May 26, 2004
Sean Baker was a member of the Kentucky National Guard from 1989 to 1997. During that time, he served in the Gulf War. In the late 90’s, he got out of the Guard, but re-enlisted after September 11th.Nothing wrong with our military culture, though! Just a few bad apples.In January 2003, Baker was a member of the 438th Military Police company in Operation Enduring Freedom at Guantanamo Bay, where he says he was “given a direct order by an officer in the U.S. Army” to play the role of a detainee for a training exercise.
“I was on duty as an MP in an internal camp where the detainees were housed,” said Baker.
Baker claims that he was ordered to put on one of the orange jumpsuits worn by the detainees. “At first I was reluctant, but he said ‘you’ll be fine…put this on.’ And I did,” said Baker.
Baker says what took place next happened at the hands of four U.S. soldiers—soldiers he believes didn’t know he was one of them—has changed his life forever.
“They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down,” said Baker. “Then he—the same individual—reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn’t breath. When I couldn’t breath, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was ‘red.’”
But, Baker says, the beating didn’t stop. “That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me,” he said. “Somehow I got enough air, I muttered out, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier, I’m a U.S. soldier.’”
Baker says it wasn’t until one of the soldiers noticed what Baker was wearing did the exercise stop. “He saw that I had BDUs and boots on.”
Nearly 15 months after that day, and countless medical treatments at Walter Reed Hospital, Baker is now medically retired from the military, but still suffers.
“I sustained an injury to my brain, a traumatic brain injury which has caused me to have a seizure disorder I deal with daily,” said Baker.
Baker’s traumatic brain injury is outlined in a military document in his possession, which says the injury “was due to soldier playing role as a detainee who was uncooperative.”
(Via Looka!, which is full of much more cheerful posts about food and drink, all reminders that even among monstrousness life is worth living.) [04:14 PM]
Bad apples are the
ones who ignored their training
and brought cameras.
Everytime I read something like this, I think about how much I'd like the victims to be able to file suit against Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, to recover huge financial damages from the personal fortunes of those guys.
Are there any legal procedures that can be used to indemnify incompetent government officials outside of suits against the U.S. Government? If not, I'm beginning to think there should be.
Next MADD versus the propblast cup?
That's why Redman Suits exist and are used.
I suggest drawing strong conclusions to the sarcastic (pick your word) effect that Of course, if he really had been a “detainee,” it would have been okay based on the victim's statement (or on anything else really) is somewhat like relying on the occasional rape victim's choice to deny powerlessness by the documented it's better to think of oneself as an inviting slut than as totally powerless psychological mechanism.
In this case the victim thinks he would have escaped injury if only they had known he was one of them. Maybe so, maybe not.
I say again that's why Redman Suits are used even when everybody does know better.
What's wrong with our military culture - given that we have a military culture - is that folks like GinMar find their magazine holders clumsy ("Godforsaken ammo pouches" 25 May). Even to distinguish our military culture from their military culture is too hard for me to do.
This belongs in another thread but threads die, issues live on - Drake said once his story and Tomb Tapper are the only two SF strongly featuring military interrogation. There's I think Quaker Cannon(?) with an isolation tank technique no interrogator. Any others?
I hasten to add that when I mention clumsy web gear I do mean the problem is with the gear and the establishment that won't do better not the soldier.
On the other hand as a picture badge carrying member of the military industrial complex I also support money for expensive boondoggles that may not leave enough to do everything.
Clark, with all the good will in the world, I can't quite figure out what you're getting at.
What's creepy about this story is that it's hard to escape the conclusion that way too many people are getting way too accustomed to using way too much force. The moment the other soldiers thought this guy was a detainee, they started beating him hard enough to deal out a traumatic brain injury.
This isn't battlefield conditions we're talking about. This is Guantanamo Bay. There's noplace for the actual detainees to run, no matter how "uncooperative" they're determined to be. The fact that a simple misunderstanding led directly to sadistic abuse suggests a culture that's getting into the use of force for purposes, shall we say, extraneous to the need to keep order and debrief terrorist agents. (Indeed, routinely handing out traumatic brain injuries doesn't seem to me a really great way to find out about Al Qaeda networks, but probably I suffer from a residual belief that somebody in the US government still wants to protect NYC from being blown up. This is probably naive of me and I should stop.)
The moment the other soldiers thought this guy was a detainee, they started beating him hard enough to deal out a traumatic brain injury.
From the article Jim Henley linked, it seems that the soldier in question was posing as an uncooperative prisoner, so it's not *quite* as bad as your quote makes it sound. It's still horrific.
I don't think it's just the military culture. There's a pervasive idea in the general culture that prisoners (usually not distinguished from convicts) deserve whatever is done to them.
Josh, how does "posing" as "uncooperative" make it any less bad? Yeah, Patrick's "the moment" is a bit of rhetorical overstatement; they didn't start beating him until he, what, didn't do what they told him to?
Josh, how does "posing" as "uncooperative" make it any less bad? Yeah, Patrick's "the moment" is a bit of rhetorical overstatement; they didn't start beating him until he, what, didn't do what they told him to?
I was responding to the rhetorical overstatement. I think this story is disturbing enough that engaging in rhetorical overstatement about it does a disservice to the cause of making sure it's dealt with appropriately and doesn't happen again.
Personally, I think you're straining at gnats.
Wow.
I don't know what else to say about this post. Just...wow.
Man, I hate what this country is becoming.
Personally, I think you're straining at gnats.
Perhaps. This camel sure is tasty, though.
Bonus points for an outstanding comeback.
That may be because my writing reflects my thoughts and both are confused. Like sharing at an AA meeting saying something was selfishly intended to help me order my own thoughts.
Perhaps the insult is that calling the Army an Army is considered an insult.(think about it)
I don't find the story creepy because I took such things as a given before I read this example. Expecting anything different, asking for anything different is asking for what never was and never will be.
I doubt this was sadistic abuse - extreme abuse certainly - but I rather doubt the lifestyle implications of sadistic in this context. Sadism perhaps in this case but not necessarily. Quite possibly the victim was chosen because nobody liked him. I have no idea.
What there is no escape from is the conclusion that way too many people are getting too accustomed to using way too much force. It is a true statement. A well formulated formula, a valid conclusion from the facts. Consistent with consensus reality. Accords with the senses. Aligns with the observations. Probability 1 beyond any subsequent Bayesian change later. Any other conclusion is pure denial of reality.
What there is an escape from is the notion that a well run Army, a New Model Army, would have a different culture. I mean it is as meaningless to say the army is all bad apples as it is to say "just a few bad apples" whether meant literally or sarcastically. They aren't apples - nothing so relatively innocuous as ethylene gas infects the troops. Perhaps some bad apples - some infections - are among the prisoners? Certainly training has emphasized creating the other even among push button killers.
On the civilian side for a NY reference - one of the prisoners at Rikers Island put an improvised weapon (ground down ballpoint?) through the eye of a guard not all that long ago. There were reports that the prisoner later apologized for blinding the only sympathetic guard in the prison - but the nice guy was the only guard the prisoner could get close enough to for his shiv to blind. Nice guys finish last.
Quoting Dr. Pournelle:
Let me limp up and say it again: Armies break things and kill people. If you do not want things broken and people killed, keep the army in barracks. ....[where like the Mafia they only kill each other and their wives and children and themselves cem]
It is no good trying to change the nature of the Army so that it doesn't break things and kill people because if you do you won't have an Army any longer....
....And all the sensitivity training in the world won't change that: the incidents will continue to happen, only now we will have a Sensitive New Age Army that won't be as good at breaking things and killing people when things really need breaking and people really need killing.
That’s a nice bit of tough-sounding hard-headed realist rhetoric from Dr Pournelle. I wonder if it’s actually true.
My knowledge of history, including military history, kinda sucks, but my impression is that it used to be a truth universally acknowledged that an army of young men, in possession of weapons and armor, must be in need of plunder and rapine. My impression is also that this is not quite as true as it used to be — that the age of the professional army has brought about a reduction (though not elimination) or plunder and rape in the wake of war, and without reducing (in fact, improving) the effectiveness of those armies.
Is my impression accurate? And might the same thing be possible with torture and less formal brutalities visited upon prisoners?
Avram snuck in ahead of me.
The Pournelle quote encapsulates the viewpoint of
a tough-talking, non-military officer (who is also well-known for his "realist" essay stating how much better off he believes the world would be if half the population died off to advance the gene pool).
I'm under the impression that if we the study the written policies of military training academies and read statements by high-ranking U.S. generals, we may find a mitigated conception of what Army culture should be like.
(I still wish that lawyers would figure out some way for the victims of Bush and Cheney to initiate private personal injury suits.)
Meanwhile, how about that Al Gore? He's not only speaking to us as voters; he's speaking to the world about us and saying what needs to be said.
In response to Avram:
I am not an expert on military history, but my impression is that major bad behavior (pillage and rape, primarily) by soldiers started with the rise of standing armies. If you go back far enough your army was just your adult male population (only landowners in some cases, etc.), and generally weren't formed up as an army for very long.
Once more places had standing (or at least long-serving) armies the bad behavior became more prevalent, probably for a variety of reasons (boredom, brutalization, lack of pay, etc.). The more disciplined the army, the better the behavior, generally speaking, although I'd have to do some research to see how much that mattered in ancient times (I'm not that familiar with the depredations or lack of them on the part of the Roman armies, for example, except in a few specific cases).
The Thirty Years' War was something of a low point for this sort of thing in Europe. After that armies got more professional (many armies in that war were more or less giant groups of mercenaries) and more generals made an effort to prevent them from harming civilians (with numerous exceptions).
I'd say that the Napoleonic Wars were probably the high-water mark for good behavior by European armies, on average. Wellington was particularly known as a strict disciplinarian and was quite willing to hang soldiers who bothered civilians in defiance of orders. (The most famous British military-local civilian encounter of the period involved marriage.)
After that things got better in some respects and worse in others - you see less casual pillage and rape by soldiers (in the more professional armies), but more planned brutality against civilians (e.g. bombing).
As for torture, I don't know. Going back to the Napoleonic Wars again, I would say that torturing military prisoners was probably very uncommon amongst the professional armies. Certainly they wouldn't have done it for purported intelligence reasons (given the reluctance in many quarters just to send out spies and the like). On the other hand, I wouldn't care to speculate about what, say, the Spanish guerrilas might have done without some research.
I suffer from a residual belief that somebody in the US government still wants to protect NYC from being blown up. This is probably naive of me and I should stop.
Listening to the President's speech a few nights ago I had a terrible realization. He was warning us, covering his ass really, that we were going to be attacked again. I mean, I've seen the polls and read the columns speculating about the odds of Bush sweeping the election (or even just forgoing it) in the face of terrorist attack. I've been worried for a while, but hearing him cover his ass in the first 15 minutes of a speech just chilled me to the bone.
I recently moved from NYC to Ohio, but I still worry about my city and all those who still live in it. Yeah, you should probably stop being naive. You might also want to consider taking that long walking tour of Canada in August or September.
What I'd like to know is how you tell the difference between an "uncooperative" prisoner and one who genuinely doesn't know the answer the question you just asked.
==========
Oh, about that Major Terrorist Alert: I see two reasons for it. One is this: If the bad guys manage to do something horrid between now and November, this is a CYA maneuver. "See, we were on top of it! We _told_ you it was coming!" The other reason is "The president's poll numbers suck! Quick, run a diversion!"
Dan Blum:
"I am not an expert on military history, but my impression is that major bad behavior (pillage and rape, primarily) by soldiers started with the rise of standing armies."
I suppose this could depend on how you define "soldier" - there's a valid distinction to be made between, say, warriors in a pre-state tribal society and specialized soldiers in historical times.
But. Everything I have read leads to the conclusion that warfare is a near-universal in human societies, and that pillage, rape, and mass murder were probably hallmarks of warfare long before any distinction was made between "fit adult males" and "the army".
Clark: A well run Army does have that difference, even in a state which is run along the lines of Nazi Germany there were places (read, "The Interrogator" by Hans Scharff, and the comments of those whom he questioned) where civility, and decency reigned, yea even in the midst of war.
For the better part of fifty years the US Army has striven to that end, and in the main we have managed to make our interrogation culture such that this sort of thing wasn't really possible.
