Imagining the Next Occupation
Jason Brownlee
Soldier
behind blast walls near Ba‘quba, Iraq.
(From the exhibition “Battlespace,” www.battlespaceonline.org.)
(Eros Hoagland) |
When Lt. Gen. William Caldwell pitched
the US Army’s updated field manual on the March
10 Daily Show, Jon Stewart inquired: “If
I read this, can I take over a country?” Caldwell,
who served 13 months in Iraq and today runs the
Combined Arms Center in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas,
demurred with a chuckle. And the text his center
published in October, FM 3-07, Stability Operations (2008),
treats the question as moot.
FM 3-07 skips over the matter
of whether the Army can or should take over a country
and cuts straight to how, thereby enshrining post-war
occupation and political administration as core
responsibilities of the Army, coequal to war fighting.
The new field manual is as significant for the
aspirations it encapsulates as for the operations
it purports to guide. At a moment when much of
the public looks forward to concluding the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military’s strategic
thinkers are studying how to “stabilize” more countries
in the future. FM 3-07 marks, yet again,
the post-September 11 zeal of President George
W. Bush’s administration for a mission—nation building,
if by another name, stability operations—that candidate
Bush disdained in 2000. The outgoing president
leaves his successor a bureaucratic apparatus and
ideological leitmotif for rationalizing vast military
spending and foreign adventurism.
Lead author Lt. Col. Steve Leonard
and his collaborators have written a manual reflecting
the Bush administration’s perception that America
has entered “an era of persistent conflict.” Since
early 2005 the government has maintained a secret
watch list, updated biannually by the National
Intelligence Council, of 25 states that are deemed
unstable or threatening.[1] FM
3-07 heeds the White House’s call to fix such
“failed or failing states” by battling the “destabilizing
forces” of government collapse, criminal networks
and humanitarian emergency. The jobs of stability
operations would previously have been recognized
as nation building—“various military missions,
tasks and activities…to maintain or reestablish
a safe and secure environment, provide essential
governmental services, emergency infrastructure
reconstruction and humanitarian relief.” The Army’s
“full spectrum” approach also entails offensive,
defensive and civil support operations, but Caldwell
told PBS talk show host Charlie Rose on March 13
that the focus on stability operations signals
the priority for “the next ten or 15 years.”
Leonard et al depict stability operations
as a venerable tradition, dating from King George
III’s use of British troops to “execute colonial
policy in the Americas.” Subsequent cases include
Winfield Scott’s capture of central Mexico, post-Civil
War reconstruction, the invasions of Cuba and the
Philippines after the Spanish-American War, post-World
War II Germany and Japan, Vietnam and “more than
15 stability operations” after the collapse of
the Berlin Wall, including those in Haiti, Somalia
and the Balkans. FM 3-07 infers from this
frequency that occupation typifies the historic
role of America’s armed forces: “Contrary to popular
belief, the military history of the United States
is one characterized by stability operations, interrupted
by distinct episodes of major combat.” Some readers
may challenge the premise that conflicts in which
hundreds of thousands of Filipino, Vietnamese and
Iraqi civilians were killed should be considered
the Army’s normal work. Students of American history
may also balk at the notion that stability operations
can reasonably aim “to leave a society at peace
with itself and its regional neighbors, sustainable
by the host nation without the support of external
actors.” In the main, US occupation has delivered
one of four outcomes: further internal war (Somalia,
Haiti); repressive authoritarianism (Cuba, Dominican
Republic); impending invasion by a nearby government
(the Philippines, South Vietnam); or long-term
clientage with a substantial American military
presence (Japan, Germany, South Korea). Against
this backdrop, the far-fetched promise of FM
3-07 bespeaks a kind of sophistry, a posture
of technical control that has been empirically
disproved yet ideologically preserved.
Jekyll and Hyde Humanitarianism
The term stability operations, like
“pacification” in the 1960s and “nation building”
in the 1990s, relabels the occupier’s use of violence
and separates it semantically from prior warfare.
America’s experiences in Lebanon in the 1980s and
present-day Iraq evince the transparency of this
divide, as havoc persists despite the end of “major
combat operations” and the hoisting of “mission
accomplished” banners. According to the Iraq Body
Count website, more Iraqi civilians (7,984) died
from May 2003 to April 2004, the first year of
stabilization and reconstruction, than during the
invasion. Because FM 3-07 rests on the distinction
between stability operations and major combat operations,
it fails to address the violence that happens after
the population stops being invaded and starts being
stabilized.
