Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 26: John Brown's body stays restless

Quarters used by Union forces during the siege of Vicksburg

Here is a review of David Reynolds' recent book on John Brown, called John Brown, Abolitionist, and also of Nicholas Lemann's book, Redemption: The last battle of the Civil War, that focuses on Adelbert Ames' fight to sustain democratic government in Mississippi after the war: John Brown's body and blood by Ari Kelman Times Literary Supplement 02/14/07.

Unfortunately, it starts with a rather fantastic description of John Brown's mission at Harper's Ferry:

Steeled by faith in God’s omnipotence, on October 16, 1859, John Brown set in motion a plan he believed would liberate 4 million slaves throughout the American South. Brown envisioned a biblical flood, not of water, but of people, rising at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, as bondsmen rallied to the Harpers Ferry federal arsenal. This army of liberation would break over Dixie in a divine wave, cleansing the the region of sin. At nightfall, Brown and his men seized the armoury and sent patrols to take hostages and alert slaves that the day of jubilee had arrived. The next day, townspeople traded shots with Brown's gang, until marines arrived and ended the rebellion.

Well, the part about Brown getting caught is more-or-less right. Brown was hoping for some slave reinforcements in Harper's Ferry. But he didn't imagine gather in them into an "army of liberation" that "would break over Dixie in a divine wave". He intended to set up a guerrilla operation in the Appalachians that would encourage slaves to escape their masters and facilitate them in doing so.

This description of Ames' battle with the Redeemers isn't quite so bad, although it implies that the occurences at Vicksburg were more a one-time event than an example ofa process that occurred through much of the South:

At least for six years: in 1865, the states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, finally abolishing slavery nationwide. In 1874, that amendment, as well as the Fourteenth, expanding citizenship and promising equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth, guaranteeing voting rights, prompted another violent upheaval, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Self-styled white "Redeemers", convinced that freedmen with ballots menaced a divinely sanctioned natural order, disfranchised African Americans by terrorizing them. The Redeemers seized Vicksburg to ensure that an upcoming election would remain a whites-only affair. Mississippi’s Reconstruction governor, Adelbert Ames, then sent African American troops to recapture the town. The white mob held off the militia and killed twenty-nine African Americans. (my emphasis)

And this comparison immediately following is accurate enough:

Separated by sixteen years and a Civil War, John Brown’s raid and the Vicksburg murders are divided by more than that in most histories of the era. Brown, after all, fought for freedom. He was a champion of racial equality, whose righteous ends mitigate, even if they don’t necessarily justify, his bloody means. The Redeemers, by contrast, then, were devoted to an antiquated racial order, and they killed to return to a bygone era. Disparate goals seem to open a gulf between the Redeemers and Brown that not even a shared fondness for bloodshed, underpinned by relevant scriptural passages, can close. (my emphasis)

The review kind of goes downhill from there. He makes an unconvincing attempt to link the religious outlook of the postwar, white-supremacist Redeemers with that of John Brown. Well, Brown and most if not all the "Redeemers" were Christian. But beyond that, there's not a lot of resemblance.

He criticizes Reynolds for supposedly justifying Brown spilling "rivers of blood", a highly questionable metaphor in Brown's case. Describing Brown's most controversial action, the execution of five proslavery settlers in the "Bleeding Kansas" mini-civil war, this way:

On May 24, he and his followers snatched five pro-slavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. His gang split the captives' skulls with broadswords, biblical retribution gone mad.

Kelman seems to accept the notion of Brown as a crazy religious fanatic. But the Pottawatomie killings, whatever else they may have been, were not "biblical retribution gone mad". They were specific acts done in a particular context of the conflict in Kansas. Kelman at least gives some historical background of the Kansas conflict and even of the Pottawatomie killings.

But he writes, "Even militant abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass, had considered him a dangerous tool, a loaded gun with a hair trigger." Well, no, they didn't. Douglass supported Brown in some of his activities. He declined Brown's invitation to join the Harper's Ferry raid because he thought it was too risky a plan, a judgment which the outcome arguably validated. But he didn't think of Brown as off his rocker or as someone operating on "a hair trigger".

Kelman is correct when he writes of the postwar "Redeemers":

The Redeemers, along with other Evangelical terrorists in the South, sensed an opening and became the Democratic Party’s de facto military wing.

He also gives a decent definition of the Redeemer strategy that "became known as the Mississippi plan: terrorism backed by biblical metaphors, in service of voter suppression", though I do think he over-emphasizes the religious theme. John Brown was clearly deeply religious. The Redeemers were Christians and no doubt had religious views matching their white supremacist beliefs. But their motivations weren't overtly religious in the way Brown's were.

