CULTURES OF WAR

Abstract

This roundtable discussion of John Dower's Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq brings together the views of five scholars from a variety of academic disciplines: Sheila Miyoshi Jager (Oberlin), Monica Kim (Chicago), Ravi Arvind Palat (Binghamton), Emily Rosenberg (UC–Irvine), and Ussama Makdisi (Rice). In the December 2011 issue of Critical Asian Studies the participants will interact with one another in part 2 of the roundtable.

Notes

^1. Dower 2010.

^2. President Lyndon Johnson later confided that his decision to gradually increase the levers of war was due to fear of China's reaction; calling up the reserves and publicly committing the United States to a full-scale war in Vietnam might have precipitated another Korea-like confrontation. It is also important to remember that a chorus of voices was already challenging the direction of U.S. policy on Vietnam on the important issue of escalate-or-withdrawal. Historians writing after the fact have generally given short shrift to this dissent, instead focusing on just a few lone voices in the administration like George Ball in the executive branch. However, as Fredrik Logevall and others have shown, there was in reality a “veritable chorus” of people in the State Department and National Security Council, as well as analysts in the CIA, who shared Ball's views. William Bundy and John McNaughton, two key players in the policy deliberations in late 1964 when Saigon was on the point of collapse, shared Ball's pessimism about the long-term prospects of the war and the likely consequences of U.S. defeat in South Vietnam. Influential Democratic senators Richard Russell andWayne Morse also advocated a negotiated neutralization of South Vietnam and eventual American withdrawal. Moreover, elite opinion was also divided on what to do. Prominent commentators such as Walter Lippman, Drew Pearson, Arthur Krock, and Hans J. Morgenthau all opposed a major American escalation. Thus, while it may be tempting to ascribe the failure in Vietnam to the same “groupthink mentality” of a shared cold war consensus, the reality was that by the early 1960s that consensus had began to fracture in large part because the cold war had begun to change. See Logevall 1999, 375–77. See also Morgenthau 1965.

^3. See Scales Jr. 2004 (Culture), 21. See also Scales Jr. 2004 (Transformation). A report in a special edition of Military Review Counterinsurgency Reader (October 2006) complements the Army/Marine Corps Field Manual (FM) 3-24 on counterinsurgency operations.

^6. See “Counterinsurgency” in FM 3-24, at www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf. The FM mentions “culture” eighty-eight times and “cultural” ninety times. The manual was published in 2007 by University of Chicago Press: The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

^4. General David Petraeus outlined his new approach to tactics in strategy in Iraq as early as 2006 when he wrote: “Knowledge of the cultural terrain can be as important as, and sometimes even more important than, the knowledge of the geographical terrain. This observation acknowledges that the people are, in many respects, the decisive terrain, and that we must study that terrain in the same way that we have always studied the geographical terrain.” See Petraeus 2006, 51.

^5. An analysis and description of the “cultural turn” in U.S. military strategy can be found in my monograph, Jager 2007. Much of the material used was drawn from that study. The use of anthropologists and social scientists in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is controversial. In particular, the Army's Human Terrain System (HTS) and its formation and deployment of Human Terrain Teams (HTT) have garnered considerable attention within the anthropological community as well as mainstream media. HTS/HTT is a DoD program conceived in 2005 and implemented in 2007. Manned by social scientists, the HTT operates by embedding itself with deployed units to provide commanders with an understanding of the “cultural terrain” to make informed decisions on developing relations, promoting community development and identifying threats. From the beginning the HTS/HTT came under intense criticism from academic anthropologists for betraying fundamental principles of anthropological ethics. Citing past misuse of social scientists in the counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam, some anthropologists have denounced the program as “mercenary anthropology.” Roberto Gonzalez, a leading critical voice, is concerned by what he sees as a dangerous trend in the co-optation of cultural knowledge for military purposes, a view shared by other notable anthropologists, namely David Price and Hugh Gusterson. Their concern centers on what they see as politically motivated ethnographic work that can endanger informants and their families. But mostly, they wonder whether using cultural knowledge for military operations will threaten the disciplinary integrity of anthropology itself when cultural knowledge is used as a weapon. See Gonzales 2007; Gusterson 2003; Price 2002 (Interlopers); Price 2002 (Lessons); Price, 2006. In October 2007, the executive board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a statement on the HTS program as “an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.” It concluded that (a) “the HTS Program created conditions which are likely to place anthropologists in positions in which their work will be in violation of the AAA Code of Ethics,” and (b) “its use of anthropology poses a danger to both other anthropologists and persons other anthropologists study.” The Executive Board did not, however, condemn the HTS because they believed anthropologists should not work for the government, but because the HTS was specifically designed to assist the military in the prosecution of war: “Anthropology can and in fact is obliged to help improve U.S. government policies through the widest possible circulation of anthropological understanding in the public sphere, so as to contribute to a transparent and informed development and implementation of U.S. policy by robustly democratic processes of fact-finding, debate, dialogue, and deliberation.” The Executive Board affirmed that “anthropology can legitimately and effectively help guide U.S. policy to serve the humane causes of global peace and social justice.” See American Anthropological Association Executive Board Statement on the Human Terrain System Project 2007. In a later 2009 report commissioned by the Executive Board of the AAA to study HTS in order to formulate an official position on members' participation in HTS activities, the commission concluded that “constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible” but that “AAA emphasize the incompatibility of the HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers.” See AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) 2009, 70–71. Other critics from within the government including DoD and policy experts have criticized the HTS program's lack of accountability, poor leadership, mismanagement, and the recruitment of unqualified personnel. John Stanton, for example, has been a particularly harsh critic of HTS, stating that “program oversight, discipline and accountability have been virtually non-existent from the beginning.” See Stanton 2008, 2. In her investigative reporting in Afghanistan, journalist Ann Marlowe relayed similar complaints, adding that some of the HTTs even needed interpreters: “It is hard to see how they are getting closer to the people or learning more than a smart American officer who's done more homework,” she concluded. See Marlowe 2007, 4. Yet, despite these and other problems, most critics of HTS/HTT still admit that the “cultural turn” in counterinsurgency made a dramatic difference in Iraq, whether HTS/HTT directly contributed to this outcome or not.