But they changed the rules, (hell they did away with the rules) and the restrictions we've spent the past umpteen years building into the use of lethal force (soldiers are restricted in when they can kill people, which is why most of us don't come home and shoot people for looking threatening) and you get what we have here.
You may not be surprised, and you may call me naive, but this was not something I expected to come to pass, because the rules in place are built to stop it.
As comfort I have seen the anger, and the shame, in those who didn't commit crimes, who now have to try to hold their heads up when they hear, valid, complaints about the service they serve.
Lenny: I don't know what you are trying to say with The Pournelle quote encapsulates the viewpoint of a tough-talking, non-military officer but Jerry served in the Artillery in Korea, where he not only lost no small amount of his hearing, but troops; close enough to the enemy that they were shot. So, in my book, he is a military officer (and yes, he still is, the commission is for life, even if he isn't still in the service).
Dan Blum: Standing armies reduced the pillage and rapine, because the institution of discipline (the triangle and the noose, for the most part) allowed a commander to impose his will far more readily than could be done to a raggle-taggle band of farmers and free-booters, raiders and rapscallions, who flocked to the colors in the age of ad hoc militias and feudal levies.
As for toture, Napoleon's intelligence services used it, regularly. Britain's intel collectors were, mostly, dedicated amatuers, or military analysts, so the methods they used varied a lot, but toture was less common.
For the most part captured soldiers weren't subject to it, because teh nature of battles, and campaigns were such that there was usually little of merit to be gleaned from them.
It may be that the only period when it was safe to be a civilian in a European or American war zone was from about 1800 to 1950; even then this safety was very limited south of the Pyrennees and East of Berlin. I've just been rereading Candide, which opens with the rape, murder and disembowelment of his family, and of everyone on the villages that either the "Bulgars" or the "Avars" pass through.
How did the troops treat civilians in the American Civil War?
Terry:
I hadn't been aware that Jerry Pournelle served as a commissioned officer; so I take that back. But I have been depressed by his expressions of cynicism about human nature for more than thirty years, off and on. I notice him, now that I search for it, taking General Anthony Zinni to task with the same bleak attitude.
Jerry Pournelle posted some excellent clear-eyed stuff against the Iraq invasion on his blog just before it happened.
There is no international court for civil redress that I am aware of but there is a criminal one. The International Criminal Court in the Hague has the jurisdiction to indict leaders for warcrimes if they feel that national governments have not taken sufficient action. For instance, if allegations of British soldiers are proven to be true but if Britain refuses to take action, or only punishes low level soldiers, the court could decide to indcit Geoff Hoon (the British equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld) and Tony Blair if it found evidence that the abuse was systemic.
The court cannot, however, take action against President Bush or Secretary Rumsfeld because the US government insisted on being exempted from the ICC on the grounds that it would leave US soldiers open to politically motivated and unfounded accusations.
Yes, and isn't that wonderfully convenient! (Read with huge dollop of sarcasm in your morning coffee.)
With no video
of Rodney King's beating, it
would be no big deal.
The really aggravating thing about the latest terrorism warning is that it is gonna get used the same way Bush's tax cut push was.
"The economy is booming! We can afford tax cuts!" became "The economy is tanking! We need tax cuts!"
In this case, if there is an attack: "See? We told you it was dangerous. Keep us."
If there isn't: "See? We told you we'd protect you. Keep us."
I suppose this could depend on how you define "soldier" - there's a valid distinction to be made between, say, warriors in a pre-state tribal society and specialized soldiers in historical times.
Actually I think the big distinction I missed was between soldiers and raiders - in many societies there have been traditions of small gangs of armed men pillaging civilians just for the sake of it, but that's an end in itself, not a negative consequence of organized warfare.
Of course, this is highly unlikely to make the slightest bit of difference to the civilians involved.
I think that many of the worst atrocities prior to the 20th century involved combinations of the two types of behavior, with raiders becoming armies - the Mongols, for example.
Standing armies reduced the pillage and rapine, because the institution of discipline (the triangle and the noose, for the most part) allowed a commander to impose his will far more readily than could be done to a raggle-taggle band of farmers and free-booters, raiders and rapscallions, who flocked to the colors in the age of ad hoc militias and feudal levies.
That's certainly true of the most recent transition to well-disciplined standing armies, starting in the 17th century (or so), but my reference, which was admittedly very unclear, was to the first such transitions, back in the early Iron Age sometime (certainly by the days of the Roman Republic). I'm not sure the effects were the same, then (I'm not sure they weren't, either - I need to read more in this area).
I'd say that the Napoleonic Wars were probably the high-water mark for good behavior by European armies, on average.
Except for "south of the Pyrenees", where the hideous brutality of the 8-year Peninsular War (where an army was harrassed by guerilla insurgents, & there were atrocities on both sides) gave rise to Goya's "Disasters of War" prints & the famous painting of an execution squad called "The Third of May".
The prints are still very strong meat indeed. The painting, stripped of its romantic lighting & colour, fits quite well into film & photo images of 20th century execution squads.
I'd say that the Napoleonic Wars were probably the high-water mark for good behavior by European armies, on average. Except for "south of the Pyrenees", where the hideous brutality of the 8-year Peninsular War (where an army was harrassed by guerilla insurgents, & there were atrocities on both sides) gave rise to Goya's "Disasters of War" prints & the famous painting of an execution squad called "The Third of May". The prints are still very strong meat indeed. The painting, stripped of its romantic lighting & colour, fits quite well into film & photo images of 20th century execution squads.
I didn't say the situation was good, just that it was about the best it's ever been, on average. (I also did note the Spanish situation, but not very clearly. I should get more sleep before posting.)
[Slight spoilers ahead. Skip a paragraph.]
I'm making my way slowly (because I want to savour them) through Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, set during the Napoleonic Wars. Maturin is an intelligence agent (a "dedicated amateur" in Terry's words), and in the second or third book he is captured by French intelligence agents and tortured quite mercilessly. The book does not go into detail, and is the better for it, but it takes a few months for him to regain his health. Having later disposed of any French agents who can confirm his status as a spook, in "The Surgeon's Mate", Maturin travels to Paris to read his paper in natural philosophy, quite confident that as a civilian he will be ignored by the authorities. I haven't finished the book, but so far he and his travelling companion are unmolested.
As an aside, I choose to trust O'Brian's portrait of 19th century intelligence ops, so it strikes me that throughout human history, all over the globe, that people are as smart as people. If one group of people can run a sophisticated scam that can lead another group into folly, then so potentially can any group do so. If the British SIS can lead a complacent Abwehr around by the nose during WWII, then it strikes me as eminently reasonable that, say, Iranian intelligence could give the US a helpful push as it stumbled into the Iraqi quagmire, especially since Iranians can read and learn as easily as the rest of us.
But I really wanted to comment on the illusion of progress in the organisation of armed forces being touted hereabouts. As War Nerd points out, we actually have two types of army here in the 21st Century: the machine people (USA, Europe, and, er, that's it), and the rat people (the rest of the world). The civilised countries have to try and fight with all sorts of restrictions, because unrestrained our armies would cause terrible destruction and ruin whatever it was we thought we were trying to save. The gang warriors are essentially fighting the same kind of war that was fought by our tribal ancestors: throwing masses of soldiers at the enemy, promising them loot, land and women, or at least a chance to exercise catharsis by hurting and killing a bunch of strangers.
Our armies in USA and Europe are undoubtably more sophisticated than they were, but it's clear from the situation in Iraq that the tribal mode is always at hand if the sophisticated facade breaks down. The evolution of our armies is just that, a near-blind process of mutation and replication, not a clear shining path of progress towards a more perfect state that one day all armies of the world will attain.
The US Army is probably no more sophisticated in its organisation and philosophy than the Imperial Romans; in its present state it might even be less so. I would say that the Iraqis, by the same token, are no less sophisticated than the ancient Germans. I'm afraid that as long as Homo remains sapiens, this is what warfare will be like: a meandering path between sophistication and tribalism.
Lenny: Let me say, in Jerry's defense (and not that it really matters, given your complaints, but hey, after many years, I've come to like the man; perhaps because, not in spite, of our differences) he comes by that bleak and cynical attitude honestly.
There are times I agree with him... the difference is I am a crappy writer of fiction, and no one pays me to spout off. If they did, and if people gave me credit for what I've done, because it sounds good/right, and if I was still writing about things fifty years from now, they might say the same sorts of things about me, as you say about him.
I have some very bleak views on my fellow man, and some very atavistic urges toward some of them, but I like to be well thought of more than Jerry does, so I tend to bite my tongue, reaching rather for irony, and understatement.
NelC: I suppose it depends on how one defines the nature of sophitication. We don't decimate units for cowardice, heck we mostly don't even kill idividuals.
But no, if one makes the mirroring of the culture from which a popular army (as opposed to a drafted) army is drawn (and the Roman, the British and the US are all of that stripe) then no, the basics (apart from the means) haven't really changed.
Which is why I feel the weight of history every time I march in formation... the echoing of boots in step is a line that stretches back to Ashurbapinal, and before; from the Plains of Meggido, to the Field of Armagedon, and I am a part of that long march.
It can be a shitty job (memories of which are part of my Jerry can be so bleak) but it has its moments, and (God help us) like the guy who crawls in the sewers, it is needful.
As for people, yeah! I'm always amazed/amused at the talking heads on history/archeology who seem astounded that our ancestors were, apparently, as smart as we are.
A long time ago (50's) I myself knew personally in their native setting lots of perfectly decent Germans with all the awards you could name - one of the Germans (Knight's Cross) in our social circles was very best friends with a Belgian you didn't back into a corner at cocktail parties - shades of a genuine Gestapo interrogation by the genuine Gestapo. It takes all kinds.
I have known well only one German who acknowledged being a convinced Nazi - his explanation was the best I've ever heard of - he said "What did I know? I left school at 11 to be apprenticed as a baker." When he went through Poland so quickly he began to believe. When he marched with his unit down the Champs Elysee he was sure of it. When Americans saved him with bayonets from death at the hands of the French he looked the French in the eyes and decided to rethink. A nicer guy and a more pro-American German you'll never find. Don't ever doubt that he was a convinced Nazi though.
An Italian acquaintance with stars explained there was no particular intent to violate Hague rules in the horn of Africa (read Hailie Selassie's appeal to civilized nations) but when the supply train is the local sporting goods store soft point is what you use. Fighting on the cheap leads to cutting corners; don't ever doubt they cut other corners.
Reading Colin Powell's Memorial Day message reminds me of a German war bride - her daughter's teddy bear was named Rommel (not Manfred) - who had a totally different experience with Russian infantry than Powell talks about. Neither one is wrong.
If you want to read about it - read John Ciardi, a humane man of letters, on realizing his unit was a mob and he was part of it -
The closest I've come to an interrogator personal acquaintance you might have run into is a Reserve Officer, Dave (Basque last name obscured) Uberxxga(also a fan and he shot for the Division) from Idaho who was assigned to Interrogation out of Fort Lewis 20 years ago. Of course he is a decent human being and when I knew him a volunteer fireman and a committed first responder in his community.
Doesn't change reality.
I can read here about "safe to be a civilian in a European or American war zone [was] from about 1800 to 1950" then I can call a surviving Aunt and say - remind me, who in the family has the chest of drawers with the bullet from Quantrill's raid on Lawrence?
As for people, yeah! I'm always amazed/amused at the talking heads on history/archeology who seem astounded that our ancestors were, apparently, as smart as we are.
A fast side comment, Terry. A bit over 30 years ago in college I spent part of a Christmas holiday working on an team in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park east of San Diego (which is about the same size as Rhose Island and is gorgeous, if you like desert) updating old archaeological surveys. It involved working our way back into the edges of a wilderness area, checking sites and features that someone had reported a couple of decades before. A lot of my time was spent hiking ridgelines, looking for agave pits -- places where someone had build a fire above or around a large agave plant to cook it's roots in the ground. The best feature of the area we were working in was a short stream that flowed most of the year, which was surrounded by small trees.
I asked my instructor one evening how many natives (Desert Coahilla, IIRC) had lived in the group of valleys we were surveying. I expected that it migh be as high as several dozen, but no more than a hundred. I almost fell over (OK, some wine had been passed around, but not that much) when he said at least two thousand, probably less than ten thousand at the peak. I simply did not believe him.