His closing judgment on Ames is also unfair:

Ames, bumbling and naive, lived in complex times and was swamped by uncertainty. He tried to find the righteous path. But he kept tripping along the way.

No, Ames was not "bumbling and naive". He was not "swamped by uncertainty" but by organized force and violence. And he did find a "righteous path". The Redeemers prevented him from travelling down it.

Tags: adelbert ames, john brown

Closing the Bush Gulag

The greatest of the all the Cheney-Bush administration's scandals by far is what Al Gore has aptly called "the Bush Gulag", the network of prisons and torture centers of which Abu Ghuraib, Bagram in Afghanistan and Guantánamo are a part. As Jack Balkin put it at his Balkinization blog (Bush Justice Department Tries to Squelch Legal Representation at Guantanamo 04/26/07):

We should not forget this central point: The Justice Department is trying to do everything possible to prevent Guantanamo detainees from having any rights at all. It wants to get as close as it can to what it the Bush Administration sought before [the] Rasul and Hamdan [Supreme Court rulings] - a law-free zone. But the more the Justice Department tries to eliminate procedural protections and basic elements of fairness for the detainees, the more it undermines its argument that the detainees have a remedy that is just as good as habeas.

In fact, the Justice Department's argument about the adequacy of the remedy has always been disingenuous. The Bush Administration wants what it has always wanted - a legal black hole, a place where it can seize any non-citizen, declare them an enemy of the state and hold them without any means of redress. It wants, in other words, the very absence of law.

Although we have been momentarily distracted by the scandals over Alberto Gonzales, we should remember that the Administration's policies on detention and interrogation ... are the real reason why this Administration, and this Justice Department, have been such a disgrace to our country and to our traditions of government under law. (my emphasis)

I would definitely add the Iraq War to that "real reason", but the point is well taken.

Karen Greenberg takes a look at the practical steps a new President could and should take to shut down Guantánamo in Can Guantanamo Be Closed? What a New President Could Do  TomDispatch.com 04/26/07. Her advice would largely apply to the other stations in the gulag, as well.

The whole article is worth reading. She also gives a good summary of the political and legal traps running a torture gulag has created. You snatch a bunch of suspects, usually with little or no actual evidence. You fly them off to a law-free zone and sadistically torture them for years.

But then what do you do with them? Any evidence you do get is extremely likely to be tainted in some way by the torture and other misconduct they experienced in the Cheney-Bush legal Phantom Zone. And putting them on trial in any kind of remotely fair process brings the prospect of their being acquitted. Then you have to let people go who you've advertised to the world as the worst kinds of terrorists. Instead, you could keep them in the gulag and keep on torturing them and sending more prisoners there for the same, and more and more people get caught up in the spiraling dilemma.

Here's a sample of what she says:

How could a new president extricate us from this mess? The next occupant of the White House should start by accepting the following very American principle: Those who are not going to be charged with a crime should be returned to their home country, a third country, or the country where they were initially captured.

Behind this principle lies a reality which must also be accepted. The current Guantanamo debacle has little to do with the rule of law, the Geneva Conventions, or even, for that matter, a realistic assessment of the more pressing terrorist threats to the United States. At its heart of hearts lies a simple fear of political embarrassment.

U.S. officials have consistently held that they are guarding vital national security interests by keeping the never-to-be-charged detainees in custody. However, the sad truth is that, when it comes to most of these prisoners, what's really been at stake is the administration's need to save face by concealing its utter ineptitude. Privately, even Bush administration officials will acknowledge that the detainees were captured and sent to Gitmo capriciously. Rather than housing the "worst of the worst" (as the administration has regularly bragged), Gitmo penned up the easiest to grab, especially in Afghanistan. Often these were simply the individuals that local bounty hunters could provide or who were found on or near the battlefield. Many were put on planes to Guantanamo based on nothing but an American unwillingness to assert with confidence that they would never be a threat to the United States. Instead of masterminds, whatthe Bush administration netted were cooks, chauffeurs, wanderers, the mentally deranged, and - sometimes - children.

When an administration defiantly adverse to ever admitting error decided not to send home those who had been seized by mistake, it set itself a trap that it has been unable to escape to this day.

She also deals with the inevitable question, what if some people go back to terrorism (or start practicing terrorism for the first time) after they are released? Her answer is basically: deal with it. As she puts it:

It is time to return to a system in which terrorists are tried in courts based on actual evidence. Unless this principle is accepted, Guantanamo won't be closed because there will always be U.S. prisoners who can't be tried and will never be freed.

