvised explosive devices. This too is an aspect of the structural unsuitability of modern armed forces to fight elusive enemies that present no stable targets.

It's worth noting here that air power is being used for more than high-tech reconaissance. As Tom Engelhardt writes in Words to Die For TomDispatch.com 04/17/07:

Air power has long been the American way of war. In fact, the use of air power with all its indiscriminate terror has, in the last year, ratcheted up strikingly in Afghanistan and may now be in the process of doing the same in Iraq. (It's hard to tell without the necessary reporting.) Journalists in Baghdad evidently do not look up - and military press briefers don't point to the skies. We have, in fact, been bombing and missiling in heavily populated urban areas of Iraq throughout the occupation years. But no descriptive language has been developed that would capture in any significant way the loosing of the U.S. Air Force on either country; and so, in a sense, the regular (if, in Iraq, still limited) use of air power has next to no reality for Americans, even though Iraq's skies are filled with attack helicopters, jets, and drones. (my emphasis)

There are some problems in Luttwak's arguments. He seems to suggest toward the end that a longer-term commitment by the US to govern a conquered country like Iraq - conquered in conventional military terms, at least - would make a successful counterinsurgency effort more feasible.

And what would any article on counterinsurgency be without the inevitable Second World War reference? Luttwak has an uncomforable discussion about how Roman ruthlessness back in the old days and German reprisals in occupied territories during the Second World War were effective in maintaining control. He also says that this wouldn't work for the US because we wouldn't be willing to do such a thing.

Actually, the pacification of Fallujah just after the 2004 Presidential election was largely the Roman method. The city was evacuated and something like a third of the buildings in the city distroyed. The resistance remains active in Fallujah. And the air war referenced in the Tom Engelhardt quote above is also a kind of Terror in its old-fashioned sense from the French Revolution.

And a couple of thoughts about the German occupation example. In the east, i.e., central Europe and Russia, the Hitler government wasn't interested in having friendly cooperating governments. That territory was "Lebensraum" (living space) for the German people in Hitler's eyes. The supposed lesser peoples like the Slavs were to be enslaved and possibly eliminated. "Wining hearts and minds" over the long term was just not part of the plan.

I don't know enough specifics about the Third Reich's intentions for France to be able to judge that example that well. But in that case, as also on the eastern front, the partisan guerrilla forces were acting in very much a subordinate role to the conventional forces on the other side of the German lines behind which they found themselves. As long as there was any reasonable hope of a counteroffensive by their side's main forces, which was the case on both fronts even at the darkest moments for the Allies, the partisans could afford to limit their attacks in order to be of maximum use as an harassment force later on when the German position weakened. Luttwak is surely partly right in the argument that he makes here. But those German-occupation examples are really of limited value in determining what was effective in opposing insurgencies like the one in Iraq.

Finally, Luttwak opens his article by accepting what I think is a deeply flawed assumption about the American people's attitude toward casualties in war:

Modern armed forces continue to be structured for large-scale war, but advanced societies whose small families lack expendable children have a very low tolerance for casualties. Even supposedly warlike Americans [??? who besides Republican warmongers assumes that?] gravely count casualties in Iraq that in three years have yet to reach 3,000 — fewer than were lost in many a single day of battle in past wars. Fortunately, this refusal to spill the blood needed to fuel battles diminishes the likelihood that advanced societies will deliberately set out to fight one another (pas des enfants, pas des Suisses, pas de guerre) unless they are somehow able to convince themselves that a war could be entirely or very largely aerial and naval. Such wars, however, are difficult to imagine, except when islands are involved, as in a China-Taiwan war, which is very improbable for its own reasons. Air and naval forces can certainly be employed advantageously against any less advanced enemy incautious enough to rely on a conventional defense, conducted by regular forces, but in that context as well here must be severe doubts about the continued usefulness of the ground orces of advanced countries that are intolerant of casualties. It is easy enough to blockade the enemy, to successfully bomb all the right nodal points and shut down electrical, transportation, and communications networks. Air strikes can disable runways and destroy both sheltered and unsheltered aircraft, ballistic missiles, and nuclear installations. Air power can also sink warships, or rout any mechanized forces eployed in the open, as the United States did with Iraq in 1991 and partly in 2003, and as it could do with Iran. No real role would remain for ground forces except to dislodge the enemy from any territory he had occupied, or to occupy his own territory. That, however, is bound to cost casualties that might not be tolerated; it is also bound to provoke an insurgency. (my emphasis)

In my earlier comments on John Mueller's arguments about war and public opinion, I talked about my reservations on this widely-held assumptions. It seems to me that the example of the Second World War (there it is again!) shows that the public will support a long war with heavy casualties if they have good reason to believe that it's in the national interest. The Iraq War shows that the public can also reject a war that most people don't believe is vital to the US, even with relatively small death toll. (Although we should note that total casualty figures including both injuries and deaths are larger in relation to the Vietnam War than the death toll. More severely wounded soldiers are surviving longer thanks to better battlefield medical care and also the ability to airlift the wounded to top-quality military hospitals in Germany.)