The next day he pulled out the survey data and a couple of reference books and showed us the evidence and what they would have lived on and had each of us do the math -- and it came out at around 4 thousand in a set of villages. He said (as I remember it now) "the people who lived out here were at least as smart as you are, probably smarter. Consider the range of all of your knowlege and consider that they knew just as much, but concentrated on surviving in this environment. You don't even see the same landscape they did, even though the climate has not changed that much. They would thive on food you don't know how to see."
An Italian acquaintance with stars explained there was no particular intent to violate Hague rules in the horn of Africa (read Hailie Selassie's appeal to civilized nations) but when the supply train is the local sporting goods store soft point is what you use. Fighting on the cheap leads to cutting corners; don't ever doubt they cut other corners.
Logistics, always with the logistics! Seriously, isn't logistics part of what determines how much rape and pillage happens in the wake of an army? Until the 20th century, armies pretty much had to "live off the land." While there was some attempt to pay the civilians for the supplies the army took, if they were operating in hostile territory, it was less likely. When the food and goods of an area is considered to be valuable to the opposing army, then it's better to destroy it than it is to leave it behind. This is, I believe, some of the reasoning behind Sherman's march to the sea. Firing the fields of the enemy will starve the peasants, but it will also starve the enemy. Armies tend to be focused on the guys that are trying to kill them.
As for rape, I don't understand it. Maybe it's a guy-thing. As far as I know, it's so common as to almost be a law of nature. I don't know of any stories of mass rape by the Allied forces in WWII. I don't know if that's because we didn't think of things like that back then, or if the local girls welcomed the liberating soldiers with more than open arms, or some other factor.
As for Pournelle, as quoted, he sounds no more cynical to me than Jim has sounded, here. The mission of the army is to break things and kill people. That's what they're there for. They aren't the peace corp. If you have doubts about that, go watch basic training for a while. The reason war settles arguments that haven't been settled any other way is because it is the worst thing that we have yet managed to come up with to do to each other -- short of complete annihilation. I don't see that reminding people of what the armed forces are designed to do is cynical; I think that it is something that is too easily forgotten. People think of war as marching soldiers and waving flags, not frightened men wounded in the dark, or MPs torturing naked men in a prison, nor children blown to bits in front of their parents' eyes, nor the flag-draped coffins coming home, nor the 18 year old football hero returning without his legs. The flags and the marching are the least part of it, and we'd do better to remember that.
I don't know of any stories of mass rape by the Allied forces in WWII. I don't know if that's because we didn't think of things like that back then, or if the local girls welcomed the liberating soldiers with more than open arms, or some other factor.
I do. Comfort Women served the victors too. They were mostly little brown women. They mostly died.
the people who lived out here were at least as smart as you are, probably smarter. Consider the range of all of your knowlege and consider that they knew just as much, but concentrated on surviving in this environment.
And they were used to working hard at it too. I was thinking about this while watching the Colonial House series on PBS. The modern people who had to live as if they were in 1628 were at a disadvantage because they had to learn skills and ways of life (working from dawn to dusk, with only Sabbaths off) that people who really lived in 1628 took for granted.
If there was grumbling in the real 1628 about working twelve-hour days or going to church every Sunday or the women having to do the same boring cooking and washing and cleaning every day, while the men were off planning new and different things, we don't really have records of that because history was mostly written by the wealthy leisured-class (nearly all males) who had time to write.
Back on topic: Likewise we don't hear as much in history from victims of torture or other abuses during wartime because even many of the ones who survived weren't literate -- and much of the history was written by the winners who considered such abuses justified (for one reason or another, though we'd probably consider all their reasons unjustifiable) or by their descendants who didn't know or didn't want to think about the horrible things Grandpa did in the war. But they would mention it if Grandpa, or even worse, Grandma, was one who had the horrible things done to him or her.
Lots of terrible things happen in war. Any job that involves people killing other people, set aside in a different subcategory called "the enemy," is going to lend itself to other abuses of "the enemy". It may be true that there were some wars with less of such, but human nature being what it is, no war that I've ever heard of was atrocity-free.
O.T.: Lenny Bailes, were you at UCLA in the 60s? I knew a guy with the same name who read science fiction and was the roommate of a friend of mine. E-mail me?
Lydia:
The mission of the army is to break things and kill people. That's what they're there for. If you do not want things broken and people killed, keep the army in barracks.
Presumably, commanders order those things done in order to neutralize opposing armies and establish control of strategic territory -- not to casually kill noncombatants. The thing I dislike about Pournelle's comment is the implication that if you deploy effective soldiers, they won't know when to stop breaking things. If that's the case, I'm for training less effective soldiers who may not kill and occupy as effectively, but who will know when to stop killing and breaking.
I don't know of any stories of mass rape by the Allied forces in WWII.
I assume you mean the "Western Allies"? Because once the Red Army hit Germany, they raped pretty much everything female and breathing.
Clark: A well run Army does have that difference, even in a state which is run along the lines of Nazi Germany there were places (read, "The Interrogator" by Hans Scharff, and the comments of those whom he questioned) where civility, and decency reigned, yea even in the midst of war.I've talked to my father about what he knew from WWII about capture and interrogation, and it's quite clear. First off, although they always flew with civilian-dress ID photos, they knew that the odds were that if they were shot down, it would be hundreds of miles behind enemy lines; in that case, there was no real point in trying to escape capture.
The ideal goal, in that case, was to be found by the Luftwaffe (and since they were probably the ones who had shot you down, they would usually have a pretty good idea where to find you). If the Luftwaffe didn't find you, your goal would be to find the Luftwaffe. If you surrendered to the Luftwaffe, you stood a decent chance of being greeted as a compatriot, almost; booze was not out of the question.
Failing that, there was the Wehrmacht. You wouldn't get the hero treatment, but they were generally professional and workmanlike about things. You'd probably be delivered intact to the POW camp, and you'd probably remain intact within it.
The thing which you wanted to avoid, at almost all costs, was being captured by an SS unit, for obvious reasons.
There was, for what it's worth, one thing which could be worse than being captured by the SS: Being captured by a civilian. Especially because there was a pretty decent chance that you had just finished bombing their city (after all, the actual bombing run was probably the most dangerous part of any mission: Once the bomb run started, the pilot's job was to hold the plane absolutely straight and level and at a constant speed while the bombadier sighted the target; and flying straight and level at a constant speed is a great way to get shot down). Getting captured by a civilian was a great way to get a pitchfork in your stomach.
I recently read an article about the Iraqi prison abuse nightmare in which several WWII veterans who had been POWs talked about their experiences not being tortured. One of them piloted a B-26 (same type of plane my dad flew on), and, when he was shot down (at the tail end of a bomb run, naturally), the pilot who had shot him down met him on the ground to shake his hand and introduce himself. Of course, given that he was the pilot of the B-26, it meant that he was also an officer, which certainly didn't hurt his reception. As an aside, it reminds me of my favorite "shot down" story of the war, which went the other way 'round, sort of: One of Adolph Galland's Me-262 pilots, shot down by my father's B-26 (which was on loan to another crew), parachuted down into his mother's back yard, at which point she brought him inside and whipped up a nice pancake breakfast for him.
Oh, and another anecdote from that story about WWII POWs:
Howard Lowenberg, 78, of the Pittsburgh suburb of Penn Hills, was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and spent five months as a German POW.[....]
During processing, he was asked his religion and he answered Jewish.
The officer questioning him lowered his voice so the guard couldn't hear and replied, "I'm marking you down as a Catholic so you'll have a better chance of going back to the States."
"I didn't say the situation was good, just that it was about the best it's ever been, on average."
Dan: Wasn't totally contradicting that there had been some improvement at that stage, just mentioning the most well-known exception at that time. (And related art.) "There are always exceptions" is a Rule of Biology, and human behaviour probly falls under that.
I wonder if it was partly a "swarthy" vs "whiter" issue, the same way that Latin Americans, Hispanic peoples (dare I say even Arabs?) are seen in more modern times?
Lydia wrote:
"I don't know of any stories of mass rape by the Allied forces in WWII. I don't know if that's because we didn't think of things like that back then, or if the local girls welcomed the liberating soldiers with more than open arms, or some other factor."
I remember first reading about it in "Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape" by Susan Brownmiller, that there was an enormous number of rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers (Allies)
Here is a link on it
"Based on contemporary hospital reports and on surging abortion rates in the following months, it is estimated that up to two million German women were raped during the last six months of World War Two, around 100,000 of them in Berlin."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/berlin_05.shtml
Of course, it's not unique... Rape of Nanjing, mass rapes in the Pakistan-Bangladesj war, Bosnia, etc.
Well, I'm no more enlightened than I was, but I am more unhappy. Thank you for the details, I think.
There was an author on the local National Public Radio station a while ago who had just finished a book on the Rape of Nanking. I had to turn the show off, as the details were getting entirely too distressing to allow me to continue to work while listening. Gotta wonder, sometimes, why humans exist.
Back to the basic issue: I'm really not sold on the idea that the only way that the army can "break things and kill people" efficiently is to hate, hate, HATE their adversaries with all their might. I'm not saying that that isn't an effective strategy, I'm just saying that it isn't the only one available, and not even necessarily the most effective.
Who is more effective a combantant: the vicious killer, who thinks his opponent is little better than a dog, or the cold-blooded strategist, who respects his opponent's capabilities? You can see the difference in the stories of WWII pilots above: officers treated other officers with respect, because, well, they respected them. The civilians killed in rage, because the fuckers just bombed the hell out of them--not the best way to get people to think of you as equal.
I don't think that the army would lose that much effectiveness if they stopped thinking of their enemies as inhuman. They might just gain some: underestimating your enemy is never good. Look at Iraq, for example.
Now I launch into lala land, feel free to ignore: It is my understanding that most of the training that non-coms get is designed to get them to think of their enemy as inhuman, because it makes them easier to kill. Whereas officers recieve a different sort of training, because underedtimating your opponent is far more dangerous if it's a general who is doing it. Basically what I'm arguing is that the U.S. military is designed to make its rank and file think of whoever they are fighting as horrific scum. As long as that's true, atrocities like Abu Graib will keep happening, because if someone has complete control of someone he hates, he isn't going to treat him well. But to be perfectly honest, I don't really know much more about military training than I learned from Full Metal Jacket, so it's both possible and even likely that I'm totally full of crap.
(Ignoring the comment spam above ...)
Heresiarch, functional armies need both. They need cold-blooded strategists who respect the enemy's capabilities, but they also need hate -- without a goodly dose of hatred or contempt it's hard to kill in cold blood.
Reading textbooks on military psychology is a bit of an eye-opener. For example, studies during the Vietnam war discovered that infantry troops in firefights with enemy units don't all shoot at the enemy -- in fact only about 15% of soldiers are willing to actually aim their gun at another human being and pull the trigger. We have strong inhibitions against killing, and it takes training (read: desensitization) to make it possible. It's no accident that most of the deaths in modern warfare are inflicted by artillery or other crew-served weapons; they're out of direct sight of the enemy most of the time, and this makes it a lot easier to get soldiers to cooperate at efficiently killing other people.
One of the more alarming trends of the past few decades has been towards the use of psychological training courses designed to make it easier for soldiers to kill. Another alarming trend is the spread of special forces units: specialists with esprit de corps who've been trained to work as teams of serial killers (that is, planning and executing multiple sequential kills). I'm flying a speculative kite here, but I suspect that the militarization or para-militarization of policing, and the slow resurrection of the Bloody Code in American penal theory supports this lethal socialization of the military (by providing a ready supply of recruits already desensitized and disinhibited to violence).
So many things:
Yes, armies break things, and they kill people, for the most part hating the enemy isn't part of it (at least not in the US/European model. Hitler's army had some difference, mostly on the Eastern Front) Asymetric wars tend to make this less stable a circumstance.
Soldiers like order, in the chaos of the battlefield rules are a support, knowing that the rules protect one (and knowing they are followed) keeps the enemy human. Seeing to it those rules in remain in force also helps to make the treatment of the enemy more civil.
Clark: I'm not sure if I'm reading you right, but it seems you are implying your friend engaged in less than savory behaviour as in interrogator. As an aside, was he a mustang? because officers don't get trained for interrogation.