A corollary to this that must be accepted is: There can be no absolute guarantee that some of the 160 former detainees, once freed and returned, won't commit acts of terror. But in the exponential growth of terrorist threats in recent years, particularly in the wake of the Bush administration's war in Iraq, a few of these small fry simply don't add up to a significant menace. After five years of interrogation, incarceration, and often long periods of isolation, many of them are, in any case, now deemed broken men. If any of them do prove threatening, let them be captured anew and tried for actual acts or plans on any of the many legal grounds available to law enforcement.

Essentially, the argument that we can't let anyone go that Dick Cheney thinks might someday somehow be dangerous is really the argument for tyranny that I suppose is as old as tyranny itself. The good people are in danger, and the government has to act in a lawless way to protect the good people from the evildoers. Then the lawless "protection" starts the cycle I just described - you can't convict them of a legal offense because you resorted to lawless (govermental) Terror and torture to deal with them; but they might be more dangerous now because of the way they were treated; so you have to keep on enforcing the lawless protection on more and more people. And on it goes.

The bottom line is that the next President has to restore the rule of law in place of the torture policy and the Bush Gulag.

Tags: bush gulag, guantánamo, torture

Military budgets, priorities and "Al Qaida" in Iraq

Gareth Porter has a couple of pieces out during the past week or so that make some important points about the current politics of war and military spending.

One of the risky aspects of the current moment is that there's a danger that at the same time the Democrats are finding their voice to criticize Bush's Iraq War as the American public is demanding, that they could wind up avoiding a serious look at the Pentagon's budget and the military priorities that should set that budget.

In The Coming Push for More Troops - for More and Bigger Iraqs Huffington Post 04/18/07, historian Gareth Porter reminds us the military Establishment and its advocates - not all them conservative, "neo" or otherwise - are pushing for a permanent increase of 100,000 in the Army and Marine ground forces. In fact, Congress just authorized a large increase.

The immediate justification is the strain that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are putting on the active duty military. There's substantial evidence that the strain is real. But reports on those strains have been pretty vague and deserve to be read with a critical eye.

But such an increase provides an opportunity both for permanent-war Republicans and antiwar (for the moment) Democrats to join in spending more money to show they are "pro-military". And, unfortunately, our political culture has come to equate spending more money on the military as "pro-military" and "supporting our troops". And a wide range of interests, from members of Congress to the services themselves to military contractors, have no interest is disturbing that well-established habit of thought in the minds of reporters and political commentators.

But the end-strength increases for the Army and Marines that Congress authorized are not going to provide any short-term relief for the services in Iraq, as the recent extensions of tours of duty there illustrates. And there are real problems in equating "more military spending" to "more effective defense", much less "more appropriate defense".

The rightsizing of the military can't be done without some sense of priorities. For instance, I imagine I were doing one of those "extemporaneous speech" exercises that I did in high school where you're given a topic and then you immediately go to the podium and talk for X number of minutes on it, and that the topic was the changes I would make in the military at the current level of budgeting. My off-the-cuff changes would wind up shifting resources away from the Air Force to the Army and Marine Corps, drastically increasing language instruction in Arabic and other Middle Eastern and South Asian languages and shutting down corporate-welfare boondoggles like the Star Wars program.

But some implicit assumptions about policy priorities would go into that, conscious or not. And what we buy with our military budget dollars should be driven by what we realistically need in pursuit of realistic and sensible defense goals. For instance, Porter writes about the military's pitch for an end-strenght increase of 100,000 Army and Marines soldiers:

That may sound reasonable to many, but only because they haven't stopped to ask what kind of war those troops would wage and in what countries they would fight over the next decade.

It turns out it is very hard to come up with credible answers to those questions. The obvious targets of a big U.S. ground war have all disappeared. For many years, the Army had North Korea and Saddam's Iraq to justify the size of the ground forces. But now South Korea's superior military strength and the détente between North and South Korea have made the North Korean attack scenario irrelevant. What is left is the half-baked idea that U.S. ground troops might have to occupy North Korea if the regime collapsed and disorder loomed. But the military knows perfectly well that there is no possibility of U.S. troops occupying a state on China's border.

Now Saddam and his big but vulnerable conventional army are gone, and the U.S. Army and its army of propagandists have had to invent a new justification for the big war army they want. The answer they are about test market with the media and Congress is that the United States must be prepared to fight more wars like the one in Iraq -- to occupy militarily and "stabilize" one or more major Islamic countries in the face of widespread Islamic-nationalist domestic opposition supported by elements of the former regime.

