war comes to long an, jeffrey race (1972)

(40): key to the resistance to the French had been the economic revolution -- what it had meant for peasants, in daily life

(42): in 1956, gov't advantages: (1) operate openly; (2) military force; (3) foreign resources; (4) nationalist heritage vs. Party advantages: (1) strong local organization, based resolutely in broad social base

(52): elections too dangerous because communists would win , 1957-1961

(55-60): imp--failure of gov't sponsored land reform, 1956-1968 (compare with Taiwan/Japan!). high threshold, very little implementation, etc.

(70): revolutionaries' land reform much more impressive -- distribute it 'fairly'

(98): not advocating 'collectivization', but property

(99): 1959 marked the darkest period in Long An, after serious repression (but this, he argues, actually laid the foundation for their revival)

(109-110): an armed struggle did not mean guerilla warfare--its principal purpose was to make politics possible, in essence [this is helpful, in guarding against some elementary peacenik criticisms of 'violence']

(112): Mao on fireflies

(119): against adventurism -- being careful with the new policy, calling for a general uprising can be 'speculative adventurism'

(121, 125): important--need for a national front was a product of careful strategic thinking and historical reflection (on the Nghe An soviets, from the 1930s). a need to form temporary alliances with intermediate classes. the Party as brain, Army as muscle, and Front the way of fracturing the society...

(128): the National Democratic Revolution -- demands were, as befit the balance of forces, more moderate in the South than in the North

(133): 1961-1963 reprieve for gov't

(140): by 1965, though, the revolutionary forces had won

(141): three kinds of differences, between communists and the Gov't

1. (141-159) strategic -- because they saw revolution as a stage-by-stage process, involving the (a) concept of class (society founded on classes); (b) concept of contradiction (classes fight); (c) concept of force (need to muster willing base, that is willing not b/c it's coerced); (d) concept of balance of forces (be wary of adventurism/reformism; (e) concept of security (sympathetic environment is critical); (f) concept of victory (through overwhelming balance of forces). the sum total of this is that a purely military strategy is unworkable. critical: Party's strategy was preemptive (i.e., a line that prevented the gov't from coopting other classes--the crux of this is the Front, which seeks not to alienate middle/rich peasants--see p. 157), and thus entailed a social strategy, while gov'ts strategy was reinforcement-based (a military defense of the existing distribution of 'values'). the take-away is that--had the gov't been communist!--they might not have lost]
   
2. (159-165) organizational -- the gov't's polcies were (1) conflict-aggravating; (2) based on numerical weakness; (3) critical: implemented through highly centralized bodies. revolutionaries were the opposite.
   
3. (165-174) policy -- revolutionaries pushed policy that (1) redistributed wealth; (2) redistriubted status/power; (3) provoked gov't, protected people (?)
   

(174-176): critically (what he calls another way of thinking about the above, through three summary themes: (1) contingent incentives -- people would only have access to certain benefits (land, upward mobility) that depended upon their participation in the movement. the gov't, through its idiocy, produced this contingency (because the only way to have land was to join the revolution).

(177-178): (2) assimilation of forces -- rural Vietnam as decisive area, broad social base of support

(179-180): (3) building nationalism through 'communalism'/local -- it was through harnessing the local interests of the population that the Party succeeded in building a larger organization.

---

[1] the framing of the counterfactual -- had the gov't been communist! -- belies his own approach to social classes/social conflict. groups work from their interests. not terribly important, but worth noting (see p. 159, p. 267)

[2] take-home: organizations are not superior by virtue of 'organizing better' in some abstract sense, but because--in a definite social context--they speak to the individual interest of those that they are trying to organize. this is why, I think, Olson's account was so unhelpful. without some understanding of who you're trying to organize and the context in which you're operating, you can say very little about what is likely to make 'free-riders' contributors, etc. (see p. 165)

jeffery paige, agrarian revolution (1976)

(6-7): summarizing stinchcome--"family-sized tenancy most likely to produce intense class conflict..."