Regarding Anza Borrego, I love the place. As for living off the desert, I know a fair bit about it, but less than one who had to live off of it. I have spent time living off the land, sort of (and that in the spring, when the living was easy) in Joshua Tree. Chia is pretty tasty, and has lots of energy.
Which reminds me of a trip to Ukraine. I was one of the very few Americans who ate the wild strawberries (the majority of them were decidedly city boys). Walking along, with some Ukrainians, (getting ready to assault the American position) one of them made a stooping move, not stopping, just a quick bend at the knees and waist, and popped back up.
When I got there I saw he'd grabbed a couple of strawberries as he walked.
Ray: Civilian capture was an iffy thing. They might want to kill you, they might not. In part this is becuase the B-17 crews; in particular, usually came down some distance from the area they bombed, and people are funny about such things.
But yes, Luftwaffe capture was the fastest way to as comfortable a captivity as one was going to get.
Lois: The hunter-gatherer types work less hard than one thinks to get food. I seem to recall that the modern day remnants work 10-15 hours per week getting food. One has to recall too that the San, and suchlike, peoples are all living on marginal lands these days, so the folks who lived in the lush plains, and forests, may not have had to spend that much time going after supper.
Heseriarch: You are wrong. Non-coms get training in tactics, and techniques (most specific to their field, but no small amount of general infantry stuff too). They also get training in the handling of troops, and officers. Mindless robots, with no restraint on their emotions, and let loose of the leash (when it comes to violence) can't be controlled when the world goes to shit, so we don't train them that way. Not the troops, and certainly not the leaders.
Some stupid exceptions notwithstanding.
Regarding the now-deleted post that came between Heresiarch's and Charlie Stross's, we at Electrolite would be the last to disagree that would-be brownshirts are "malignant narcissists," but the fact is that our comment section isn't simply a public facility for posting lengthy essays on whatever off-topic subject strikes somebody's fancy. If you need web space, we recommend Hosting Matters.
I wonder if it [nastiness in The Spanish Ulcer] was partly a "swarthy" vs "whiter" issue, the same way that Latin Americans, Hispanic peoples (dare I say even Arabs?) are seen in more modern times?
I've not gotten that impression, although I can't say for certain. I think the difference stems from the fact that in most of the areas Napoleon conquered, there simply wasn't much organized resistance (after he conquered it, that is). In Spain, there was, which started an escalating cycle of nastiness on the parts of both the guerrillas (wasn't this the war that gave us the word "guerrilla?") and the French troops.
Negative Negative I am saying Dave was/is a good guy - that they are all good guys. Equally true that he was bewildered by the assignment and quite bemused that it was his.
You mention the Eastern Front. The Italian General mentioned above took a division to the Eastern Front - brought back his headquarters. Some people filtered back from Russian prisons later. Few people can be taught to shit on a shovel and throw it away from your position in the midst of the Russian Winter (sometimes I hear it was better to shit your trousers than freeze your arse) and also keep your cool. Meth apparently helped.
Since we seem to be arguing by reference to authority rather than sharing experience and observations read Jim Cerillo on selecting and training gunfighters who can make instant life or death decisions and kill on sight just the same.
As an aside, one of our Canadian readers might have noted his reference that after about 30 days things have changed for the last of the nice people. He hasn't so I will.
An analogy - ask a football coach to win the BCS Championship with players who are not only A students in Engineering but never need a bedcheck sooner than say train a nicer force of 3,066,294 active duty under Nixon or 12,123,455 under Roosevelt to preserve all that I hold dear and themselves.
Pushing that analogy a little we have in effect General Karpinski saying nobody told me I had to bedcheck my guys after we put rules in place for a curfew.
Ranks right up there with Linda Hamm saying nobody told me we had a problem and Tuffte saying yeah they did it's right here in the small print at the bottom of this slide halfway through this presentation.
And finally remember some of the many reasons I'll give Dr. Pournelle a pass on drinking too much. As a young man I was entirely too impressed by the Swiss system of universal military service
(in one of their civil wars it was the highlands versus the lowlands so they could break for lunch and the highland grazers bring milk and cheese to share with the lowland wheat bread for a jolly half-time in the killing game)
until I had a nice heart to heart talk with a man who took a battalion of WWII retreads to Korea and watched them die.
Wow, that travesty generator dinged my Turing test-o-meter for all of ten seconds in the last posting. The one before it was much more coherent. Cark, whoever you are, you might want to re-tune your Markov chains ...
Obsolete wetware - stuck in the Box-Jenkins Box-Tiao age - when you're auto-regressive shocks linger.
Lenny --
The problem with building a less-effective military is that then you lose.
For awhile -- It's been twenty five years, so I doubt I'm remembering the right building, never mind the precisely correct details -- there was a big painting up in one of the public rooms of the Canadian Staff College in Kingston; it was some First World War scene of total, abject, recent devastation; half the village burnt, dead people, dead livestock swelling up, nothing alive in the fields but one flowering something in a hedge, the church roof fallen in, and nothing moving at all. (A photograph that big would have showed the rats, at least as little brown dots,but the painting was bizarrely Impressionist.)
The little brass plaque underneath it gave the dates and the place and the name of the artist, and said "This is defeat." (The whole phrase is This is defeat. Avoid it. but I do not believe that painting caption had that.)
Defeat is really, really bad, and the folks who have inflicted it know this as well as anyone except the defeated. They'll go to really extreme lengths to avoid it.
Heresiarch --
You're ignoring one very basic thing; most people aren't Achilles.
The US military -- and the New Model Army, and the Union Army which was its true descendant and the father of the army you have now, by way of the Indian Wars -- got designed that way because that was what was possible. While there are people who can kill calmly out of pure intellectual conviction of necessity, they are rare, and they're scary. (If they're not extremely well socialized, they're effectively undeluded sociopaths. There's a real limit to how many energetic, educated, undeluded sociopaths any given society can absorb, so there's a strong tendency in societies which manage generational stability to discourage people who could turn out like that from actually doing so. This is probably a net good even during a major war.)
You barely have enough of those guys to do you for combat commanders; you will have to fill in with folks who can mostly manage the job in the line officer slots. The emotional tribal pragmatics is what most folks can do -- which are hard to keep most folks from doing, as witness identification with sports teams -- that will produce a force able to fight, and so are what most armies do to get that.
That tribal emotional 'our gang' response has no fucking sense of scale at all; it's back on the veldt and you offed the lion or you didn't live. Put someone's head there and their body will follow, more or less irrespective -- not completely, but the guys running these prisons are in nearly as much social isolation as the folks in them -- of physical danger.
It's the delusion that you can kill fear; great for getting someone to stand up to whatever material threat is making them afraid, very bad indeed in an environment where the fears are all in their head.
Even worse when they want the fears to be in your head.
Graydon:
So you're saying that non-berserker soldiers always lose? Even Jerry Pournelle isn't claiming that in the link I posted about Zinni. He does state the opinion that civilized "soldiers of the Republic" can't prevail as an International occupation force.
I don't know enough about military strategy to argue about this, on my own hook. But I have been reading statements from a number of high-level American generals abhorring what's been going on in Iraq. Are you saying that military policy which professes adherence to the Articles of War and the Geneva Convention is just hypocritical lip service?
Lenny: He most emphatically isn't saying berserkers are needed to win. Hell, he isn't discussing berserkers at all.
He is discussing moderate sociopaths: people who have no qualms about killing people, if they deem it needful.
He is saying that that sort of person is rare (and thank God for it) and that without hundreds of thousands of them, one needs to instil conditional sociopathy.
And he's right.
I am, among other things, a trained killer. I am also a limited killer. I need certain conditions to apply before I can just shoot someone. I have also been trained to die.
That last is why armies beat gangs, and mobs... we are willing (within limits) to take casualties, to get ourselves killed in the defenes of our buddies, and the pursuit of a goal.
I am certain there are conditions, outside of a war, in which I would be able to kill in cold blood (hot blood is easy, and learning that I will pull the trigger was one of the most... interesting... parts of training) but I have yet to encounter the right circumstance.
It was (to address another point) Wellington who said the only thing more depressing than a battle won was a battle lost.
Clark: I'm not sure what experiences you want me to share? Teaching interrogators? Apparently the ones who were taught abandoned the rules in some places (at least two of the civilians interrogators had been Army interrogators).
My experiences with prisoners? I've done that before, and I suppose; if you think it will illuminate, I can do it again.
But this seemed more theory than practice, the whys of what makes for good, rather than my anectdotes of what I saw/allowed/was willing to do.
As for Jerry... Yeah, I had a fairly quiet war (as I like to say, so far as I know, no one tried to kill me retail) and I was tempted to fall into the bottle for a while.
He's much better now that he's not drinking.
As for the good guys, I hear Mark Antony in Julius Caesar when you say that, so I'm still confused.
Lenny --
Hell, no.
Berserkers are not what you want, beyond a very specialized set of assault applications unlikely to occur on a modern battlefield.
Full-up Berserkrgangr turns off your sense of consequence; about you, the people around you, the objective, everything. It's giving the 'fight' part of the 'fight/flight' reflexes total control of your brain, and while there are people who make successful use of that biochemical wiring in a controlled fashion -- lifting heavy things, frex -- it's impossible to train the wiring into existence, and I doubt there's any substantial population on earth where as much as a tenth of the male population has it.
Much shorter version -- given a choice between a berserker and a tank for an assault function, pick the tank; it's more useful.
What happened, what is happening in Iraq, is that the civilian leadership of the United States military has great contempt for, and ignorance of, the uniformed Army, and has expended it in a fashion detrimental to the Republic.
In social terms, armies are pressure vessels; you put a whole lot of potentially intolerable stress on them -- running toward the fire that's trying to kill you, not running away from death and disease and privation, doing without sleep and peace and privacy for months while performing complex tasks -- and the social institutions of the army have to absorb that stress.
That's why they tend to be rigid, ritualized, and formal; it's a huge amount of stress, and indeed the model of warfare as competing social stress-absorbers is a pretty compelling one, since the other thing an army has to do is innovate capably in response to the other side being clever. This puts another kind of stress on the rigid institutions of the social pressure vessel.
So what Bush and Rumsfeld did was to take an Army heavily optimized for an integrated Air/Land battlefield, bad numerical odds, high intensity combat, and the assault role -- to go somewhere and kick the absolute pluperfect helya out of another army in an open-field battle of manoeuvre -- and used it as an army of occupation without adequate planning, logistical support, or troop strength.
That would be bad enough; what they did also, being ignorant and incompetent, was to deliberately remove big parts of the social pressure vessel as a matter of temporary convenience.
So of course you got atrocities; you take a bunch of kids who are trained to be aggressive, to totally destroy the enemy, to pound on the objective until it's a smoking hole in the ground, and give them a job that involves in part laughing off attempts to intimidate them by shooting nearby, in an environment where there is no working social interface between their institution and any of the social institutions around them, where there isn't a cohesiveness of opposition -- you have to fight everybody as individuals, and the appropriate mechanism is different per individual -- and where their own civilian leadership is working hard to actively dis-inform them concerning the nature of the opposition ('Saddam was responsible for 9/11'), and then leave them there way the hell too long and it's several sorts of miracle that they haven't yet built any large pyramids of skulls. For 'basic human decency', the US Army is scoring awfully high. (If there's another way to understand Rumsfeld's policies than trying to grind this out of them, it's not clear to me what that way might be.)
So, yeah, you can have an effective army which tries hard and sincerely to respect the Geneva Conventions and the Articles of War; it will consistently and regularly fail, as the social pressure vessel leaks a bit where individual components -- soldiers, people -- happen to fail under load, but as a whole it will do a pretty good job.
What's hypocritical lip service is taking an Army very specifically designed to be incapable of functioning as an army of occupation -- this was the response of the generals to Vietnam; "we're not going to be that kind of hammer again" -- and using it as one, incompletely, without a plan, without adequate strength, and deliberately breaking its ability to function lawfully and then claiming that you of course intended to respect the various laws.
George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld deliberately intended the extra-legal results; they see nothing wrong with the torture of prisoners, the refusal of counsel, with holding people without charge or cause, the mass production of sociopaths and sadists among the citizenry of the United States.
Or they're too personally incompetent to be trusted with firecrackers.
Pick one, because those are the only two options you've got.
