A Second Hand Conjecture

Chinese journalist Zhou Shuguang was abducted by the security services in China on a manifestly fatuous charge. Incredibly, he used Twitter to keep the world informed throughout the ordeal.

No Comments »

One thing I’ll never understand about the military is how it looks to failed wars to prove the truthiness of its current strategy. What baffles me more is how earnest scholars, like Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, manage to revel in such silliness. Surely he knows what a failure is? To whit:

The whole process ought to be familiar to students of counterinsurgency. It is, in essence, an update of the old plan known as “concentration” zones or camps. The latter name causes understandable confusion, since we’re not talking about extermination camps of the kind that Hitler built, but rather of settlements where locals can be moved to live under guard, thereby preventing insurgent infiltration. The British used this strategy in the Boer war, the Americans during the Philippine war, and many other powers took similar steps in many other conflicts. In Vietnam they were known as “strategic hamlets.”

This was Boot in April of last year advocating the building of walls around ethnic zones to prevent bombings. Ignoring his advocacy of turning Iraq into an enormous concentration camp, he looks to the Boer Wars, the Philippines, and Vietnam to prove his point. Last I checked, they weren’t raging cases of victory (the Philippine-American War was a qualified victory, since an insurgency continued for well over a decade after the “mission accomplished”… how history repeats). He continues with such advocacy today:

It’s true that there are walls around Dora and other Baghdad neighborhoods. … But then there are walls around many gated communities in the U.S. too. The walls per se are not evidence of reconciliation, I’ll grant you that. But nor are they evidence that reconciliation is impossible. They are one of the important security measures implemented in the past year that is reducing violence and making possible political progress—which is real, whether you admit it or not.

The trick to this, of course, is that Americans choose to live in gated communities, and pay money for the privilege. We do not grant the citizens of Sadr City the same courtesy—we shut them in and declare victory. Boot is discussing coercion, not choice—the deliberate punishing of a community for the actions of a few.

Now in fairness, actual opinion amongst Iraqis, at least those willing to talk to soldiers, is mixed. None liked the walls when they were first installed, but some later came to appreciate the protection they afforded. All, however, according to my contacts, dislike the feeling of disconnectedness the walled communities generate. I’ve been under the impression that fostering disconnectedness is a bad COIN practice, no matter the security gains. And Boot isn’t selling this as a best-fit stop gap measure in the face of no other better ideas. He’s selling it as an unqualified good.

Nouri al-Maliki used to say that he didn’t want to wall off entire sub-cities for their own good; now that his election is in doubt, those beliefs have evaporated. How convenient for him. What is Boot’s excuse?

2 Comments »