(7-8): summarizing wolf--"middle peasant provides mass base"

(11): the infamous graph of rural class conflict

(16-17): small-holding as the most efficient form of organization (political factors prevent this form from proliferating, he's suggesting--this is obviously very important in the Angolan case)

(18-25): thus, for noncultivators

1. (18): draws income from land, is economically weak and needs coercion; draws income from capital, is economically strong
   
2. (21): draws income from land is dependent on servile labor; draws income from capital, can tolerate free labor
   
3. (23) zero-sum conflict over static agricultural product; reform possible in other situation
   

(21): graph of three noncultivator attitudes

(22): no labor unions possible here--where dependent on servile labor [?]

(26-34): thus, for cultivating classes

1. (26) land for cultivators important, they will avoid risk; income, they can afford risk
2. (30) importance of land as source of income, stronger incentive for economic competition and weaker incentive for organization (and vice-versa)
3. (34) the greater the importance of land, the more the structural isolation of noncultivators and thus the weaker the pressures for political solidarity
   

(28): quoting Mao on the middle peasants

(33): export agriculture, where there are wages, tends to be equalizing (he puts a lot of emphasis on this, like Marx with working-class, he's saying)

(29): graph of three cultivator attitudes

(40-45): LAND and LAND--agrarian revolt [he's giving the example of El Salvador--but it's difficult, as was noted, to discard this as simple 'agrarian revolt' because it was crushed. it certainly doesn't indicate that we have a quiescent, unorganized, structurally isolated peasantry!]

(42): German Peasant Wars and Bolivian revolution--here the introduction of organizational strength comes from without, he is suggesting. [hone in on this, seems dubious again]

(45): CAPITAL and LAND--the reform commodity movement (focusing on control of the commodity market, not asking for radical demands for redistribution of property)

(48-58): CAPITAL and WAGES---the reform labor movement (a radical class-conscious proletariat focused on limited political questions, because the costs of revolution are higher given the higher probability of reform)

(51-58): discussion the exception of the Malaya plantations [see graph on 57], where 'rubber' means that behavior of the elite is more and more like one who depends on land, due to

1. labor input much less onerous in rubber, thus very difficult for small-holder to cultivate; thus rubber plantations have competition, whereas the tea estates in Ceylon dont
2. rubber took indentured immigrant laborers, servile labor
3. fixed incomes in rubber; expanding in Ceylon

(58): LAND and WAGES--agrarian revolution (you have a well-organized peasantry and a landed elite that can't make concessions, basically)

(62): decentralized sharecropping and irrigated rice production, in particular, will give you revolutionary socialism

(65): graph comparing cotton sharecropping, though, to rice sharecropping (stability of tenure, centralized management, and dependence on landlord in the former). but see graph, since the latter is better on only two out of three.

(66): the migratory labor estate will give you revolutionary nationalism--Algeria and Kenya are the examples. [arguing, on 68, that workers are organized from without--this is the weakest part of the book, since it is impossible to make this distinction in the way that he does

(69): account of the Mau Mau, and the role of the Kikuyu

(70-71): summary of the four outcomes

(95): describing how he distinguishes revolutionary socialism from revolutionary nationalism. [problematize]

(104): quite robust statistical results, having done this

(120-123): summary of chapter 2, his empirical data and the support it lends to chapter 1

(212): Portugese kill 30,000 to 40,000 putting down the Angolan rebellion in 1961

(230): again, SH viable, but the estates were dominant; the graph is useful

(237): estate managers were dependent on colonial controls of (1) labor and controls of (2) land

(250): migratory patterns were prohibiting class-based organization [but here, again, we have to remember that, actually, the class-based organization won!]

(254): no flexibility --> zero-sum conflict

(278): sharp contrast between N. and S. Vietnam

(292): population in N. Vietnam, he's arguing, had a 'conservative interest' in their subsistence plots, and a 'consequent resistance' to political innovation [this is going to be difficult to sustain, my man!]

(300): the point about ecological disaster upsetting the North completely [this is how he makes sense of rebellion, presumably--but weak!]