Congress and the public really need to ask some obvious and basic questions about proposals like this. It's clear to me that the services have put way too much emphasis on preparing for conventional war - the Soviet Red Army pouring through the Fulda Gap in an attack on western Europe - and not enough on counterinsurgency operations.

But I don't want to see the United States looking for more adventures like Iraq, where we go in, take over the whole country and fight a counterinsurgency war for years before enough of the public gets sick of it that the voters eventually put a stop to it. I'm all for having lots of people trained to be fluent in Urdu. But that doesn't mean I think taking over Pakistan and doing the Iraq War routine there is a good idea.

Even on the particular issue of increasing the Army's and Marines' end-strength, there are some real policy questions involved. Is the Army still going to have to rely on the reserves to the extent is has the last four years in case of actual war? What role will private contractors like Halliburton's KBR and Blackwell play in military planning? Does the Army intend to shift it's focus more toward counterinsurgency and all that involves, or is it just planning to train a few ten thousands more in how to fight the Soviet Red Army the way they've done since the Soviet Union collapsed?

And check this out. Via Corrente Wire, Blackwater Makes It Official: They're Running a Private Army 04/25/07, I see this news report from last year from the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot: Blackwater USA to open facilities in California, Philippines bt Bill Sizemore 05/16/06:

Six weeks ago, Blackwater Vice Chairman Cofer Black said the company is interested in creating a small army for hire - a brigade-size force that could be contracted for peacekeeping and stability operations in troubled regions of the world.

This whole shadow-world of Blackwell and other private-security/mercenary companies is one that should be very much part of military budget discussions, because a large part of their funding comes from the US military and they operate in far too much of a legal gray zone.

Porter's other recent article is Democrats' Timetable Allows U.S. War in Sunni Region to Go On Inter Press Service 04/26/07. Although the current political jousting is over Cheney and Bush rejecting any restrictions at all, it's not too early to focus on what it means to mandate an end to US participation in sectarian violence in Iraq but to allow continued operations against "Al Qaida". It's a huge conceptual loophole. As Porter writes, this will invite war advocates to make all of its targets into "Al Qaida", whether that's true or not:

A five-page Marine Corps intelligence report on Anbar in September 2006 reflected that view of the situation. It said Anbar province was a "vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq." Media reporting on the province largely conformed to that interpretation. The notion of a two-sided war in the Sunni heartland bolsters the George W. Bush administration's political position that any talk of a timetable for withdrawal is defeatist.

In fact, however, it is far removed from reality. The majority of the important Sunni insurgent organisations represent a second anti-al-Qaeda force that has far greater potential for defeating al-Qaeda than the U.S. military does.

Tags: gareth porter, iraq war

"Sally Forth" discovers telenovelas

This is not why I watch telenovelas. It's not, I tell you, it's not!!


This was the daily "Sally Forth" cartoon by Steve Alaniz and Fracesco Marciuliano for 03/27/07. Ted had discovered telenovelas the previous day and explained to Sally, "It's called a telenovela and every episode should win an Emmy!"

I'm not sure from this if poor Ted realized he could get English subtitles through closed captioning.

War politics

Tom Hayden has been paying close attention to the politics of the Iraq War and his observations are always worth seeing. His latest that I've seen is Anti-War Dynamic Accelerating, Bush Power Dropping Huffington Post 04/24/07. He writes:

The implosion of the White House Iraq policy is unfolding on three tracks: on the ground in Iraq, in the clash between Democrats and Republicans over withdrawal, and in the widening scandals weakening the presidency itself.

He lays out the basic choices for the Democrats this year well on the war funding:

House and Senate progressives will continue pushing for a timeline to end funding by next year. Assuming a Bush veto of the present legislation, the Democrats will keep forcing vulnerable Republicans to vote over and over for the war. The current majority may compromise by deleting the withdrawal deadlines in exchange for "enforceable benchmarks", to the dismay of most in the anti-war movement.

And his comment on the relationship of the Cheney-Bush scandals to their Iraq War policy is sensible:

This may be the endgame of the war, the Watergate Moment for the Bush administration. Since the Democrats prevailed in the November 2006 election, one scandal after another has cascaded over the walls of the White House. Today it is the fabrication over the death of Pat Tillman by "friendly fire." The targets have included John Bolton, Alberto Gonzales, Scooter Libby, the Veterans Administration, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. The comparison to Watergate is this: while the Congress began formulating exit plans as early as 1969, they gained critical momentum when joined to the Watergate hearings of 1973. Nixon simply became too weak at home to fight back over Vietnam and Cambodia.