George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld deliberately intended the extra-legal results; they see nothing wrong with the torture of prisoners, the refusal of counsel, with holding people without charge or cause, the mass production of sociopaths and sadists among the citizenry of the United States. Or they're too personally incompetent to be trusted with firecrackers. Pick one, because those are the only two options you've got.
One other option: they're too insane to understand the situation. If not them, than those that shape the policy... there seems to be a painful convergence between those that saw the opportunity to create a client state in Iraq (taking pressure off Israel, allowing us to move troops out of Saudi Arabia, giving us a platform to launch further strikes against nations that supported or even simply contained terrorist organizations as well as serving as a godawful huge stick for a carrot and stick program of arm-twisting diplomacy, if you can call coercion by threat of military action to be diplomacy) and those that honestly believe that God himself is backing our play and that all we do is right and meet in His eyes.
These two mindsets collide in the Bush administration, and where they come together, they do not allow for measured consideration of the proper uses of military force and the nature of the modern army. What is intended to be done will be done because it is in the national interest and because it is the will of God: and once you've decided that, how can you pull out of the situation? It is impossible to admit mistakes when one believes the course is divinely ordained.
Matthew --
You might well be correct concerning the specific value of "too incompetent to be trusted with firecrackers", but in my universe at least, that is just what you are describing.
I mean, would you give an aweless, nutso, God-shouting woo-woo disdainful of empirical evidence, experience, expertise, and actual results firecrackers? A cap pistol? A metal spoon?
Lenny,
I'm probably expressing myself poorly, and I have no actual experience at all, only book learning, but what I'm trying to say is that no army capable of functioning effectively can be free of the danger of committing atrocities. Yes, I'm saying that atrocities are one of the prices of war, that they're inevitable. That doesn't mean that I think that we should fold our hands and shake our heads, and say (as people now say about My Lai), "Well, you know, these things will happen in a war," as if it were an excuse. It's not an excuse; it's just a statement of fact, kind of like "gravity works."
Just as we build stairs and bridges and elevators and rockets to deal with the fact that gravity is not always our friend, the Armed Forces has built conventions and standards and social forces which make those atrocities less likely. But ask an engineer, and he'll tell you that X% of bridges will fail. They know that, but it's not possible to design such that all the bridges are 100% safe. It's the same for atrocities. In order to maintain a fighting force capable of fighting, there will be some percentage rate of failure. The challenge is to balance the two vital needs: defense and decency.
We learn more about engineering every day, and the design of bridges and rockets and skyscrapers improves every year. Ideally, this is also true for the structure and strictures of the armed forces. The military is a very conservative institution, and for good reasons. Their mistakes have a high chance of being lethal. I don't think that we've done all that can be done to create the perfect balance point between effective and malignant, but I do think that there have been improvements. Unfortunately, as Graydon pointed out, some of those changes were made assuming that we wouldn't be using the army as a force of occupation -- especially not doing so at the behest of someone who doesn't know the difference between occupation and a hole in the ground. (Do I remember correctly that for weeks after capturing Baghdad, we had combat troops functioning as occupation troops, doing (gods help me) police work?)
I've never had any respect for "zero tolerance" programs. A "zero tolerance" program is, in my opinion, an admission of the failure of leadership. They are put in place because the enforcement of a more nuanced policy has lead to corruption, or because the people enforcing the policy have insufficient information to do so intelligently, or (most common, these days) because there is a perception that somebody's getting away with something. A zero tolerance approach to excessive violence in the military is, in my opinion, the wrong way to go. Instead, I want to see more transparency, and fairer application of the UMCJ. I also want to see actual application of what I had thought was one of the basic building-blocks of a well-ordered armed force: that one is responsible for the actions of one's subordinates. Wish we could apply such to Rumsfeld.
Graydon:
I still want to question the pragmatic wisdom of using Jerry Pournelle's soundbyte to excuse the actions of the Army -- specifically as a waiver of responsibility for the killing of non-combatants and the unnecessary destruction of property.
The mission of the army is to break things and kill people. That's what they're there for. If you do not want things broken and people killed, keep the army in barracks.
I read the "wisdom" that you and Terry are holding to, as that invading combat troops must be trained to enter a temporary state of heightened sociopathology in order to successfully do their job (assumed primarily to be the killing of opposing soldiers). If they do not enter that state, they will fight less efficiently and lose -- which is the worst thing possible.
I don't have the experience or military knowledge to dispute that point with you. I'd want to study the implications of "efficiency" and "loss" if I had the responsibility for dealing with the issue. I'd want to see if there was some way to minimize what Terry says is necessary to do to soldiers and still avert the loss of sovereignty. But I know nothing of this, other than having occasionally had to confront street criminals and call the police. Maybe I wouldn't find a way.
But, granting that what you say is true, I still believe we have a responsibility to ask our Armies to avoid killing of noncombatants and wanton destruction of property. The statements I've read by good Generals confirm this. (Maybe this is obvious and we all agree on it.)
I'm not willing to accept the idea that once the Army is turned loose, we cease to be responsible for unanticipated acts of carnage. (So don't turn them loose, at all, unless you accept *the probability* of uncontrolled acts of murder and pillage.)
That's what I think is wrong with the Pournelle quote. It's possible that I may be misconstruing what he intended to say. (Maybe all he meant is that you must accept a definite, but hopefully low, percentage of unwanted death and destruction in any military action. But that's not the way I read those words).
I don't like the idea of using the "no omelette without breaking eggs" paradigm to blunt our senses of affect over soldiers committing wanton and violent acts against noncombatants, their homes and property.
Graydon attempts to explain that what we've seen in Iraq is an unfortunate, but natural consequence of military mismanagement by Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. I can believe that.
But I feel queasy about the concept that uncontrollable violence against people who are not actually threatening you is a natural consequence of any military operation -- which is what I believe the Pournelle quote suggests.
-- and what I thought this thread was started to discuss. (I.e., were the soldiers at Guantanamo actually justified in thinking that Sean Baker was a threat to them? If they were justified, did they need to apply that much force to neutralize the threat? What kind of stupid training procedures would allow this to take place? And so on.) I'm perfectly willing to set aside my reaction to the Pournelle quote to move on and talk about that.
George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld deliberately intended the extra-legal results; they see nothing wrong with the torture of prisoners, the refusal of counsel, with holding people without charge or cause, the mass production of sociopaths and sadists among the citizenry of the United States.
Or they're too personally incompetent to be trusted with firecrackers.
Pick one, because those are the only two options you've got.
I'm rather afraid it's a mix of both actually.
mkk
Mary Kay, Matthew, Graydon ... I hate to say this, because it makes me feel like my tinfoil hat is showing, but I think Bush and Rumsfeld planned to commit war crimes. And they did so before 9/11 or the Iraq invasion.
How else to interpret their refusal to sign the Rome Agreement establishing the International Criminal Court?
The Rome Agreement and the ICC were acceptable to Britain and France, both of whom send out soldiers almost as often as the US, if in smaller numbers. It turns out that despite the news coverage, the agreement is a rather toothless document. War crimes indictments can only be referred to the ICC if the legal system of the accused's nation can't handle them, or in the event that no such mechanisms exist in the accused's country, for example by reason of civil war or breakdown of legal authority.
So the cited excuse -- that US forces might be unfairly accused for political reasons -- doesn't hold water. The USA has a working legal system, doesn't it? Which leads to only one conclusion, as far as I can tell ...
Lenny:
Jerry is not providig a justification, he is giving an explanation. For the record, he's said such things for years, and he is right.
We have not trained an army for occupation. The question you pose, about violence to those who are non-threatening is difficult.
I don't want to die. Really. As a result, I thought about killing people. There are three events, from my time in Iraq which stand out. The first was a guy on a motorcycle who broke into our convoy. If he'd done the right sort of stupid thing I was planning to hit him with a Humvee.
The second was a US MP who was out of uniform, out of place and armed. Happily he didn't have that rifle pointed at me, and so I took the time to ID his equipment.
The third was a guy, in the back seat of a car, who (after they broke into a convoy) felt the need to lean forward from the back seat and reach into his coat for his wallet.
In all of these moments it wouldn't have taken much for me to kill those people.
I think I'd've felt badly afterwards, but no one would have faulted me.
What Patrick mentioned in this post (which you say you want to get back to) is a different circumstance, and not acceptable.
That's all there is to it. It is not acceptable.
As a followup to Terry's illuminating post above: even if you do train a professional army for occupation duty, Shit Happens.
For a classic example, consider the British Army's record in Northern Ireland. I don't think anyone could reasonably accuse the British Army of the mid-1990's of not being experts in dealing with an insurgency -- and doing so with kid gloves on, given that it was on UK soil and the civilians were British citizens. Nevertheless, civilians were shot and killed by mistake on several occasions in the 90's.
Well, there's one big elephant in the room that no one's mentioning.
And that is - peacetime civilians in America, commit atrocities.
Every damn day.
This is what drives me absolutely bgfck about the whole "women in uniform, do you want Our Girls, Your Daughters, coming home in body bags?" handwringing rhetoric of the conservative establishment. Everything else aside - is my life somehow more valuable than my brother's, is it necessarily a weaking of the military, all the other issues - this is the emotional thing which is used to short-circuit logic and trigger pavlovian responses in the public.
And, as I say, it drives me fng *nuts.*
Because what it comes down to is, it's okay for women to be killed, so long as they haven't a prayer of defending themselves.
They fished bones out of the river last month - "Down by the banks/of the Ohio." Prime suspect is the boyfriend.
There was a woman shot in her driveway by her ex, along with her new lover, for the crime of refusing to be owned by her former man.
There were six or seven rapes of teenage girls downtown last year, and they didn't do anything serious about catching the guy.
This is not a part of the country with a high crime rate, either.
But "that girls were raped" is axiomatic, in the mirror of Achilles' shield that is our homeland. That serial killers are going to be male and their victims female, is axiomatic. That whores are legitimate targets, not even worth police investigation - families of those "trash women" in Washington state and Canada could have told you that, years ago. It's okay for them to be shot/beaten/raped, so long as they're not being "unwomanly" by taking up arms...
Abner Louima. How many young men shot while trying to get out their identification, for the crime of being black and poor? What about the scandal that was the news on 9/10, that was forgotten and has not been reawakened in the SCLM since, about Miami and the stash of stolen guns kept to plant on the bodies of those shot by mistake?
So before we expect or dismiss or pardon or are shocked or outraged or surprised at the military committing atrocities against those we officially designate as unpersons - before we blame some special military alien mindset, as we so easily blame "the Arab Mind" (as we blamed 'the Oriental Mind,' and 'the Celtic Mind" in past generations) - we need to turn the cold eye of Justice on ourselves, the culture from which our armies are born.
Sword in the hand of the wielder, I tell you.
Terry - that particular remark about Jim Cerillo was indeed intended as a knock on some who perhaps don't realize how abstracted much of their reading has been - no application at all to you - though I will acknowledge our conversations from those here to talking about stalking guns in England before the war where I had to post as unknown coward have been prickly.
My only differences with you from my side are generational. Perhaps my comparing Karpinski to a football coach who says rules in place are built to stop it so I don't need to do bedcheck is meaningful.
Expanding on my mention of Dave U. of course he had no training - that's part of why he was bemused at leading interrogators and translators - he was tasked to lead folks doing a job he couldn't.
I still believe we have a responsibility to ask our Armies to avoid killing of noncombatants and wanton destruction of property. We do, we do indeed. There is little like Oradour sur Glane in our history (Wounded Knee anyone?) but wanton has its shades - generous is giving the residents a few minutes to get out when you're burning their house to get light and warmth to fix a track overnight.
On the engineering perspective - Linda Hamm mentioned above is the manager on the Space Shuttle program who is on record as saying nobody told her there was a problem with Columbia. I thought the analogy to be both obvious -at least to fen who know the story - and useful.
OBS SF There is a long ago story, presumably from Astounding/Analog where the United States had political generals - Mexico ruled the SW (Azatlan) again, and a political engineer was demanding repairs to the leak that was going to kill everybody in the story be done to a schedule.
Lenny I certainly can't speak for Graydon or Terry but when you say
I read the "wisdom" that you and Terry are holding to, as that invading combat troops must be trained to enter a temporary state of heightened sociopathology in order to successfully do their job (assumed primarily to be the killing of opposing soldiers).
then I disagree with the nature of the facts asserted and I have a different view of what those 2 are trying to communicate.