(322): his highly selective graph of uprisings and 'revolutionary socialist events'

(324): important--here is the most odd aspect of his argument, where the claim is that there was a military dimension to the base in the North, but a political aspect to the insurgency in the South. [interrogate here]

- - - -

[1] 'political organization' from outside vs. from inside--particularly apparent in the case of Vietnam. on the one hand, they had mass support; on the other hand, they were a party 'imposed' in any normal sense of the word. his argument actually hinges on the very thin presentation of 'revolutionary socialist events'

[2] the notion of 'agrarian revolt', and how this squares with anticipated apathy in the 'LAND and LAND' case?

[3] market as enabling reformism. as skocpol rightly says, the market can put inordinate pressures and make upper-classes more stubborn than ever.

[4] wolf and skocpol talk of the importance of a lack of repression in allowing political organization to build--this is fundamentally why the middle peasant matters for wolf, he can avoid the incompetence that comes with being completely subjugated

[5] confusion of Marxism with Materialism--given that there isn't a one-to-one between crops and source of income, might we not have to talk of class struggle as itself determining 'income source'. why is land/income the first mover, always?

[6] in Angola, the importance of political structures in conditioning the character of rebellion, rather than income source. he notes the traditional structures, for example--income source ceases to matter in determining that this was a 'revolutionary nationalist' cast. [and let's not forget, also, that it was the MPLA, the class-conscious segment, that finally won.]

If the paradox of military engagement in such a conflict is that the more you fight the more you lose, then the paradox of political engagement is that the more you rule the weaker the native component of the government becomes, and the more likely it is to collapse when you leave, as the South Vietnamese government did in 1975.

lecture 12, "french imperialism"
charles keith (john merriman's course)

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topic of lecture: French imperialism from 1871-1914

citing a novel from an army officer who speaks about his expedition to Sudan as compensation/consolation for the anger at Alsace-Lorraine's annexation.

during the period we're discussing, the French empire exploded: at the outset, had been little more than outposts in Algeria, military presence in parts of North Africa, Southeast Asia, few "small spits of land" in the Pacific and the Carribean--exploded to include large swathes of North Africa, West Africa, most of mainland Southeast Asia, parts of the Middle East, and territories in the Pacific/Carribean.

by the end of WWI, the French Empire exercised sovereignty over 100 million inhabitants--twice as many people as lived in metropolitan France at that time, roughly.

the passage captures the two central themes at this juncture in French imperial history

(1) serving in the army to recapture prestige lost in the disastrous war with Prussia. officer sees the site of revenge overseas--French nationalism, in this sense, became increasingly inseparable from the idea of a strong, healthy French empire. the fusion of a more modern, French nationalism was new to French history at this period.

(2) the passage comes from a novel, a part of popular culture--during the late 19th century, Empire became something that more and more French people experienced directly, either through popular culture, serving in the army or colonial administrations, or settling lands for the motherland.

take-away from the lecture: Empire, during the Third Republic, became central to French nationalism--it was in the national curriculum, in the national newspapers, and in political discussion. in many ways, it became a "common experience." Empire was a central part of making people French, in sum.

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Empire, of course, had a long past in French history.

during the 17th and 18th centuries, French had a colonial history in the Caribbean and in North America, though many of these possessions were lost around the time of the French revolution. one of the revolution's powerful legacies, in fact, was a conviction to carry the revolution across French borders--to bring the rights of man to the monarchies of the continent. Napoleon of course, continued this--who carried the reach of the Empire across Europe, all the way to Russia.

at the turn of the 19th century, in fact, Napoleon even tried to colonize Egypt--an event which spoke to his messianic belief in science/progress and French civilization. an absence of any real knowledge, of course, about the non-Western world (and a predisposition to the idea of non-Western inferiority). This potent combination, the mission civilizatrice, was to drive French empire until the end.

at the birth of the Third Republic, however, the various tumult in French history prior meant that the Empire was pretty small. it was, correspondingly, fairly marginal in national imaginary. in the years before the French defeat to Prussia, the main urge to expand often came from soldiers/sailors and/or missionaries. even the bulk of Algerian expansion after 1830 was largely the work of Generals, who defied the national government in Paris. at this stage, in a way, the French empire was a giant system of relief for the French military (something to "occupy" them).

BUT: after the loss to Prussia, an acute sense of national inferiority prevailed. Critics attacked the Republic as a cesspool of corruption, etc. Emasculated militarily, slumping economically, shrinking demographically--at this juncture, many people obviously turned to colonial expansion. Jules Very was perhaps the most prominent advocate of this belief.

in his words, "colonial policy was the daugher of industrial policy... export is an essential factor in public prosperity" -- colonies were essential to a strong national economy. France needed exclusive access to new markets and raw materials. furthermore, closely tried to these objectives were political-strategic ones--a policy of abstention was "the road to decadence". Expansion in Africa and Asia was necessary to make France great in the panoply of nations, according to Very.

he also believed in the civilizing mission: "superior races have a right, but also a duty" to bring civilization to other nations. it was the colonial empire that would save France, and elevate their subjects.


----------

So: colonial objectives were brought into national politics, big-time, especially after Very and the Republicans came to power in 1879.

first attempt to expand was in Vietnam, where the endeavored to take over what is now its Northern half (then called Tonkin--had failed on several occasions before). on the pretext of protecting catholics and prosecuting pirates; the campaign was unpopular and failed. general's head ended up on a pike-staff.

nevertheless, this prefigured Empire's future prominence--colonial expansion accelerated from this point on, as France rushed to compete with Britain and Germany.

debates over colonial policy would become a standard part of French political discourse in the 1890s. every government after Jules Very presided over a steadily expanding colonial Empire.

----------

this new prominence was, in many ways, due to the influence of a growing colonial lobby in French society--this lobby was very influential in spreading the idea of Empire as national redemption. it was a diverse group of individuals, who put forth the idea for expansion in many different ways (it was not particularly organized)--included men like informal group of explorers/geographers, shipbuilders, railway magnates, factory owners (path to material wealth), missionairies (converts in the heathen races--declining religiosity in the homeland, don't forget), writers and journalists.

so they weren't united by the same interests--but it is precisely their diversity that shows how compelling Empire had become, for France.

the assumption had become, indeed, that Empire served France, as a whole. Empire as a solution to domestic, national problems ("colonies as a laboratory for modernity"). before the Third Republic, the social value of colonies was little more than a way to get rid of people that the State considered undesirable (French penal colony in New Colony, where over 4,000 of the communards had been sent). but toward the end of the 19th century, this began to change--a potential home for landless peasants, unemployed workers, etc, even.

French engineers, and social planners, came to see colonies as a vast work-site--building from scratch, in a sense. Colonies:France, as what Far West:America (says a colonial administrator in Morocco). a "training ground", for many of these bureaucrats.

----------

in popular culture: schoolchildren began reading about colonies in textbooks (Ministry of Education directive: "it must not be forgotten that France is a world power... Let us not have any scruples about...giving them as rich an image of their country... the mother country and her distant daughters"). the urban middle-classes visiting the Museum of Natural History began to see objects collected in the colonies. and in the massive expositions (in 1900, colonies given their own staging grounds--entire buildings were transported from the Empire).

the Empire was more than a periodic spectacle--crept into the most mundane forms of everyday life. in newspapers, day-in day-out--articles focused on military encounters, of course (vs. a "savage enemy"). captured in novels, as well.

the French encountered an Empire in cafes, dance halls, etc. even goods that people bought evoked the Empire (the yellow "banana" box). even in Church--the last third of the 19th century was a time of intense missionary activity, and people heard financial pleas from these missionaries.