Hayden ends with what's kind of a throwaway line, but it's a catchy phrase. He refers to the political weakening of the Cheney-Bush team and suggests, "Call it an indirect impeachment." That's a good concept. I'm hoping for the real thing for both of them. But "indirect impeachment" may actually be a good way to conceive of the currently more likely alternative.

Ithink there a typo when he writes that insurgents "blew up the parliament" in Iraq; it was a bomb in the parliament's cafeteria, it didn't destroy the whole building.

See also To Stop the Dirty War by Tom Hayden Huffington Post 04/02/07.

For reporting on the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman hearings, see:

House Investigates Army's Handling of Tillman, Lynch Incidents PBS Newshour 04/24/07

Tillman's family tells of military's deceit by Frank Davies MediaNews/San Jose Mercury News 04/25/2007 (The Mercury News is the Tillman family's hometown newspaper.)

Lie on Tillman battle reveals war on the truth by Scott Herhold San Jose Mercury News 04/25/2007

Lawmakers see cover-up, vow to probe Tillman death by Zachary Coile and Robert Collier San Francisco Chronicle 04/25/07

White House says Bush didn't know Tillman killed by friendly fire by Zachary Coile San Francisco Chronicle 04/25/07

Lawmakers see cover-up, vow to probe Tillman death by Zachary Coile and Robert Collier San Francisco Chronicle 04/25/07

Oversight Committee Holds Hearing on Tillman, Lynch Incidents House Oversight and Government Reform Committee 04/24/07

The Testimony of Jessica Lynch was particularly moving. She looked great on the brief TV clips. But an article in the 04/25/07 San Francisco Chronicle print edition that doesn't appear to be available online opened by describing her as "Limping slowly to the witness table", which doesn't surprise me. She really sustained some severe injuries. In fact, she described them in her prepared testimony:

Following the ambush, my injuries were extensive. When I awoke in the Iraqi hospital, I was not able to move or feel anything below my waist. I suffered a six inch gash in my head. My fourth and fifth lumbars were overlapping causing pressure on my spine. My right humerus bone was broken. My right foot was crushed. My left femur was shattered. The Iraqis in the hospital tried to help me by removing the bone and replacing it with a metal rod. The rod they used was a model from the 1940s for a man and was too long. Following my rescue, the doctors in Landstuhl, Germany found in a physical exam that I had been sexually assaulted. Today, I continue to deal with bladder, bowel and kidney problems as a result of my injuries. My left leg still has no feeling from the knee down and I am required to wear a brace so that I can stand and walk.

Which makes me think, what kind of freak rapes an unconscious woman with a bleeding head and her legs and feet smashed?

I haven't heard anyone comment on it, but she obviously made a decision to disclose the fact she had been sexually abused, something she didn't have to do and presumably no one on the committee would have asked her about that.

Her comments on the phony tale the Pentagon PR hacks made up about her are memorable:

When I remember those difficult days, I remember the fear. I remember the strength. I remember the hand of a fellow American soldier reassuring me that I was ok now.

At the same time, tales of great heroism were being told. My parent’s home in Wirt County was under siege of the media all repeating the story of the little girl Rambo from the hills who went down fighting.

It was not true.

I have repeatedly said, when asked, that if the stories about me helped inspire our troops and rally a nation, then perhaps there was some good. However, I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary. People like Lori Piestewa and First Sergeant Dowdy who picked up fellow soldiers in harms way. Or people like Patrick Miller and Sergeant Donald Walters who actually fought until
the very end.

The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes and they don’t need to be told elaborate tales.

My hero is my brother Greg who continues to serve this country today. My hero is my friend Lori who died in Iraq but set an example for a generation of Hopi and Native American women and little girls everywhere about the important contributions just one soldier can make in the fight for freedom. My hero is every American who says, my country needs me and answers the call to fight.

I had the good fortune and opportunity to come home and I told the truth. Many other soldiers, like Pat Tillman, do not have the opportunity.

The truth of war is not always easy to hear but it always more heroic than the hype.

But the Republican war fans definitely do not want to hear the truth. Hype is all they care about at this point.

Obviously, the Republicans in Congress would have been glad never to investigate these shameful fake stories and coverups about Lynch and Tillman. But, regardless of your position on the Iraq or Afghanistan Wars, how can anyone thing this kind of conduct on the Pentagon's part is right? This is one of many reasons that mindless idolization of the military, whether in the form of The Troops or any other way, is such a damaging thing. Undoubtedly part of why the people who did this thought they could get away with it was that they were thinking they were immune from criticism or accountability for it. Disgusting.