Seems to me combat troops will enter a state of heightened sociopathology regardless of training and there is nothing much temporary about it. A large part of hell weeks is selection for people who can go someplace else inside their heads. Consider the tale of a hot-shell guy who didn't have his oven mitts - so he traded first hands then forearms over quite a long time for keeping the gun going. Train for that.
bellatrys I believe you have me (and many of us) confused with somebody else. I certainly don't believe it's okay for women to be killed, so long as they haven't a prayer of defending themselves. When she was alive my wife had everything from a High Standard .22 magnum derringer in a wallet holster (don't do this at home it is classed by BATF as any other firearm with strong restrictions) to a loaded shotgun around along with assorted Gerber and Morseth and Blackjack knives.
Bringing it back on topic - the problem is you can't have it both ways. Abner Louima should never have been shot but notice that in Los Angeles the corrupt police in the Ramparts Division had community support in abusing their positions as officers of the law to keep the peace in the community. Any objections to keeping the peace and protecting the citizenry?
Notice that the armed forces of the United States of America are as selective as they can be, perhaps to their detriment, in selecting and deploying forces.
I listened once to a sitting judge lament the fact that his job compelled him to give young men criminal records that would haunt them. He thought that in his prior life as a Marine company commander in Vietnam he could have done something with the same kids.
Certainly anybody in metro Seattle who reads this is welcome to contact me about shooting anything I currently have from a Hammerli gas gun to a .375 rifle.
Lenny --
I don't think the atrocities are excusable. I would like to know where you get off imputing that I do think they're excusable. (This is not a light accusation to make in my birth culture.)
Break things and kill people is a design description.
Think of it this way -- some guy who is really good with a bulldozer can use it to turn over your flower garden in the spring so you can plant in properly turned soil, but no matter how good that guy is with that machine, you have these big tread dents in your lawn.
Similarly, really able people can use an army to sit on a society long enough that some other people can change the institutions of that that society; it will still get people killed and stuff blown up that oughtn't to be, because of the nature of the toolset available to an army.
It's like the Islamic cultural concepts of "Dar Al-Islam", "the house of peace", and "Dar al-harb", "the house of war". Once you're using an army you're in the house of war. Civil society doesn't exist, can't exist, until you're not using an army anymore.
One of the things about civil society that is dead, gone, one with Thebes the Golden in that situation, is the time to take considered decisions; if you do that, the other fellow will kill you, your unit, and leave your beloved home at the entire mercy of the enemy.
So you don't do that; you make rapid pessimistic assumptions and react on that basis. You'll do this in an information vacuum for every category of information except the physical capability to be a threat, using a very simple set of rules because human minds can only handle very simple rules under that level of stress and with that constraint of speed.
That is what an army is for; this is what using an army means, just as using a bulldozer to turn your flowerbed means the big tread dents in your lawn. The guy driving can be really, really good, very careful, dedicated to doing the least amount of damage to your lawn as can possibly be done, but fundamentally it's a bulldozer and it's going to mangle your lawn.
So, yeah, the guys driving the bulldozer -- those responsible for the operations of the army -- have a responsibility to do so carefully, to strengthen the traditions of conduct so that the people involved have self image heavily invested in not shooting the wrong people, to prosecute those who fail to exhibit due care -- which is not the same thing as a 'house of peace' definition of due care -- and to strive to learn from this experience and to apply it to the next one.
Because they are dealing with human beings under conditions where they're being stressed past the point of failure, they're not always going to succeed. They wouldn't always succeed even if there weren't an information vacuum to deal with. This is going to be the case so long as there are human beings involved.
They are not responsible for the decision to use an army in the first place, with all its foreseeable consequences of death and destruction; that rests solely with the political masters of the army.
The political decision to use an army involves taking responsibility for the widows and orphans and cripples and destruction. This is precisely what has not happened about Iraq, what is being denied as something either needful or possible by the government of the United States of America.
Graydon:
If I've imputed that you condone atrocities, I'm sincerely sorry.
I thought that you took great care and patience to explain that the kind of adverse military conduct we've seen in Iraq can be the result of badly managed operations -- poor logistics and inappropriate troop deployment (using an invasion force as an occupation force).
My complaint was that I disliked Jerry Pournelle's quote because I read it as writing off gratuitous killing and destruction as a byproduct of *any* military operation.
The other thread in this was my comment that if troops need to be trained into a state of conditioned psychopathology to fight effectively, I'd prefer we fight with troops who haven't been messed with as much -- who might also be less effective killers. You and Terry replied that that was no good, because those troops would lose. And I said that I don't feel I have enough knowledge and experience to contest the point.
In the meantime, I think you made one of the most useful points in the thread -- that if we want to avoid violent tragedies, armies must be managed and deployed competently, consistently with their training. I'm all for people who have some understanding of what happened and why to suggest ways that it might be avoided in the future.
My issue is/was with the idea that the kind of destruction and violence against civilians we've been reading about in Iraq is unavoidable, no matter what kind of military management we have. I had the feeling you agreed that it shouldn't be.
You'd be the last person I'd accuse of callous insensitivity to the tragedies of warfare.
The debate on this might then turn to what constitutes unnecessary violence and what constitutes regrettable, but unpreventable tragedies.
I'm conceding that my reaction to Pournelle's quote may be coming out of my own subjective biases. I hope that Clark Meyers, who introduced it into the discussion, didn't intend to offer the quote as an excuse for the conduct of the Guantanamo soldiers against Sean Baker -- a separate atrocity which was the issue that prompted Patrick to start this thread. I don't know whether he did; but that's what set me off in the first place.
Lenny --
Thank you; clarification appreciated.
I think you're getting two sorts of things muddled up. (Which is easy, because they're both tangled things.)
Things like Guantanamo (or Abu Ghraib) are deliberate policy; someone has decided to remove legal and proceedural protections from a population of prisoners and to torture them until they obey their captors' desires.
That's a very deliberate step; it's criminal, immoral, it isn't even useful in some utterly pragmatic calculus of information. Creating a mechanism for torture as a tool of policy is an incompetent evil unless the purpose is to terrorize the supposed enemies of the people who created the extra-legal enclave.
It's very damaging to the torturers, but it isn't -- despite being carried out by the US military -- an 'army' thing, in the sense of the Pournelle quote; it's a thug thing. Taking soldiers and turning them into torturers is a Bad Plan, it requires a terrible confusion about the nature of physical power, it's just generally horrible, but what you've got when you do that isn't an army. (Put thugs and torturers up against actual armies and they get creamed like spinach.)
What Dr. Pournelle is talking about in that quote is the inherent messiness of force, rather than the inevitability of torture and abuse.
Frex, if a group of vehicles is attacked, and does textbook-perfect reactive fire -- limited, well-aimed, and directed only at active attackers -- the bullets are still going somewhere. They're still going to hit people not involved in the attack -- maybe not this time, but some of the time -- and do damage to civilian property and infrastructure.
You can't avoid this, other than by not sending an army in the first place.
That's the easy stuff; you're going to get shots going long, shells and bombs landing where you didn't intend or in places where you honestly believed there was a legitimate target and there wasn't. You try hard to avoid that, but you can't entirely; you have to fight the war using fallible human beings.
Which is where you get into the hard stuff.
Combat operations break people's brains. Courage is a finite resource, stress -- fear of death, sleep deprivation, the consequences of over-riding fear with will so that you function -- corrosive, and in time, you don't have the troops you sent even if none of them are physically injured.
So there's a time limit. (Rumsfeld is exceeding it by a factor of not less than two, and maybe four, with the fifteen month deployments to Iraq.) Go over that time limit, and the troops have stopped caring about anything complicated, they've lost a lot of complex social function, and they're indifferent to the consequences of their actions beyond getting whomever is shooting at them to stop.
That, too, is a predicatable outcome, just like the rounds going long and the occasions of bad targetting. It is this character of combat armies which Dr. Pournelle is also referencing; you wind up with something that doesn't have a capacity for nuance in the application of force if you take an army and use it.
If you're careful about what kind of army you build, you don't, even in that stressed, low-nuance, offhandedly slaughtering state, get torturers. You will get killing without compunction, and you'll get a lot of it, because troops in that state prefer the deaths of innocents to the perception of risk.
Since I can resist anything but temptation let me chime in by saying for my money the conduct of the Guantanamo soldiers against Sean Baker as described was entirely inexcusable. Then again for my money so was the direct order by an officer in the U.S. Army” to play the role of a detainee for a training exercise.... in the circumstances as described.
I haven't learned a better way to say it so I'll repeat myself - we know or should know a few things - we know that things get out of control and that's why we keep a tight lid on things. The RedMan padded suit exists for something approaching violence in training and as a reminder.
I'll say again that it would not astound me to find the victim was chosen because somebody thought he needed a lesson or just didn't like him. That's one of the many circumstances which if they exist would aggravate the officer's behavior in my opinion.
My reaction was to Nothing wrong with our military culture, though! Just a few bad apples. I'd like to think some of the later comments carried the notion of a nice guy army way way too far and so made it clear why I felt compelled to respond however incoherently.
There is a necessary level of destruction in practice and in reality. It is sometimes obscured and we often don't want to think about it. I used to know a cute blond doghandler who was often tasked to go out after mass parachute jumps and find folks who weren't responding. She wasn't wasting her time. In fact I was surprised how many she found. That's the origin of my first remark - what's next Mothers Against Drunk Drivers against the propblast cup? [actually MADD won that battle in real life] Shocking news that people who jump out of airplanes get drunk afterward?
IIRC - David Drake in The Voyage has words to the effect that when you absolutely positively have to charge uphill into machine guns it helps to have somebody who thinks it's a good idea. I'm pretty sure I remember that before I saw it there but I don't know where.
I have no memory of his name but I long ago and far away knew a guy who got gigged for varying his route and running his men through family quarters singing the same songs they sang every other morning. I can't imagine that anyone including the offended women had any illusions about what happened every other day.
I keep trying to say that incidents such as the one that opened this thread are inevitable - sure to be found if we go looking.
It follows then that nothing useful follows from finding one such except a chance to stamp on it.
To keep a lid on it and to protect others by reminding them that though they no longer be guided by a conscience they have rules.
I'll close with one of Dr. Pournelle's best known and least understood quotes:
As Montesquieu put it, "a rational army would run away." To stand on the firing parapet and expose yourself to danger; to stand and fight a thousand miles from home when you're all alone and outnumbered and probably beaten; to stand fast over the body of Leonides the King, to be rear guard at Kunu-ri*; to stand and be still to the Birkenhead drill; these are not rational acts. They are often merely necessary.
*from Army Magazine Kunu-ri on the Chong-chon' River where Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) inflicted one of the worst defeats on the U.S. Army that it has ever suffered....fighting on foot as infantry, the 2nd Division "red legs" suffered the greatest casualties in the withdrawal. Out of an authorized strength of 3,695 men, the 2nd Division artillery lost 1,461 troops
Graydon:
I appreciate your clarifications. But I don't want the stressed, offhandedly slaughtering army that prefers the deaths of innocents to the perception of risks, either. This may be a fussy preference that I don't get to have, if I value my life and liberty; but I'm not sure of that.
I'm not clear, now, on whether you're saying the "offhandedly-slaughtering army" is an inevitable result of prolonged conflict between two combat armies that *don't rotate troops,* or that it's an inevitable result of using an army, period.
Charlie: You underestimate the macho chauvinism of a certain type of American male. America is the number one country on earth and no one can dictate to us or sit in judgment on us. We dictate to others and sit in judgment on them.
It would have been absolutely pandemic in Bush's world. It can also, of course, be the kind of thinking that condones and encourages atrocities. But I really don't think they were thinking that far ahead. Just spittin, adjustin, their balls, and sayin' "Hell no a bunch a damn foreigners ain't gonna tell us what to do." I don't even have to close my eyes to see my uncle Bob in such circumstances.
mkk
No clark I was speaking generally, that there is this debate going on whether the US military or any military can or ought to have a "zero abuse" policy etc etc etc all hinging on [real or perceived] military necessity/culture etc - when in fact it is irrational to expect the military to be *better* than the civilian population from which it comes.