Tags: air power, air war, counterinsurgency, iraq war, edward luttwak, tom engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt on the anti-Vietnam War movement

Tom Engelhardt this week in Americans in the Opinion Polls, Not in the Streets TomDispatch.com 03/25/07 addressed a question that Marigolds2 raised here at The Blue Voice earlier this month. That question being, with the Iraq War so unpopular, why aren't we seeing more obvious public protests? As Engelhardt phrases it:

And yet the translation of all this sentiment [today], of these conclusions, into visible action, despite inspirational moments, has generally been less than overwhelming. Yes, in the years since the invasion, there have been a few enormous marches; and yes, there are groups that protest regularly, even heroically; and yes, in cities and towns across the country, protesters have gone out weekly with their signs, sometimes to freezing mid-winter street corners, simply to make a point. Nonetheless, given the extremity of the Bush administration and its acts, it's hard not to wonder why, most of the time, the levels of mobilization have been so relatively weak.

He has some interesting thoughts on this issue, including the notion that people are judging that supporting antiwar organizations like MoveOn.org by contributions is an effective way of making their position known. I think that may be partially true.

But I especially want to call attention to a historical observation he makes that goes so far away from the conventional wisdom that even people reading or hearing it may just disregard it because it contradicts a familiar image:

In the Vietnam era, though few realize this, antiwar sentiment was strongest at the bottom, in the blue-collar world. As Vietnam scholar Chris Appy has pointed out, for instance, a Gallup poll in January 1971 "showed that the less formal education you had, the more likely you were to want the military out of [Vietnam]: 80% of Americans with grade school educations were in favor of a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam; 75% of high school graduates agreed; only among college graduates did the figure drop to 60%." (my emphasis)

Yes, that's what it says. Working-class people, the proverbial "hard hats" in the media abbreviation of the Nixon days, were more opposed to the Vietnam War than were the kind of people who sent their kids to Ivy League schools. Actually, that fact was reflected on college campuses in that the state colleges and universities, who drew a much higher proportion of their students from less affluent families, generally had more active antiwar movements.

Today's Republican "culture warriors" can't afford to recognize this, of course, because they have such a fond image of privileged rich kids becoming dirty hippies and rudely protesting in their spoiled comfortable existence. It's a bizarre kind of "populism" when the OxyContin bloviators of the world can ridicule their opponents as being rich and lazy, all the while pushing policies that will disproportionately (and often exclusively) benefit the idle rich more than anyone else.

But then Engelhardt makes an argument that I've also seen Eric Alterman make, that the fewer the antiwar protests, the better:

Those of us who can use the tumultuous mobilizations of the Vietnam era as a point of comparison - there was even a group called The Mobe then - are certainly aware that this time around nothing comparable has happened. It's crossed my mind that there might even be a silver lining in the disappearance of those large, boisterous prewar crowds, in the fact that, generally speaking, the country seems, in protest terms, strangely demobilized. ...

What largely neutralized the full development of antiwar sentiment among the majority of Americans in [the Vietnam War] era was, I believe, the strength of anti-antiwar-movement sentiment, the visceral reaction of many working-class Americans against the crowds of protestors, against the look of that far wilder moment (and a media that invariably focused its cameras and attention on the wildest-looking of the demonstrators, especially those carrying the flags of the enemy and chanting, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win"). That visceral dislike for antiwar sentiment, as expressed in the streets, was strongest at the bottom. In other words, in those years, angry feelings about the disastrous war in Vietnam were offset by angry feelings about the most visible of those demonstrating against it.

I think this is both a misreading of historical events and also a misunderstanding of how protests movements work. To start with, the whole idea of a protest is to bring pressure on someone (bosses, war-loving members of Congress, etc.)to do something different than what they are doing. People opposing a war in progress are going to start out as a minority among the public in any country. So part of the purpose of protests, especially early in the process, is to make people aware of the issue by making people aware of the issue and challenge their way of thinking about it.

But the argument that the antiwar protests on the whole were counter-productive seems really far-fetched to me. Yes, active protests polarize and to some extent energize people on the other side. But more and more people came to oppose the Vietnam War. When Congress got restrictions on the war enacted into law in 1973 with Democrats leading that effort, the Democrats increased their numbers in Congress substantially in the next elections in 1974, though obviously the Watergate scandal was a factor. After they passed further restrictions in 1975, the Democrats won the Presidency in 1976. In other words, public opinion moved in the direction of the protesters' view of the war.

Other factors also were present in the "culture war" reaction that focused in part on antiwar demonstrators. like years of civil rights demonstrations and urban riots, the latter of which occurred nationwide after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Rightwing politicians like Ronald Reagan encouraged their followers to see antiwar protesters in the same light as they saw black people whom they feared. All those things have to be taken into account in looking at how the general public viewed antiwar protesters.

Tom Engelhardt is certainly no conservative. But this particular argument that the anti-Vietnam War protesters created more support for the war (or at least made people not oppose it as fast, or as much, or something) reminds me for all the world like the "friendly" advice reformers of any kind always get: "I'm sympathetic to what you want. But if you workers/black folks/women/suffragettes/antislavery/and-so-one advocates go out protesting and stuff and actually stating your opinions in public, you'll alienate people. There'll be a backlash. You'll hurt your own cause."

If all reformers and would-be activists had taken this advice, we would have no labor unions and lots of child labor, no Social Security and lots more poor old people, no anti-discrimination laws protecting minorities but lots of female employees getting fired for becoming pregnant, very few African-Americans in the South voting but lots of whites-only toilets and water fountains.

In fact, if somebody isn't telling protesters they're causing a backlash, then they're probably not protesting about anything of much importance.

Engelhardt adds:

Interesting enough, according to John Mueller of Ohio State University, an expert on the subject, the loss of support the Bush administration has experienced for its Iraqi adventure has followed the same arc as in the Vietnam era (and the Korean War era as well); but, in the Iraqi case, support has eroded far more "precipitously," based on far fewer American casualties and, Mueller wrote back in late 2005, "there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline."

On this he proved correct. If anything, the decline in support seems only to have intensified in recent months, leaping well ahead of equivalent figures for the Vietnam era. Only four years into the Iraqi catastrophe, polling figures match or exceed those for 1970 (perhaps seven years into the Vietnam conflict, depending on how you count) on questions like whether you favor the complete withdrawal of American forces. In 1970, for instance, 56% of Americans thought going into Vietnam had been a mistake, already way below figures for Iraq. In the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, for example, a record 64% of Americans say the war was "not worth fighting."

He links to John Mueller's much-discussed article, The Iraq Syndrome Foreign Affairs Nov/Dec 2005. He opens that article with this observation:

American troops have been sent into harm's way many times since 1945, but in only three cases - Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq - have they been drawn into sustained ground combat and suffered more than 300 deaths in action. American public opinion became a key factor in all three wars, and in each one there has been a simple association: as casualties mount, support decreases. Broad enthusiasm at the outset invariably erodes.

The only thing remarkable about the current war in Iraq is how precipitously American public support has dropped off. Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War. And if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline.

And he also argues:

This lower tolerance for casualties is largely due to the fact that the American public places far less value on the stakes in Iraq than it did on those in Korea and Vietnam. The main threats Iraq was thought to present to the United States when troops went in - weapons of mass destruction and support for international terrorism - have been, to say the least, discounted. With those justifications gone, the Iraq war is left as something of a humanitarian venture, and, as Francis Fukuyama has put it, a request to spend "several hundred billion dollars and several thousand American lives in order to bring democracy to ... Iraq" would "have been laughed out of court." Given the evaporation of the main reasons for going to war and the unexpectedly high level of American casualties, support for the war in Iraq is, if anything, higher than one might expect - a reflection of the fact that many people still connect the effort there to the "war" on terrorism, an enterprise that continues to enjoy huge support. In addition, the toppling of Saddam Hussein remains a singular accomplishment - something the American people had wanted since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Mueller has a particular need to explain how the Iraq War is supposedly different in how many casualties the US public is willing to support compared to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, because his argument is that opposition to those two earlier wars was driven by the number of casualties.

The notion that the American public is especially "casualty averse" is one that's widely accepted by the officer corps and the foreign policy specialists. But it's a highly questionable one. Because at one level of course normal people, i.e., not neocons or other varieties of Republican warmongers, don't like to see American soldiers getting killed and injured.

But when you start thinking about what made public support for the Second World War different from that in the Vietnam War or the Iraq War, increasing number of casualties could be a false correlation. For one thing, number of casualties is a mathematical quantity. The fact that the President lied like sin to get the war started isn't so easily quantifiable. But the easily quantifiable set of numbers fits into computer models much better.

This whole discussion reminds me of an argument I once had with an economist who was defending the brilliance of an econometic model that predicted the outcome of Presidential elections from economic conditions. I had two main arguments with the model. One was that it simply ignored the enormous amount of polling data with sound methodology in which people state how they voted and why they voted that way. The other was that in its retroactive predictions, it showed that the Vietnam War had absolutely nothing to do with the voting in Presidential election of 1968. Even the most superficial knowledge about that election should be enough to tell the problem with that.

Like I said, it was an economist I was arguing with. I had no chance of convincing him.

This is a topic that intrigues me, so I'm likely to revisit it.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, iraq war, tom engelhardt, vietnam war