Tags: iraq war, jessica lynch, pat tillman, tom hayden

The "patrol base" attack

The suicide-bomb attack this week that killed nine American soldiers in Iraq has understandably received a lot of attention in the news:Al-Qa'ida group behind US deaths in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn Independent 04/25/07. What hasn't been clear in a lot of the reporting is that they were struck in a "patrol base" which is an essential part of the Petraeus strategy for the McCain escalation currently under way. As a point of historical reference, at the height of American fighting in Vietnam, American KIAs (killed in actions) were running at about 10 per day. Cockburn reports:

The US military said that only one truck had exploded yesterday at a patrol base of the 82nd Airborne Division in the much-fought over province of Diyala, north-east of Baghdad. The death of the paratroopers brings to 85 the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq so far this month. This is higher than the total in each of the previous three months.

Residents in the Ameen area south of the provincial capital, Baquba, said the base attacked was in an old primary school called Sheikh Abdul Qadir al-Qailani. In a sophisticated attack, gunmen opened fire on US snipers on the roof of the school. Then one suicide truck bomb blasted a gap in the concrete wall protecting the base through which a second truck was able to pass before blowing up and causing the school building to collapse. (my emphasis)

The current strategy calls for establishing these small "patrol bases" staffed by American troops in neighborhoods throughout Baghdad and other target areas; the one sucessfully attack this week was in Diyala province, as Cockburn reports. Previously, American troops had been concentrated in larger and heavily-defended bases, emerging for individual patrols and then returning to base. The "patrol bases" are supposed to let the Americans get more familiar with the neighborhoods and developed better intelligence on insurgent operations.

In counterinsurgency theory, this getting closer to the people is a necessary step, though it will be likely to produce higher US casualties, including KIAs, in the short run. Cockburn writes:

But the US strategy since the start of the "surge" in Baghdad on 14 February has been to make greater use of US troops and give less priority to training Iraqi forces. This is likely to lead to an increase in US casualties that are often a function of the number of patrols being made. ...

The most effective method of attack against US and British forces has been the roadside bomb, to which neither has found an effective answer. No less than 1,310 US military fatalities have been caused by bombs in or beside roads. While the suicide bombers have hitherto not concentrated on US forces, possibly because they are too well defended, the more aggressive use of US forces is likely to make them more of a target.

But there are a couple of problems with this. At least a couple. One is that most American troops don't speak Arabic. And they are foreigners in Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are too unreliable for the Americans to trust them enough to make the joint counterinsurgency operations effective. Plus, there aren't nearly enough of them, and the ones that are there are more loyal to sectarian militias than to the Iraqi government. And the military is apparently giving up for the time being on hoping for American training of the ISF providing any immediate relief.

The PBS Newshour on Tuesday featured Judy Woodruff interviewing Phil Carter, who has served in Iraq as an Army captain and writes on intelligence issues, and neocon ideologue Frederick Kagan, who is considered one of the intellectual godfathers of the McCain escalation, aka, The Surge: Iraq's Diyala Province One of Deadliest for Troops 04/24/07. Carter explained how the current strategy is affecting Diyala province, where he has served:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Captain [Carter], yesterday's suicide attack on the 82nd Airborne, it was a third brigade. We know nine paratroopers killed, 20 injured. Since November, we're told 56 U.S. service members have been killed in Diyala. Why do we see the violence spiking there?

PHILLIP CARTER: Well, it looks like this is the unintended consequence of the surge. That is, you squeeze the bad guys out of Baghdad, and they pop like a water balloon up into the Diyala province, which borders Baghdad.

There's also a sense that we drew down, as Professor Kagan says, too many of our forces in this province. And so as we were squeezing in Baghdad, we were squeezing the insurgents and the militias into an area where there was not a sufficient U.S. presence.

And the third problem in Diyala is that the provincial government and the security forces are both ineffective and corrupt, and they are far more beholden to their own agendas than to any mission or security in the province.

Kagan, being the ideologue that he is, kept trying to stress the al-Qaida role in Diyala:

FREDERICK KAGAN: Well, they're going to a variety of difference places. And they've been moving around. And we've been following, as al-Qaida has been trying to establish new bases. They've been trying to do this in Salahadeen, as well.

But Diyala offers a prospect for them, because it is a mixed area, and al-Qaida's methodology in Diyala has been to attack the Shia, drive them away, and then attack the Sunni to terrorize them. That's been sort of their trademark out there, and they've been hoping that that would work for them. Diyala is a province that offers that prospect.