Particularly when it is infact drawn from that civilian population and not a special deliberately isolated group like Janissaries or condottieri. The fact that these people were in many cases National Guards troops is *very* significant - not because of a [real or perceived] difference in training levels, but because they are not from base culture, but from civilian in larger part.
If we don't like it, we can't externalize it - can't say it's the fault of The Other [in this case, the Military Mind], and not us, hoi polloi.
And the culture, as a whole, though here and in progressive Blogistan there is rejectionof that ideology - *does* admire and accept and endorse macho violence, without even any excusing "necessity" to provide a moral cover (the way blogger rightgirl justified Tailhook and pilloried the "political correctness" of the investigation.)
Just watch a teen-guy oriented movie, and listen to the crowds cheering when someone is killed or injured. The victim doesn't have to be evil, what gives the sense of righteous glee to the audience is that the victim is stupid/ugly/weak.
Or in hockey, where it's just "us" versus "them" with no moral narrative framework, even skeletal, constructed to justify the violence.
And - unsurprisingly to those of us with history backgrounds, who know that jousts and gladiatorial games were equally popular with both sexes, but surprisng to those who still believe the myth of the dainty female - it *isn't* just the guys who cheer to the decapitations and gorings and the blood on the ice and who talk about it with relish at work. It's "nice," dainty-looking fashionable women too.
The propagandist framework for the mindless endorsement of the powerful crushing the enemies of the people has long been in place. In 1984, footage of guncrews strafing civilians is openly shown in the movie theatres to cheering citizens who laugh at the atrocities and the splurting blood. I've *never* had difficulty believing that, not since I read Orwell at age 12. It's the spirit of grade school nastiness - the Old Adam - given public approval and equally importantly, no reining-in by disapproval. It may be latent in everyone, but giving it free rein is a different matter, and results in Kristallnacht and lynch mob postcards.
It isn't fair to blame the weapon for the sins of those who have forged it and who wield it.
Lenny et al - may I commend these by Graydon to your attention:
"posted 07.16.03 3:43pm on entry What imperialism looks like.: It hardly has to be an either/or, now does it?"
And
"posted 05.09.04 9:55am on entry User base persistence: The troops are doing an exceptionally good job of staying ethical
I can't say they represent Graydon's current thinking though I believe them. I hasten to add my own views are I fear well past the brink of being unconscionably wishy-washy when it comes to the indicated actions.
Lenny --
You're rediscovered the Quaker dilemma -- Quakers are about the best neighbours you can hope to have until the steppe nomads show up.
Generalized, you want to live in a community of compromise and consensus rule-of-law pacifists until you have to deal with an external group that doesn't grant you the status of "worth negotiating with" and which will use force to get what it wants from you.
(Note that in the case of Iraq, the US is the steppe nomads.)
Historically, democracies have been very good at dealing with the dilemma by biasing their society toward the 'trade' side, rather than the 'raid' side, of the human behavioural repertoire, and out-innovating (and consequently out-producing) their enemies. The relative fraction of their output and population which must go to military expenses is lower than that of their enemies, and the thalassocracy has historically been very good at keeping conflicts fundamentally naval, which has a different set of stress constraints on the people involved and produces social demands for innovation.
Currently, there are three disturbing trends.
One is the emergence of corporations which deny that the common burdens apply to them; they're readily modeled ecologically as predators on labour, and they are fundamentally against innovation, because innovation threatens their relative success. (Just like any biological predator will kill the young of any other biological predator which it comes across, a corporate will kill innovation whenever it can.)
Another is the emergence of a strong political faction within the United States which prefers the corporate power structure to the public power structure of the United States, and sees looting the latter to benefit the former as a virtuous act. This faction is against not only innovation but the mechanisms, starting with the rule of law, which allow it.
Third is one of the very specific means of looting; using the military power of the state to force market access. This has been a widespread pattern for US policy for many years, and it really annoys people. It's been getting worse over time, and it's used to support that desire for a rigidly stable hierarchy in which no threatening innovation (either social or technical) can take place.
So, here we are with an army; it is going to get indifferent to the death of everyone around it if it fights, because that is what happens to the people in it when you put them somewhere they get shot at.
Could we make it more careful, even though it is indifferent?
Probably; that would be tricky, but really purely professional militaries (see Kipling's "The Army of a Dream" for an evocation of how you might get such a thing; it's wildly technically dated, but the evocation of the necessary social change is pretty good) have done stuff like that in the past, because they're fighting and dying for pride in personal excellence rather than a concept of tribe or territory.
Unfortunately, that's freaking hard to get, and the current US military is under heavy, heavy pressure to be a better tool for looting. (Note Secretary Rumsfeld's determination to get rid of the heavy brigades and replace them with forces suitable for rapid deployment as occupation forces with inferior equipment.)
So, yes, your military could be a machine to build something somewhat different, that fought well; it would have a (much) higher unit cost, it would require more maintenance, it would probably remove the United States from Great Power status (able to wage offencive war against another Power) but it could be different. It would still kill people by mistake, but quite possibly not so many.
As Bellatrys says, it would take changing the root society of the military to get such a change.
Clark --
The contents of those posts remain good descriptions of my current thinking.
Appreciate the commendation.
Damn, the threads today are depressing me.
Graydon: as a Quaker, I really have to question your assumption that steppe nomads are likely to show up. That said, as a Quaker, I'm not religious about it: if my family were threatened, I'd defend them. But in actual point of fact, the way I'm defending them now is to make sure their passports are current.
Otherwise I wholeheartedly agree (as usual) with your (as usual) highly cogent view of Army as Engineering Discipline. And would go one further: Rumsfeld broke it, he should buy it. We had us a fine bulldozer until he decided it should be used as a squad car. Moron.
Michael:
I wished that we had some way to make Bush, Cheney, & Rumsfeld pay for what they've done in my first comment on this thread. Graydon wants to hang them. I want to hurt them by hitting their personal wallets and compensating their victims.
Is this just empty whining? They've removed themselves from legal correction by international courts. What about class action suits within the U.S. court system? Is there any way to file suit against these guys as individuals, rather than filing negligence suits against the U.S. Government? If not, what about boycotts and protests of corporations that form the core of their financial assets?
Michael --
Thank you, and yup, Rummy broke the bulldozer.
Over historical time, the guys who won't negotiate -- who don't think you're human, and do want your labour or stuff -- always show up.
I mean, sixty years ago, when the United States had the entire freaking world by the throat -- as much empire as it cared to take -- and let go and went home, something neither the French nor the Russians have ever managed to get their heads around, who would have thought that two generations later, the United States would be the pillagers?
Monumentally inept pillagers? From the self-same folks who do logistical support as a thing of transcendent beauty? It defies belief.
Lenny --
Going all poetic and taking them from their offices, emptying their pockets, and putting them at dusk in some souk in Sadr City has a certain appeal, as does liquidating the assets of everyone and everything currently engaged in profiteering in Iraq (start with Haliburton), and giving the results out as cash to individual Iraqis.
I'd argue, though, that the core problem is so much bigger than those three individuals that there isn't a financial fix. There certainly isn't enough pain, or enough cash, in them, singularly or collectively, to pay for the pain and devastation they've made.
Graydon:
The problem may be bigger than those three individuals; but it wouldn't hurt for them to have to fork over a few million dollars to Sean Baker, be hit by criminal negligence suits from the families of soldiers who've died with inadequate military supplies, sued for dishonest practices in awarding reconstruction contracts, and then hit by suits from families of Iraqi civilians who've been falsely imprisoned and murdered.
That wouldn't fix the system; but it might do some good for the families of victims. And it might send a message to neocons who've wormed their way into power that, someday, they might be held accountable for their political decisions.
Failing to do that, we can certainly boycott their business interests.
Lenny - Assume (pick your author) you've been standing on the right ley lines or blessed by alien space bats or the oversoul of the internet has picked you and you can debit a few million dollars from those three individuals and credit Sean Baker - given the power and the debit why would that individual among many be the best to credit?
How much of the nation's, the world's, resources do you want to give to adequate military supplies?
Consider the father who refused President Clinton's handshake at a MOH ceremony; should the book advances be assigned to the honored dead?
Consider the woman who said of the unused Army "they might as well be boyscouts" [my Boy Scout compass was graduated in artillery mils] - I might support tying all the national governments in knots; do you?
My original objection to this thread was that for me it amounts to saying nothing wrong with our military culture except it's military. The lyric poetry class is ending early, the young men are asked to report to the armory.(Kuttner?)
I don't want to talk about spacebats or oversouls in reference to this. I want to know whether there's any legal basis for individuals who've suffered visible, proveable injuries from the Bush administration's incompetence and criminal neglect to sue for damages within the United States court system.
Sean Baker is an example of one such individual.
If there are any poetic wishes in this, it's that lawyers might discover legal grounds for class-action suits by wronged individuals -- not against the U.S. Army or the U.S. Government, but directly against the personal assets of willfully neglectful government officials. I don't know whether there are legal precedents in this country to indemnify incompetent government officials rather than the U.S. Government, itself.
It doesn't sound very likely, even to me; but maybe it should be.
Clark: I think I see what you meant now, and I apologise if I misunderstood the subtext. I am, perhaps, too well read for my own good.
Lenny: Armies break things, both theirs, and the enemies.
My friends, the ones who were in country for more than a year... they are in sad shape, in so many ways. They'd go back tomorrow, if ordered, but they's be less than truly useful.
I'd be all right, mostly, because I was only there for four months, so I've 1: not spent all my reserves, and 2: had time to recharge them.
But I'd not last as long. I forget whom it was who said, "An experienced infantryman is terrified." I know what I can face know, but I also know what I might have too.
And that means I am more likely to be hair-triggered in my own defense (see above).
As for suing those who were responsible for the things which happened to Sean Baker... whom shall you account? Does the buck stopping only end at the President? If so, the law exempts him, he has privilege.
There are those who would argue such things as happened to Baker are part of the cost of doing business, because we need people who can do such things, and they won't really learn if they know the subject is a real person.
I disagree, on both counts. We don't need to pre-train abusive guards, we can just set them up to become monsters. And that sort of monstrosity is, at root, only beneficial to those who want to get revenge. I happen to think revenge (especially at a social level) isn't all that useful, but there are those who disagree.
Yes, it would be nice if Baker was compentsated, but better, in some ways, that the compensation be abstract. That would say we, as a community, are repulsed that it was done, for our benefit, rather than distancing ourselves by saying, "that bad man did it, so he has to pay."
Oh, and Clark... I may, in the next week or so, try to take you up on that offer, since I'll be in Seattle until a week from Tues., I think. I might be able to steal some time.
Lois, now that you mention it, there must be an interesting history to people feeling free to talk about what's miserable in their lives.
Here are a few pieces. I suspect that the lives of saints was a preliminary. Afaik, they weren't talking about their own deprivations and tortures, but it was an early mention of how much things could hurt.
The other and more direct things I can think of are Freudianism, the union movement, feminism,and soldiers writing about WWI. Any other suggestions, preferably with more of a chronology?
Being permitted to talk about what hurts is substantially egalitarian since a good bit of pain flows from higher status people to lower status people.
Terry:
I'm not sure that abstract compensation should exclude the possibility of real compensation for victims. As far as legal punishment as a preventive deterrence, you know more than I do about the possibility of discharge or court martial for military officers complicit in carrying out criminal orders.
But I'm not convinced, yet, that it would be a bad idea for American and Iraqi victims of illegal executive decisions to also seek reparations. And rather than taking more money out of the U.S. Treasury, my sense of justice sees nothing wrong with billing George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Stephen Cambone, and/or other government officials who can be shown to be directly responsible for acts of incompetence or criminality that lead to "wrongful" death, injury, and imprisonment.
This may be legally impossible. I don't know much about precedents along those lines; which is why I asked about them. A quick Google search reveals the Jennifer Harbury case, which was heard before the Supreme Court. Her attorneys argued that "[Federal Courts of Appeal] have uniformly held that government officials who engage in a cover-up to conceal the circumstances surrounding a crime, for the purpose of preventing legal action by the victims or their families, may be liable for violation of the right of access to the courts."
Here are other comments about the extent of the immunity of government officials from prosecution.
The idea of extracting compensation for victims of criminal abuse committed in the name of the U.S. Government is probably a pipedream. But I'm not sure that it should remain that way.