It is difficult to fathom the simplifications
required to treat state building as a matter of
technical know-how. Where historians fear to tread,
the strategists behind FM 3-07 march forward,
directing the Army how to bequeath to the “host
nation” a “legitimate government” that will then
join a “world of legitimate, well-governed states.”
The manual enjoins soldiers to exploit the widespread
“shock and relief” that follows an initial invasion.
In this “malleable situation,” “soldiers become
governors.” They “are required to reconcile long-standing
disputes between opposing parties…[and] are frequently
called up to restore host-nation civil authority
and institutions, to facilitate the transition
toward a desired political end state that supports
national and international order.” Lest one miss
the gravity of this task, FM 3-07 adds,
“The burdens of governance…require culturally astute
leaders and soldiers capable of adapting to nuances
of religion [and] ethnicity.” (One wonders what
role Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, a mainstay
of the Combined Arms Center’s “Cultural Awareness
Reading List,” plays in such duties.) In the areas
of cultural sensitivity and political aptitude, FM
3-07 conflates “required” with “ready.” Those
whom the manual would call governors may just as
well be dubbed “warrior kings,” as one practitioner
of stability operations, Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman,
called himself in post-invasion Iraq.
A battalion commander in the “Sunni
triangle” in 2003–2004, Sassaman gained notoriety
for covering up the drowning death of Zaydoun Fadhil,
whom his soldiers had kidnapped, forced into a
river and left behind with Fadhil’s cousin, who
survived. Although the incident brought a reprimand
for Sassaman and his subsequent retirement, his
prior efforts “to inflict extreme violence” on
Sunni Arab areas around the heavily Shi‘i town
of Balad drew accolades. Sassaman was considered
an innovator who, the New York Times reported,
“had quickly figured out what he needed to do:
remake the area’s shattered institutions, jump-start
the economy and implant a democracy, all while
battling an insurgency that was growing more powerful
by the day.” This knack for administration coincided
with a power that “was very nearly total…. When
he walked into a crowd, the Iraqis would sometimes
smile and sometimes tremble, and sometimes both.”
Those quaking may have experienced a disturbing
side that Sassaman himself admitted: “It’s like
Jekyll and Hyde out here…. By day, we’re putting
on a happy face. By night, we are hunting down
and killing our enemies.”[2] The duality of Sassaman’s reign prefigures how future American
stewards might handle the “burdens of governance.”
Marilyn Young has described that the lieutenant
colonel “met resistance of any kind with massive
force, and taught his men to do likewise.”[3] As a profile in coercion, Sassaman’s fiefdom undermines the
argument for soldiers becoming ombudsmen or undertaking
the other functions FM 3-07 describes.
On the Daily Show, Caldwell
lauded the supreme multi-tasking ability of “these
young men and women” of the Army: “One minute they’re
drinking tea with a sheikh, the next minute they’re
over surveying where they’re going to put a well
in, the next minute they’re taking sniper fire
from some insurgent and they’re returning fire,
and the next minute they’re over here figuring
out where they’re going to put another road in.”
Indeed, the breadth of jobs in FM 3-07 is
even more remarkable. A chapter on “Essential Stability
Tasks” lists establishing security, enforcing peace
agreements, handling local intelligence services,
disarming and demobilizing local paramilitaries,
controlling borders, vetting members of the ancien
regime, protecting key military and civilian
facilities, clearing hazardous munitions, policing
neighborhoods, establishing an interim justice
system, reforming the judiciary, adjudicating property
disputes, providing services for civilians and
assisting displaced populations. Later sections
mention waste management, utilities restoration
and mail delivery. This dizzying array of assignments
implies a preternatural competence that would seem
fantastical even without the example of Sassaman’s
troops.
It is worth recalling that Bush administration
officials would likely have scorned the breathtaking
sweep of FM 3-07 as recently as the 2000
campaign, when Condoleezza Rice quipped, “We don’t
need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to
kindergarten.” Under the new field manual, the
Army may indeed be directed to chaperone the children,
as well as build the school, screen regime loyalists
from the faculty and patrol the neighborhood. As
a 100-page to-do list for military occupation, FM
3-07 provides a veneer of command over these
component projects. Yet enumerating humanitarian
tasks does not necessarily illuminate them. Most
significantly, with no real accountability to the
local population there is no evidence soldiers
will pursue such directives without further traumatizing
the population. Caldwell has touted FM 3-07 as
the cutting edge product of “233 years” of experience
and the Army’s “most widely vetted” manual.[4] But the strategy assumes a beneficence that eluded Sassaman—at
least in his Mr. Hyde phases—and escaped his forerunners
during operations in Asia and the Americas. The
field manual depicts military occupation
as the calling of magnanimous armies, a fallacy
that was already old when President William McKinley
announced “benevolent assimilation” for the Philippines
in 1898. Caldwell, Leonard and their fellow strategists
have valorized the traditions they claim to reform,
even taking inspiration from America’s war in Vietnam.
Reenacting Vietnam
The Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency
Manual of 2007 revisited America’s experience
in Vietnam and found a template in the Civil
Operations and Revolutionary Development Support
(CORDS) program: “CORDS achieved considerable
success in supporting and protecting the South
Vietnamese population and in undermining the
communist insurgents’ influence and appeal, particularly
after implementation of accelerated pacification
in 1968.”[5] Likewise,
Leonard et al praise CORDS and rue its neglect
in Army doctrine: “In a cruel twist of fate,
the answers we so desperately sought in recent
years were collecting dust on bookshelves half
a world away; the distant lessons of a remarkably
success-ful Vietnam-era civil-military program
sat largely forgotten, save by those few who
had lived those experiences.”[6] CORDS
was a relatively brief attempt at nation building
that ushered in the longer-running Phoenix Program,
a campaign of assassination and mass detention.
Rating CORDS as “remarkably successful” reveals
a fixation on bureaucratic efficiency despite
staggering human costs.
Under
interim national security adviser Robert Komer,
CORDS unified the chain of command for stability
operations in South Vietnam. The program thereby
accelerated the flow of USAID funds and personnel
to President Lyndon Johnson’s “modernization”
of the South Vietnamese countryside. The counterinsurgency
manual recalls CORDS as “a successful synthesis
of military and civilian efforts,” although civilians
constituted less than 15 percent of advisers.[7] This
highly militarized stability operation failed to
deliver even the infrastructural improvement Komer
envisioned, and its failings in the political arena
were even more dramatic.[8] In 1968 the Tet offensive signaled shortfalls
that Komer soon acknowledged: CORDS had not made
the South Vietnamese government capable of sustaining
itself nor had it undermined support for the National
Liberation Front.[9] Tactical gains of territory derived mainly from
the forced relocation of South Vietnamese. While
CORDS was operating, the number of Vietnamese refugees
grew to over three million; Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara credited about 30 percent of the
growth in the Republic of Vietnam’s control to
this redistribution of people.[10] The
idea that Komer’s approach might be antithetical
to sustainable and accountable governance does
not register in FM 3-07’s calculus. The
success they emulate is akin to French accomplishments
in Algeria and Soviet victories in Afghanistan.[11] Accordingly, citizens of allegedly failing
states may question the advisability of stability
operations in their homelands.
FM 3-07 does not acknowledge
the role of human flight in America’s success at
stabilizing and reconstructing other societies.
If stability operations parrot CORDS they will
likely replicate its inverted protection racket,
driving local communities to flee the crosshairs
of counterinsurgency campaigns. In Iraq the populace’s
readiness to relocate has been as crucial for “success”
as it was in Vietnam. Internal displacement and
emigration of some four million Iraqis proved a
crucial antecedent to the decline in violent civilian
deaths during 2007–2008; most of those who migrated
took refuge with one of Iraq’s well-armed religious-ethnic
factions or deemed neighboring Jordan and Syria
more hospitable than the domains of Sassaman and
other occupation authorities.[12] Such population transfers may,
axiomatically, quiet the territory under America’s
dominion through the dubious achievement of outsourcing
government tasks to states receiving refugees and
militia “safe havens,” often the very entities
whose alleged dysfunction justifies occupation.
The Ministry of Stability
The latest emissaries of stability
and reconstruction appear set on reprising a mission
described four decades ago as building “a stable
and effective government that inspires confidence
in the future.”[13] FM 3-07, Stability Operations seals
a six-year push by the Bush administration to establish
military occupation as a Pentagon priority.