Carter smoothly called Kagan on it, and also talked more about how the current approach is likely to mean higher US KIA counts:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Captain Carter, again, the worst attack on the 82nd Airborne, they were saying today, in almost 40 years. Is there something that makes them particularly vulnerable in this location?

PHILLIP CARTER: There is, but first it's important to note a couple of things. First is that Diyala has long been home to Baath party elements and others. It was a favorite sort of retreat area for Iraqis in Saddam Hussein's government. So there's a fertile area for Sunni insurgents to go up there.

The second is that Colonel Sutherland's brigade has really adopted a muscular approach to counterinsurgency up there. And since when we left, it appears that they have almost resumed major combat operations. It's possible that there is a spiral effect between the way that the U.S. is acting and the way that the insurgents are acting, in the absence of reconstruction effort.

On your question, yes, this is a deadly attack. And it's because of the new way that the U.S. is postured. No longer is the U.S. simply occupying these massive super bases outside the city, but they're now pushing out into smaller outposts throughout the cities, the kind of things that might resemble a community policing substation in a housing area. We're talking small bases, with small-sized units, and they're much more vulnerable than the large bases outside of town. (my emphasis)

Kagan agreed about the higher risk of casualties involved:

So it is sort of Counterinsurgency 101, as Captain Carter described, that you really do have to get out among the population in order to make any of this work. You accept a certain degree of greater risk, especially initially, by doing that. But over the long term, the hope is that the risk goes down because you get a lot more intelligence from the people when you're doing more than just sort of driving through neighborhoods, where nobody knows you and doesn't expect you to stay there.

The Pentagon will be tempted to pull back from this "patrol base" arrangement to emphasize "force protection", i.e., minimizing American casualties. Which is likely to interfere with whatever good the current counterinsurgency approach might produce. But given the incredible difficulties in their way, that's probably just as well. Why lose people in a counterinsurgency approach that is hopeless for other reasons anyway?

Of course, the obvious follow-on question is, why lose people in a counterinsurgency war that cannot be won by Americans at any remotely acceptable cost, if at all?

Tags: frederick kagan, iraq, iraq war, patrick cockburn, phil carter

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 25: What have all the "moderates" gone, long time passing?

African-American civilians and Federal troops occupying Jefferson Davis' plantation near Natchez; the banner says, "The House Jeff Built"

I recently read for the first time Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, 1949 essay, "The Causes of the Civil War", which is included in The Politcs of Hope (1963). At that time, he was dealing with a trend in professional historical writing that was known as "revisionist", although it reflected aspects of the Lost Cause dogma that conservative white Southerners had been promoting practically since the end of the Civil War.

His essay focuses mainly on two advocates of this "revisionism", James Randall and Avery Craven. They "denied the traditional assumption of the inevitability of the war and boldly advanced the thesis that a 'blundering generation' had transformed a 'repressible conflict' into a 'needless war'."

Schlesinger also found Alan Nevins indulging in "a measured but entire acceptance of revisionism" in his 1947 Ordeal of the Union, where he wrote:

The primary task of statesmanship in this era was to furnish a workable adjustment between the two sections [North and South, or, more accurately, slave states and free states], while offering strong inducements to the southern people to regard their labor system not as static but evolutionary, and equal persuasions to the northern people to assume a helpful rather than scolding attitude.

The claim that "northern people" assumed a "scolding attitude" reflects the antebellum whining and blustering of the slaveowners and the publicists who huffed and puffed in defense of the slave system. A "scolding attitude"? We're talking about human slavery, people! If a scolding attitude was all that people could muster against slavery, that would mean they were disgraceful collaborators with slavery.

And, in fact, that was one of the driving forces behind free-state efforts to restrict slavery. Very few whites besides John Brown and his white supporters were ready to wage some war of liberation to free the slaves in the South. But people in free states did feel that they were increasingly made to collaborate against their wills and their consciences with the Slave Power. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made that coerced collaboration explicit by requiring free state citizens to join federal posses to recapture human property that had escaped from the lords of the lash.

Schlesinger's essay uses more judicious language than I do, being a part of the mean and nasty blogger world and all. But he rips the "revisionist" version of the Lost Cause ideology apart. He summarizes the Randall-Craven type of revisionism as including three primary premises:

First: that the Civil War was caused by the irresponsible emotionalization of politics far out of proportion to the real problems involved.

