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Review of The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2008

Wendy Brown
Wendy Brown
Affiliation:
Wendy Brown is professor of political science at theUniversity of California at Berkeley. She wishes to thank Michael MacDonald for his critical reading of a first draft of this essay
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Abstract

Wendy Brown on The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. By the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Forward by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos, and John A. Nagl. Introduction by Sarah Sewall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 472p. $15.00.

Type
Review Symposium
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 354 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2008

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References

Notes

1 The claim about winning militarily and losing politically emerged as early as 2004 (cf. Thomas E. Ricks, “Dissension Grows in Senior Ranks on War Strategy: U.S. May Be Winning Battles in Iraq But Losing the War, Some Officers Say,” http://www.washingtonpost.com May 9, 2004, A01) and has continued through Max Boot's widely cited Wall Street Journal editorial on President George W. Bush's August 22, 2007, “losing Vietnam” speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (Max Boot, “Another Vietnam? President Bush's Analogy to Iraq Is Not Inaccurate, Just Incomplete” http://www.wsj.com August 24, 2007). A different variation on the theme is offered in Ali A. Allawi's The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

2 Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 90–92.

3 The appellation “field manual” is notably odd for a treatise concerned with a battle lacking spatial or temporal boundaries and which is precisely not about “going by the book.”

4 There has been much rumbling on the Internet and in the print news (cf. Patricia Cohen, “Scholars and the Military Share a Foxhole, Uneasily” New York Times, December 22, 2007) about the tawdriness of scholarly research mobilized for military purposes, and also about the moral unseemliness of an academic human rights center collaborating on a war manual. But the moralizing eclipses what is most important to understand about the phenomenon—why the military needs this particular academic knowledge, how human rights operates in an imperial frame today, why anthropologists are being “embedded” in the field in significant numbers, and what the implications are of the blurred borders among military, academy, and capital. Not only has Sarah Sewell, head of the Carr Human Rights Center at Harvard, formerly worked at the Pentagon, but Sewell herself points out that one of the major concerns of the manual is with protecting civilians, a preeminent human rights concern during wartime. If human rights activists regard the reducing of civilian casualties and the protecting of human life as an end in itself, while the generals see it as strategic in winning the civilian population over to their side, within the strictly instrumental calculations of a neoliberal rationality, the different motivations are largely irrelevant to the convergent aims. This is especially so given the importance of being nonpartisan and even apolitical to most human rights projects—it makes the task of protecting human life amidst war perfectly consistent, and leaves aside the question of a war's purposes or of who is responsible for instigating it. A strictly moral and decontextualized commitment to reducing violence and preserving human life makes any collaboration a possibility. That said, the manual's joint authorship gives new meaning to then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's 2002 declaration, “the war on terrorism is a war for human rights.”

5 According to anthropologist David Price, who closely examined one chapter of the manual's unmarked and unacknowledged cribbing from scholarly sources (and discovered that they range from Max Weber and Anthony Giddens to Victor Turner), the plagiarism was brushed off by University of Chicago Press Editor in Chief John Tryneski. What the Press took on board, Price reports Tryneski as saying, was not a work of scholarship but, rather, a key “historic document.” “Pilfered Scholarship Devastates General Petraeus' Counterinsurgency Field Manual,” CounterPunch October 16–31, 2007, 1–6.

6 Many of the paradoxes sound like variations on chapter titles from Machiavelli's Prince and herald the same fusion of war and governance. Nor, upon consideration, is this surprising: Machiavelli's focus in that little book, it will be remembered, was on what he called the “new principality”—a populated territory initially taken by force but enduringly secured through discerning engagement with the history and possibilities of the new acquisition.

7 Only three very short paragraphs of this nearly 400-page text are devoted to the subject of private contractors and multinational corporations. These paragraphs are largely descriptive, and the only prescription the manual can offer is this: “When contractors or other businesses are being paid to support U.S. military or other government agencies, the principle of unity of command should apply” (p. 65).