In mid-September 2002, the Bush administration’s
first National Security Strategy enshrined idées
fixes that portended the invasion of Iraq and
survived its wake. The argument that weak and “failing”
states posed the greatest threat to American security
continued to develop through L. Paul Bremer’s ill-fated
tenure as Iraq proconsul. Responding to a January
2004 request from the Department of Defense, the
Defense Science Board recommended that the Departments
of Defense and State “make stabilization and reconstruction
missions one of their core competencies” and called
for changing the “mindset” of Defense to embrace
such operations “with the same seriousness as combat
operations.” The State Department then announced
the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction
and Stabilization in late September 2004. Its intended
resources were modest—White House budget requests
totaled $17 million for 2005 setup funds and
$124 million for the next year—and its expected
role amid military conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan
was commensurately small. (The Defense Science
Board study showed that stabilization and reconstruction
costs exceeded basic war fighting expenses during
1991–2004 by a factor of more than three to one,
with post-war operations in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia,
Kosovo and southwest Asia topping $40 billion.)
The Pentagon soon eclipsed State’s
new office in the latter’s putative bailiwick.
Whereas the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review had
made no mention of “stability operations,” “reconstruction”
or “nation-building,” a March 2005 National Defense
Strategy echoed the Defense Science Board’s call
for a greater military role after major combat
operations. On November 28, 2005, Department of
Defense Directive 3000.05 assigned stability operations
the same importance as warfare: “They shall be
given priority comparable to combat operations
and be explicitly addressed and integrated across
all [Defense] activities including doctrine, organization,
training, education, exercises, materiel, leadership,
personnel, facilities and planning.” The potential
for a de facto annexation of “stabilization and
reconstruction missions” by the Pentagon may answer
calls for a standing department of nation building.[14]
FM 3-07, Stability Operations signifies
the success of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith Pentagon
and Bush-Cheney White House at legitimating a project
that was anathema to many officers a decade prior.[15] The manual will be assigned
and read by soldiers bound for Iraq, Afghanistan
and other destinations. Their labors will reflect
the state of the art in America’s bid for friendly,
self-sustaining states. Meanwhile, the manual’s
immediate impact will be in securing that controversial
and troubled aim as a commonplace of US foreign
policy. This stunning leap in military policy assumes
the advisability of stability operations and funnels
resources toward executing the next occupation.
President-elect Barack Obama faces the choice of
sustaining or challenging this vision of turning
soldiers into governors.
Endnotes
[1] Financial
Times, March 29, 2005.
[2] New
York Times, October 23, 2005.
[3] Marilyn
Young, “Counterinsurgency, Now and Forever,” in
Lloyd Garner and Marilyn Young, eds., Iraq and
the Lessons of Vietnam (New York: The New Press,
2007), pp. 223–224.
[4] States
News Service, October 8, 2008.
[5] Department
of the Army, Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 73.
[6] William
Caldwell and Steven Leonard, “Field Manual 3-07,
Stability Operations: Upshifting the Engine of
Change,” Military Review (July-August 2008),
p. 7.
[7] Counterinsurgency
Field Manual, pp. 74–75.
[8] Christopher
Fisher, “The Illusion of Progress: CORDS and the
Crisis of Modernization in South Vietnam, 1965–1968,” Pacific
Historical Review 75/1 (May 2006), pp. 37–41.
[9] James
Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States
and State Building, 1954–1968 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), pp. 216–218.
[10] Noam
Chomsky, The Backroom Boys (Suffolk, England:
Fontana, 1973), pp. 96–103.
[11] A
2004 Defense Science Board report on “Transition
to and from Hostilities” advocated greater
emphasis on stability operations and evaluated
the French and Soviets as successful in four out
of nine areas in “post-conflict operations.” Office
of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition,
Technology and Logistics, Defense Science Board
2004 Summer Study on Transition: Supporting Papers (Washington,
DC: 2005), p. 5.
[12] On
the first source of stability, see Nir Rosen, “The
Myth of the Surge,” Rolling Stone, March
6, 2008. On external migration, see International
Crisis Group, Failed Responsibility: Iraqi Refugees
in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon (Amman/Baghdad/Beirut/Damascus/Brussels,
July 2008).
[13] Department
of the Army, FM 31-23: Stability Operations—US
Army Doctrine (Washington, DC: US Government
Printing Office, 1967), p. 5.
[14] See,
for instance, Francis Fukuyama, “Nation-Building
101,” The Atlantic (January/February 2004);
and Andrew Erdmann and Suzanne Nossel, Are We
All Nation-Builders Now? (Muscatine, IA: Stanley
Foundation, June 2007).
[15] See
the jeremiad of Charles Dunlap, Jr., “The Origins
of the Military Coup of 2012,” Parameters (Winter
1992/1993).