^7. The Bush Doctrine, which was developed in response to circumstances confronting the United States and its allies in the wake of 9/11, provided a use-of-force policy that addresses the requirement for offensive action to prevent threats from materializing on American shores. Lieber and Lieber (2007) have identified four key themes of the Bush Doctrine that have generated controversy. First, it calls for preemptive military action against hostile states and terrorist groups seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Second, it advocates that the United States will not allow its global military strength to be challenged by any foreign power. Third, it expresses a commitment to multilateral international cooperation, but makes clear that the United States “will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary” to defend national interests and security. Fourth, it proclaims the goal of spreading democracy and human rights around the globe, especially in the Muslim world.

^8. Kim 2009, 14.

^9. Kim 2007, 1.

^10. Among the other innovations in strategy and policy was the reconceptualization of the “war on terror” not as one war but as many different wars. This meant fighting terrorist groups and networks, even transnational ones like al-Qaeda, as separate but related conflicts, and this meant in turn introducing flexibility and adapting military operations and tactics to meet the distinct challenges of the enemy. Another related aspect of this strategy was to focus less on the moral distinctions between “us” and “them”—a major centerpiece of the Bush Doctrine— and more on the differences between “them.”

^11. Wehner 2011, 2.

^12. Ibid.

^13. Dower 2000.

^15. Wehner 2011, 2–3.

^14. Douthat 2011.

^1. Dower 2010, 11. Page numbers for Dower 2010 citations below will be given in parentheses.

^2. “Language and rhetoric themselves become a prison, and the machinery of destruction has its own momentum.” (Dower 2010, 101.)

^3. In his introduction, Dower points out that “[d]ouble standards and hypocrisy became another recurrent theme” in the narrative of Cultures of War (xxx). In his extensive footnotes, Dower comes back to the question of “double standards” and explicitly links it to the issue of legality and warfare: “The double standards reflected here go beyond the discrepancy between rhetoric and practice, and were in fact canonized in the ‘rules of war’ the great powers ostensibly endorsed at the time, for it was understood that these rules applied only to warfare between ‘civilized’ nations and ‘similar’ enemies.” (490)

^4. The most oft-referenced scholar on the relationship between states of war and legality is perhaps German jurist Carl Schmitt. See Schmitt 2003. For a discussion on international humanitarian law that situates Schmitt's theories within a longer genealogy, see Koskenniemi 2002. The work of Nathaniel Berman also critically assesses the historical claims to universalism in international humanitarian law; see Berman 2004. On the changing nature of war as a legal institution, see Kennedy 2006.

^5. This quote comes from the statement made by Rear Admiral Harris during a phone conference call with the press when the news of the suicides of three detainees at Guantánamo broke on 11 June 2006. Although the camp commander did not divulge the names of the three detainees— two of whom were from Saudi Arabia, one from Yemen—the Saudi Arabian government identified the two Saudis as Mani bin Shaman bin Turki al Habradi and Yasser Talal Abdullah Yahya al Zahrani. The story became international news. (For further details, see Risen and Golden 2006; Rosenberg and Clark 2006; and Selsky and Loven 2006.)

^6. “Statement by the President on the Violation of the 38^th Parallel,” dated 26 June 1950. Part of the Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1945–1953 of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. See www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers; accessed 21 May 2011.

^7. “The President's News Conference,” dated 29 June 1950. Part of the Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1945–1953 of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. See www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers; accessed 21 May 2011.

^1. Dower 2010, 208; subsequent references to pages in this work will be in parenthesis in the text.

^2. Significantly, though, the attack on Pearl Harbor was an extraordinarily successful “surgical strike”: only forty-nine civilians were killed, and the majority of those by “friendly fire.” See Cumings 2009, 307.

^3. Hensman 2001, 4184.

^4. Cumings 2009, 304.

^5. Achcar 2002, 74–75.

^6. Todd 2003, 80.

^7. Cumings 2009, 64–68, 132–33, 307.

^8. Ali 2003, 133–34.

^9. Hensman 2001, 4185.

^10. Quoted in Dirlik 1994, 1.

^11. Cumings 2009, 64.

^12. Ibid., 141.

^13. McComas 1991, 107, quoted in Cumings 2009, 308.

^14. Hersh 2000, 49.

^15. Anderson 2002, 13.

^16. Ali 2000, 6.

^17. Smith 2002, 99.

^18. Goodman 2004.

^19. Wallerstein 2002, 67.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Hein

guest editor