Hell, it was just human being held in slavery and being used as breeding stock to produce additional human property to be sold to other slavemongers. Plus, the freedoms of free white citizens were becoming more and more constricted by the demands of the slaveowners and their incresingly paranoid fears. Other than basic human rights and the essential freedoms of all Americans, there weren't such "real problems" that people had to get all worked up about it and stuff.

How did serious historians ever persuade themselves to write this nonsense? It boggles the mind.

Also, as part of this first plank of the "revisionist" Lost Cause approach, its advocates embraced the notion that slavery didn't have anything to do with causing the war. It was "fanaticism", lack of moderation, you know. The fact that all this ungentlemanly immoderation revolved around slavery was, what, a random coincidence?

Thus the second revisionist thesis: that sectional friction was permittd to developinto needless war by the inexcusable failure of political leadership in the '50s.

Schlesinger notes drily, "It is hard to tell which was under attack here - the performance of a particular generation or democratic politics in general."

The reality was that democratic politics and slavery were fundamentally incompatible. Democracy or the slave system had to win out.

Hence the third revisionist thesis: that the slavery problem could have been solved without war.

Assuming as I do that these really were serious historians, I just have to wonder, were they completely unaware of the existence of black people? I mean, really. The real lives of black people seemed to be an exotic abstraction for people who could come up with this kind of stuff.

As Schlesinger points out, this only makes any sense if there was a realistic possibility that slavery could have been abolished nonviolently. But those high-minded desires for peaceful abolition that the "revisionists" implicitly assume were there in the South somehow managed to stay well hidden. Probably because in large parts of the South, open discussion of abolition sentiments was just flat-out repressed. It also assumes that non-Southerners could have remained as completely indifferent to slavery and its poisonous effects on the whole Republic as the lords of the lash were to the humanity of their slave property.

Schlesinger also reminds us that there was no shortage of compensated emancipation schemes, under which capital in the form of cash would be given to the slave owners to replace their capital in the form of human flesh. The idea went about as far as an humanitarian thought would get if it entered the mind of Dick Cheney - nowhere, in other words.

While there are certainly a wide variety of issues generated by slavery, not least of which were class-based effects of slavery, primary among them the threat of slavery to free labor, Schlesinger in this essay focuses on a moral issue, which was certainly how it was widely perceived in both slave and free states:

The revisionists first glided over the implications of the fact
that the slavery system was producing a closed society in the South. Yet that society increasingly had justified itself by a political and philosophical repudiation of free society; southern thinkers swiftly developed the anti-libertarian potentialities in a social system whose cornerstone, in Alexander H. Stephens' proud phrase, was human bondage. In theory and in practice, the South organized itself with mounting rigor against ideas of human dignity and freedom, because such ideas inevitably threatened the basis of their own system. Professor Frank L. Owsley, the southern agrarian, has described inadvertently but accurately the direction in which the slave South was moving. "The abolitionists and their political allies were threatening the existence of the South as seriously as the Nazis threaten the existence of England," wrote Owsley in 1940; "... Under such circumstances the surprising thing is that so little was done by the South to defend its existence."

There can be no question that many southerners in the '50's had similar sentiments; that they regarded their system of control as ridiculously inadequate; and that, with the book-burning, the censorship of the mails, the gradual illegalization of dissent, the South was in process of creating a real machinery of repression in order more effectively "to defend its existence." No society, I suppose, encourages criticism of its basic institutions. Yet, when a democratic society acts in self-defense, it does so at least in the name of human dignity and freedom. When a society based on bond slavery acts to eliminate criticism of its peculiar institution, it outlaws what a believer in democracy can only regard as the abiding values of man. When the basic institutions are evil, in other words, the effect of attempts to defend their existence can only be the moral and intellectual stultification of the society.

A society closed in the defense of evil institutions thus creates moral differences far too profound to be solved by compromise. Such a society forces upon everyone, both those living at the time and those writing about it later, the necessity for a moral judgment; and the moral judgment in such cases becomes an indispensable factor in the historical understanding. (my emphasis)

Schlesinger was suggesting that, in reference to the approach of Randall and Craven, that this neglect of ths historical fact that strong emotions were generated on both sides may have been the main cause of their particular route to embracing a Lost Cause tall tale on the origins of the war. The "fanaticism" that they tried to blame for causing an avoidable war, in other words, was really only one of the manifestations of the social conflict caused by two incompatable systems, slavery and democracy, coexisting in one country under one government. Resolving that contradiction required strong feelings and much more besides.

Tags: arthur schlesinger, avery craven, civil war, james randall, slavery, us civil war