[lbo-talk] Thoughts on Reed and Vietnam (2)

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Mon Sep 1 10:03:39 PDT 2008


Anyway, Obama is going to find re-starting the Clinton era imperialism of bush wars pretty tough to impossible. He'll have to draw down troops in Iraq to almost base maintance levels where they will be vulnerable and try to get the Iraqis to accept US bases.


>From the military point of view the whole concept of the army as
police units is flawed to the bone because the military are not police units. I suspect that Colin Powell knew this and understood from his days in Vietnam, that's precisely why the US military Vietnam campaign failed. And from his days under Bush senior, the whole military apparatus must have known this, precisely because they did not intend to occupy Iraq---defeat and crush the military and get out fast. The once learned and now forgotten lesson of Vietnam is that counterinsurgency doesn't work because the whole country side is turned into the enemy, and on that scale no army can control a country that refuses occupation.

Somebody in the military better start educating the Neocons and other so-called foriegn policy experts on the differences between domestic police units and military units. The whole basis of US foreign policy, that we are supposed to be the iron nannies of moral virtue for the rest of the world, leads directly to using the military as a police force.

The corruption of the military used as a police force, and the domestic police force turning in a paramilitary corrupts both ways.


>From the military side, military units with policing duties don't
follow the laws, because they are the law and there is no local civilian authority or law over them on the ground. The form corruption takes is to violate the whole military ethic of soldiering, to follow orders and ignore personal moral or civilian codes. Police units on the other hand are supposed to follow civilian laws, and they are supposed to exercise moral judgements. (Whether they do or not is irrelevant to the principle here.) The only standing police orders are arrest the bad guys breaking laws and let the courts sort it out. Since the UCMJ mostly concerns internal conduct of military operations and personnel, there is no mention of civilian law (as far as I know.)

I learned from Sixty Minutes tonight that the military appraisal of risk benefit analysis yields thirty dead to one high value target. Translated into domestic police practice that means its okay to kill 30 people on a street in the line of fire, if you can drop one known felony suspect. Do we want those ratios exercised in local police forces? Civilian laws where I come from don't empower the police to shoot thirty people to kill one suspect. The whole concept is beyond the reach of civilian law enforcement.

On the domestic side, police units, through their militarization become corrupted into a military state apparatus because their civilian authorities have ignored the local legal controls on domestic police. The war on terror has blurred the boundaries between what is legally sanctioned and what isn't, and the differences between executive branch regulatory decrees, congressionally passed federal laws, state criminal law, and military rules of engagement. The Patriot Act manages to secede congressional authority to the executive as somekind of neurotic expediant, while the executive branch has defaulted to a military understanding of domestic security. The whole formulation is ludicious.

I think this blurring process is where Bush's war on terror has taken us. And we are not going to get out of this fog until some traditional liberal boundaries between these concepts of what are proper military activities and what are proper police activities are re-asserted in very clear legal and proceedural ways.

I hope Andie N and Charles B will weigh in here, as this is classic US legalistic liberalism---and is exactly what Obama and most of the Democratic party seem to lack in understanding at a fundamental level. You can see all this police-military mind set, or police-state mind set going on in all the immigrant communities around here in now routine raids and round ups.

Re-assertion of liberal legal principles probably won't happen under the Obama administration because I am not at all sure Obama understands or conceptualizes goverance this way. Niether of the Clintons did, and McCain still thinks we have to burn the villiage to save it... About the only two speakers last week who seemed to hint that they understood something of these matters were Kucinich and Gore.



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