If we believe that what's happening in our government now is a temporary and unpredictable aberration, we naturally shy away from the notion of allowing government officials to be personally indemnified. But if the neocons have revealed a flaw in our system that may be repeatedly exploited, maybe it should be addressed. As Graydon points out, this is a reflection of the larger issue of our consent in being exploited by unprincipled members of a wealthy power elite. (Of course, we aren't consenting consciously; we're just not devoting our lives 24/7 to stopping them.)
Changing our laws to allow indemnification of government officials might be an ace bandage that would create more problems than it would solve.
But in a time when it appears that government officials at the top have no sense of accountability for their actions, what _can_ we do to reinforce their accountability? We can vote the current gang out of office. But maybe we need to do something to stimulate the sense of accountability of future top-ranking government officials. If not a modification of their immunity from lawsuits, then what?
Lenny, I think you've got your usage of "indemnify" precisely backwards. Merriam-Webster online says to "indemnify" is:
1: to secure against hurt, loss, or damage
2 : to make compensation to for incurred hurt, loss, or damage
For example, as a contract programmer, I've signed contracts where I've indemnified my client against any breaches of intellectual property law I might commit in working on their project. In other words, I've promised that if anyone raises issues about whether I stole some of the code I used on this project, I'll fight it in court, or I'll pay up, and I promise my client that they won't suffer for it.
Jeremy, you're right. (Red face.) Please mentally substitute "stop indemnifying" or "prevent indemnification" to make more sense of my recent posts.
As a practical matter in some of the circumstances mentioned see Section 1983 actions for deprivation of civil rights under color of law.
On the other hand, furious though I was at the time I now credit Gerald Ford's explanation for the Nixon pardon. That is the pardon wasn't for Nixon personally. The pardon really was a decision by the President (Ford) in his constitutional office that the distraction was too high a price for the nation to pay for individual justice in the circumstances.
The existing system really does offer constitutional protections to the legislators for acts on the floor and during the session - what about those?
Remember the issues as to whether an action would lie against President Clinton and if an action would lie then on what schedule. Consider the recent use of impeachment. Do you really want to expand tools that might be used by any individual or class against elected and appointed officials in constitutional offices? Let's have the cases heard in rooms with astronomical decorations?
Lenny: Abstract, in that it is not the responsibility of one person to guarantee that the Army, et al., are not used in the way in question, as opposed to the concrete act of making it the sole responsibilty of some single person.
It may provide a momentary satisfaction to say, "it was "x"s fault, because "x" is at the top of the food chain, but there are a whole lot of "y"s in the equation; the people who were willing to carry out the orders, the people who were willing to pass along the orders, the people who approved of the orders.
All of them are in some way culpable.
If you're in the revenge business, then I suppose laying it all to the guy on the top is satisfying, but it won't really fix the problem.
And, as Clark points out, when shall we use it? Who shall be the judge who sits to say, "This is so important it gets to disrupt the gov't, until it is resolved."
Because we've seen what allowing a civil suit does to the Gov't, and if a president's advisors are up to snuff, you won't see a trial, you'll see a default, with no admission of guilt, and nothing more than money changing hands.
That won't fix the problem, merely make one of making sure the offenses don't come to light, and that can often be done without actually engaging in a cover up.
The problem is not the reaction, but rather the actions you protest, and your attempt at solution only invokes the law of unintended consequences.
Lenny,
Your idea of victims being able to hold individuals in government responsible for bad acts, versus depleting the treasury, is satisfying, in a visceral way. But I have to say that I disagree, for the fundamental reason that when it comes to liability the government of this country should be indistinguishable from its citizenry.
In other words, if we are really a democracy, if we really put our money where our mouths are, we must stand behind our government's actions.
By that, I do not mean that we must blindly support whatever the President or Congress is doing (a la “America—love it or leave it”), if we don’t agree with those actions; but we must accept that as citizens of a democracy, everything the government does is done in our names. If we don’t like what it’s doing, it is our responsibility, because it is our right, to speak up against it and do all that we can to change it.
By singling out Rumsfeld, Bush, et al. for reparations, you are letting us off of the hook. And as much as I detest their machinations, I think that disowning them is even worse, because it makes it that much easier to ignore that we are fundamentally liable for all that they do...or worse, makes us into cynics who have manufactured for ourselves the luxury of disowning policy because “we didn’t vote for” X.
This is one of the reasons I am disturbed by the word “congresscritter,” also. It bespeaks the sort of cynicism that denies that that critter represents you.
The government is not a collection of individuals, it is a collection of our representatives: as such, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The whole is, well, all of us. To treat the government as individuals is to devalue the government as a collectivity.
(PS—I do personally think that Bush and crew can and should be held responsible, as individuals, for crimes against the state.)
Stefanie:
You may be right. There are a number of issues around the actions of the Bush administration. I don't think I'm disowning responsibility for what they did. But I'm sympathetic to a penal system that does more than incarcerate murderers and thieves. (Don't hang them or just warehouse them. Make them pay their debts to society.)
That may be an overly blunt way of looking at what the Bush administration has done. Financial compensation of victims or victims' families can't repair the harm that's been done. But it can help victims to recover.
If you believe that our political system still works, I can see that you might want to throw out the idea of fining elected and lawfully appointed government officials. If we elect them, then we're responsible for cleaning up their messes.
There's a question in my mind about whether the rise to power of Bush and the neocons is different in degree or in kind from previous occupations of our seat of government by selfish, short-sighted special interest groups. It's the cynical feeling that this can happen again; we may have more national elections that are bought, if not mechanically rigged -- and what can we do if that becomes the norm for the American political process? That's what makes me want to look for additional legal checks on the power of the Executive Branch.
The lyric poetry class is ending early, the young men are asked to report to the armory.(Kuttner?)
Kornbluth. "The Only Thing We Learn".
Graydon said:
Currently, there are three disturbing trends.
One is the emergence of corporations which deny that the common burdens apply to them; they're readily modeled ecologically as predators on labour, and they are fundamentally against innovation, because innovation threatens their relative success. [...]
Another is the emergence of a strong political faction within the United States which prefers the corporate power structure to the public power structure of the United States, and sees looting the latter to benefit the former as a virtuous act. [...]
Third is one of the very specific means of looting; using the military power of the state to force market access. [...]
So the book we're in is FRIDAY crossed with LORD OF THE FLIES crossed with... what?
Stefanie: Yes, yes, and yes again. (And you wanna go out for lunch soon, or something? It's my turn to e-mail you, so I will.)
Elise - crossed with LOTR. Saruman tells the workers he is on their side and all he does is for the common good which is what he also tells the neighbors even as he starts wars secretly and foments coups within them.
"Just trust me, I know what I'm doing and it'll be wonderful - so long as you Eorlings don't listen to negative selfish people with agendas like that Eomer who wants to take over and that idiot Gandalf who wants to screw it all up..."
Stefanie - they *don't* represent us. WE elect them and then they go and do what the people who give them money want them to do.
When we call them to demand that they fullfill our first amendment right to bring grievances to the govt on our behalf, they have their flunkeys send us form letters full of Newspeak and pablum to Soma us into quietude again. (I'm working on a collection.)
And the pat platitude the Establishment used to tell us in grade school, how *we* don't need to have revolutions any more like those other uncivilized countries, 'cause if you don't like the system, well, this is America, you can just run for office yourself! - they leave out the bit about how you need lots of money and leisure time to do so...
Lenny, I think that for encouraging personal responsibility, what you really want is the criminal law, not the civil law. If elected officials are committing crimes, as I believe ours are, then it's important to be able to hold them accountable. It's also vital to safeguard representatives from legal harrassment, such as President Clinton was subjected to. Besides, I'd bet these guys are way more afraid of jail than fines, and I doubt that it's possible to fine them enough to really make an impression.
Stefanie - they *don't* represent us. WE elect them and then they go and do what the people who give them money want them to do.
So elect better people.
When we call them to demand that they fullfill our first amendment right to bring grievances to the govt on our behalf, they have their flunkeys send us form letters full of Newspeak and pablum to Soma us into quietude again. (I'm working on a collection.)
I'm no scholar of the US Constitution, but I have a feeling the words "first amendment rights" don't mean what you think they mean.
And the pat platitude the Establishment used to tell us in grade school, how *we* don't need to have revolutions any more like those other uncivilized countries, 'cause if you don't like the system, well, this is America, you can just run for office yourself! - they leave out the bit about how you need lots of money and leisure time to do so...
I have little money, and less leisure time. Nonetheless, I hold executive office in local government, and intend running for national office at the next general election. That's here in Britain, of course, where we have a functional (albeit imperfect) democracy. I wonder whether the US is really no longer a functional democracy, as you suggest, or whether it's simply easier to buy into a cynical reading of the political process than to go to all the trouble of trying to persuade a plurality of your neighbours to agree with you.
Indeed, Iain, congratulations on your recent re-election.
Stephanie's not wrong to observe that the growing power of sheer money over electoral politics is gradually making it the province of a caste that the rest of us feel we can't aspire to join. Still, there are lots of openings in the system still, unglamorous political opportunities with potential for effective use by smart activists. Spotting and exercising these opportunities is a lot of how the Right took over, one county-supervisor election at a time. As you show by example, we can take it back.
Iain: The first amendment also grants the right to petition for redress of grievances. See here.
They crammed rather a lot into that first one.
MKK
Patrick: thanks for that.
Mary Kay: from the little googling I did before writing my previous post, I got the impression that the right to petition, and the right to organise to petition, are protected by the first amendment. I didn't see anything about the right to demand that a particular representative carry out that petitioning to your satisfaction. (Or, to put it in more practical terms, if you don't like the way your elected representative is doing their job, you are free to organise your own group to lobby the government directly.) I will of course happily accept correction on that point if I've misinterpreted the case law. As I say, I'm no expert.
Iain: Well, it's a generally accepted duty of Congresscritters to help straighten out problems that individual constituents are having with the government. Not to mention that as our elected reps they are supposed to be responsible to us. I suppose it depends on just what bellatrys was asking the representative to do.
MKK--also not an expert
Mary Kay:
Sure, but that duty doesn't seem to me to be quite what the 1st amendment is getting at, and it's the kind of thing that is more appropriately enforced through the ballot box than through the courts. And representatives ought to do rather more than uncritically pass on every grievance to the government, as a look at their in trays would probably tell you. Certainly, when I received a letter last year insisting that all the homeless people in Cambridge be rounded up and put on a boat in the middle of Loch Ness, I did not press the point very forcefully with the homelessness portfolio-holder (though I did mention the content of the letter to her).
Patrick,
Actually, bellatrys made that point about money tainting politics (credit where it's due!).
FWIW, I wholeheartedly agree with you, both about the need to grab those opportunities and the fact that it's been done by the right and can/should be done by us now.
School board, neighborhood board, board of water management, library board, etc etc etc. If for no other reason, these offices are important because they are the proving ground for the next rungs of politics.
For inspiration, there's always the example of Paul Wellstone, who ran on a relative shoestring and made his lifetime of grassroots campaigning pay off. May he rest in peace-- and may the green bus (Wellstone's bus) keep on driving.
I wanted assurances that they were going to press the higher officials of the land for information on the prison abuse and the plans for the war before handing over more blank checks to be dished out to folks like Chalabi. Out of seven phone calls I got *one* form letter assuring me that the Senator was yes, deeply concerned about the abuse but was certain it didn't reflect the real America or our troops or affect the noble mission of liberation yadda yadda yadda. So they didn't even keep their promises to send out statements to concerned members of the public on the matters, as all of them pledged to me.
Vote them out? We try. Sometimes it makes a difference, sometimes the courts rule against you, and sometimes they promise to be different from their predecessor but they're not, it's just musical chairs and the game stays the same. I've seen Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, but it doesn't seem to be a documentary...
And around here, it costs a certain amount of money to run for local office, plus time, which when you work full time just to pay the rent, and barely manage that, isn't an option. (I was actually going to offer my volunteer consulting services to a challenger who seemed to be a real difference, because it took me two days to realize that the kids promoting him with handmade signs on the corner *weren't* advertising a car-wash for a charity, but then he withdrew as his campaign imploded under suspicious circumstances. He was underfunded against the Party incumbents as it was - but I certainly couldn't come up with $400,000 to run myself.)
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
Comments on Of course, if he really had been a "detainee," it would have been okay.: