McFate’s “scholarship” is pretty shoddy. Is this really the best that the Washington intelligence establishment can come up with? She uses no original sources in this article and in fact, having just read many of the article and chapters she draws up (and mostly cites) I think her “paraphrasing” of some of the work of other scholars comes very close to plagiaraism. There are passages that are very close to those appearing in Wakin, Nader, Price, Horowitz, Hickey and Gusterson.

I am not an anthropologist; however, I am an analyst who studies the sciences and complexities of cultures. I feel the need to defend Dr. McFate within the confines of this blog. I have read many of her articles and as for her work coming a little to late (February 2nd, 2006 at 11:44 am Anthropology.net) it is better late than never for I don’t see very many others working dilligently to assist our military folks in understanding the culture of a country they are trying to assist, and I repeat the word “ASSIST”. The need for cultural understanding isn’t always a weapon of the war, in some cases it could become such a weapon; hoewever, our world has many cultures where good and evil exists. How that knowledge of a countries culture is utilized determines if this is a weapon or not. Basically this is for our troops to understand not only the “evil” but the “good” as well so not to misunderstand those they are trying to assist.

counterinsurgency
task in many lands.

http://www.twq.com/04winter/docs/04winter_metz.pdf

There is now much of an historic record for what was
done in our
counterinsurgency response to the Iraq insurgency and
how it worked
out.
Mr. Metz’s article is important because it was written
early in the
insurgency and offered solutions to ongoing problems,
many of which
were
put into practice. Thus, this article is invaluable,
not only for what
it
admits to be the misjudgments of the Pentagon but also
for its
assumptions as to what the insurgency and Iraq are all
about. To my
mind,
this article is a radical departure from the Vietnam
experience. So I
particularly look forward to the opinions of those who
may have
experienced Vietnam insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Personally, I
fear
that, unless this article was neutralized by others–
and I think not–
it
represents a pathological gold mine to understanding
where we went
wrong and
where we thought wrong, being culture blind and
language deaf. Worst of
all,
it seems to me, the Pentagon operated on a series of
ideological assumptions, as this article indicates,
that support my
opinion
that we went in truly intelligence blind.

Daniel E. Teodoru

************************************************

A very interesting story made yet another scandal
for
the White House:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050100854_pf.html
At the end of a basic training ceremony, Iraqi Army
recruits in Anbar province tore off their uniforms and
refused to serve. According to the Wash. Post:

The protest was triggered by an announcement that the
new soldiers, all residents of Anbar province –
widely considered the heartland of Iraq’s Sunni Arab
insurgent movement — would be required to serve
outside their home towns and outside the province as
well.

To me, having posted Mr. Metz’s 2003 article on the
Iraq insurgency, I am encouraged that someone finally,
in effect, said: Rumsfeld goes or we go!

To understand this view, one must first recall the
imperial McNamara solution to the Vietnam War: a large
central army. I was in Danang Airport waiting for my
plane to Saigon when I met and ARVN soldier on
emergency leave to go back home to his Mekong Delta
village. He was stationed in a unit near Danang and
the local Viet Cong Committee of his village tried to
talk him into deserting, using the well known
nice–>mean “binh van” tactics scripted way back by
Lenin. First he was sent requests to return to protect
his family; then he was sent a death warrant if he did
not desert; then he was sent a threat to his family;
finally, he received a package with a small child’s
hand in it. Thinking it was his young son’s, he asked
leave to return home. There was no other way to
confirm that. I have no idea what happened. But the
story came to mind when I read the above story about
the Anbar training camp. In fact, we succeeded in
Vietnam only after the Tet Offensive, when we
concentrated our assets and efforts into training
local forces– RFs and PFs– to resist the VC from the
villages. That spelled the end of the Viet Cong and
the war became against Hanoi’s regular troops sent
south.

Let us remember that Rumsfeld ordered our “liberator”
troops to not interfere with looting, violence and
murder after Saddam fell on grounds that “freedom is
messy.” Thus, the insurgency began as a crime spree.
As a result, we could not disarm people; they needed
their AK-47s to protect their homes. It was only when
our troops came under constant attack that all Iraqis
were deemed suspect of trying to kill our troops until
proven innocents.

