> In the first month, therefore, the occupiers would face a paradox: the
> institution best equipped to exercise power as a local government˜the U.S.
> military˜would be the one most reluctant to do so.
Which returns us to Clausewitz and Ian's mistery quote: "local government" becomes war by other means.
The way Clausewitz's motto is read backwards in authoritarian discourse is, in my opinion, the most interesting thing Foucault ever said. Reading the motto the other way around - not backwards - you could just as well argue that a war pursued according to badly thought out politics must necessarily fail; sending the Americans in to save the Shi'ite's qualifies as badly thought out politics. But though Clausewitz's ideas are larely abandoned in our wonderful Military Revolution days, the spirit of discipline is far from gone...
As for the British Arabists, jeez, you're talking about a completely different set of creatures to the Marine Corps. The architects of British rule, like Percy Cox, Curzon, Cromer - to say nothing of a bureaucratic mass murderer like Churchill - might have had an extremely objectified realpolitik outlook, but there was a tremendous romantic impulse in people like Lawrence. In the end he went native, and became very bitter when 'his' people were inevitably betrayed. It's fascinating stuff. The guy was a product of Victorian orientalism, not Rambo&Reagan exterminism. I wonder if a bunch of brutalised 19 year olds, whose idea of history is mechanically yelling out Corps history to their drill sergeant are even capable of the sort of emotional involvement that ultimately consumed Lawrence; maybe Graham Greene is not so wrong to say that the American army isn't very adept at the kind of power required for subtle colonialist manipulation - precisely because it is militarily too strong.
Thiago Oppermann
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