The more we preempted, barging into homes in the
middle of the night, the more we turned the Iraqis
into outraged resistors. Soon they went from avenging
insults to their Iraqi dignity to avenging dead
relatives. Apparently none of Gen. Sanchez’s
commanders read Lora Blumenfeld’s book REVENGE, as
seen by Mediterranean peoples. We kept, as Metz wrote,
assuming that we were dealing with Jihadists from
abroad. And so, as in Vietnam, when we realized that
we couldn’t stay, we concentrated on building up an
Iraqi army to replace ours.

To make a long story short, we turned an unleashing of
criminals into a foreign Jihadist insurrection from
abroad (for Rumsfeld ideology substituting for
intelligence). And so we focused on creating a Shi’ite
Army to protect against Sunni insurgents and then a
Sunni Army to protect against Shi’ia Death Squads (not
to speak of the Kurd Peshmerga we fully armed). When
we tried to put it all together into a national army
that we control, we only repeated the ARVN catastrophe
of mass desertions.

But now the lowest soldiers have made it clear that
this is a LOCAL war, to protect their neighborhoods
and villages. Perhaps now Mr. Bush will go the next
step and fire Rumsfeld and replace our military
trainers with able Arab speaking advisers who can
train local police forces to protect their own
families.

At the same time, withdrawing our troops on a fixed
schedule and asking the UN to replace us with police
advisers will refocus this war into the many local
wars that it really is. The Central Government can be
helped by us with reconstruction funds that are
performance standards based (their corruption could
never be as bad as that of our contractors).

In the end we may not get credit for Iraq’s police
suppression of a bandit insurgency fought and won at
the local level, the UN police advises will, but them
we also will be remote from any final failure if it
occurs. Yet I really think that our ability to
persuade Iraq at the central and local levels will
only manifest once we remove our ham-bone military and
empower Iraqis one local sector at a time.

Daniel E. Teodoru

Antropologi.info posts on the delirium of this War on Terror, with news of anthropologist Montgomery McFate’s (of the Institute for Defense Analyses) take on how to win this war. I will personally inject at this point, that this is too little too late…

It could, in fact, be a perfectly moral decision—if, that is, it were taken after careful consideration of all of the implications. But the case is parallel to that of the conscientious objector who is asked if he would never, ever kill another human being….even if the human being in question were raping and torturing to death his wife, daughter, or neighbor. The answer might still be yes, but the consequences would have been considered.

In the case in hand, I agree completely with Ozma when she writes,

I am all for exposes of American naughtiness. But I am actually very unsympathetic to the proposition that American anthropology is (or, alternatively, once upon a time was) somehow a quasi-criminal endeavour, or a rogues’ gallery of malevolent wankers.

It is one thing—and a very desirable thing, indeed—to recognize the sins of the past. It is another entirely to be so caught up in self-flagellation that considered judgment of circumstances becomes impossible.

John McC — obviously we are simpatico on this one, but I do think it is also important to champion the stand-alone importance of scholarship in fields like medieval history. If everything scholarly had to be judged according to criteria of current relevance (or what feels like current relevance), well, sakes alive! (as I reckon you’d agree anyhow).

As for whether we can disavow certain practices specifally *as anthros* — I dunno about this, really. For example, “clandestine ethnography” is one definition of spying, right? But my problem with government agents getting sneaky abroad is in no way limited to distress about whether they call themselves “anthropologists” as a cover story while doing it. Getting too worked up about that one dimension strikes me as, at base, a worry about such charades making the rest of us “real anthropologists” look bad. But it’s not like U.S. undercover operatives’ (potentially nefarious) actions would be made more okay if they called themselves fairy princesses rather than anthros while carrying them out, right?

So it seems to me there is another motivation for critical scholarship like that of Price and Suzuki (and the sum total of my knowledge of their work has been gathered here, I should make clear). It is to suggest there is something *inherently* naughty about American anthropology, itself, not just “American anthropology when used as a cover story by agents of American naughtiness”. I mean, I am all for exposes of American naughtiness. But I am actually very unsympathetic to the proposition that American anthropology is (or, alternatively, once upon a time was) somehow a quasi-criminal endeavour, or a rogues’ gallery of malevolent wankers. I’ll freely admit I feel that way sometimes at the AAAs… but I think it is incorrect as a guiding principle of historical scholarship.