----------

of course, no better way to experience it than go there. though, by the late 1880s and 1890s, there were few Frenchpeople in the colonies (with the exception of Algeria: 300,000 French settlers in 1871)--little more than administrators and garrison--gradually, though, more and more came.

the most drastically affected, of course, were soldiers in the military, as France attempted to expand, and consolidate her Empire (in the face of fierce resistance). long sea journeys, tropical diseases, and miserable pay.

missionairies, too, went overseas more and more.

settlers went to the colonies in order to stay--often committed for life. took to the colonies whatever Capital and possessions they may have had. distance from home, hostility from natives, etc., were all serious obstacles. many were drawn by inducements from people who owned large tracts of land (land-owners also sought Italian and Spanish immigrants, when they couldn't find enough Frenchfolk).

-----------

as Empire grew, life in the colonies became more regularized. administrators/civil service generally took over from soldiers/military, and started to collect taxes, keeping law and order--often having to sanction violence against deviants and those who resisted. increasingly, these people came not from the military, but from civilians who were trained at specific schools in the metropole (Ecole Colonial, for example--founded in 1877).

French government also did its best to draw professionals to the colonies (lawyers, doctors, etc.). Paris offered subsidies.

more and more women came, as well, to these places. in a way, this reflected the taming and the "making domestic" of the colonies--the regularization. women going to seek husbands, etc. many women worked in humanitarian capacities, which is ironic considering what their husbands would be doing.

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by WWI, there would be almost 500,000 French citizens scattered throughout the French empire. what was life like? few people found adventure, of course. disease took a large toll (malaria, yellow fever, etc.). attack/accidents were almost always a concern. medical care was often inadequate. colonial goods were often susceptible to rapidly changing market conditions, meaning that settlers didn't always thrive. social life, in the colonies, was fairly limited--in many places (presumably rural), some citizens might even spend months without seeing other Europeans (!).

most never relinquished their sense of superiority. these attitudes were reinforced by French laws and institutions, and well-established spatial and social segregation.

-----------

to WWI--when "Guns of August" began to roar in 1914, the French empire was at its peak (second only to the British). colonial promoters lauded the benefit of the colonies: (1) prestige, (2) secure site of investment, (3) captive markets, (4) raw materials/cheap labor, (5) reserve army of soldiers. Empire had become a popular part of popular culture. in short, Empire had become a fundamental part of national identity/hubris (as in the rest of Europe).

few French people in 1914 could see few things that might threaten this happy equilibrium. for many people, France had recovered from the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (and Empire was central to this national revival). "The renewal of France," in the words of a colonial official in 1912.

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of course, not all was well in the Emipre. haven't spoken about the effect of French colonialism on those in the colonies. needless to say, French imperialism didn't coincide with the "best of French civilization"

few accepted French expansion without struggle; but few, of course, could match the technology of the French, at the same time.

as French police, legal systems, etc., replaced the overtly military presence of the earlier age--occupation and repression paraded as "integration"/"assimilation"

by 1914, cracks began to appear in the edifice. not everyboy had been swept up by French dreams. a small anti-colonial lobby in the homeland began to appear. for some, expansion seemed a dangerous overextension of French power. others, seeing that promised financial concerns were underwhelming, began to criticize it practically. others yet protested on moral grounds--at a protest in 1906, the famous novelist Anatole France thundered, "whites do not communicate with blacks and yellow men but through arms... the people we call barbarians know us through" our barbarism. Jean Jaures went even further--refuting the mission of the civilizing mission (in this case, in Morocco)--arguing that a civilization existed, in Morocco, that had hope for the future. "And I cannot pardon those who have crushed this hope."

during the 1920s and 1930s, anti-colonialism would become a more potent voice in the metropole. (in 1931, a famous anti-colonial exposition would be organized, in opposition to the colonial expo--nothing similar had happened in 1900).

however: it was not the French themselves who would eventually succeed in crumbling the edifice of Empire. ultimately, it collapsed, first and foremost, because of the many forms of resistance waged by those under their yoke.

in many ways, WWI was a tipping point--the myths sustaining French rule had been very powerful, many in the colonized world had asked themselves whether colonial power was unchallengable and inevitable (and, for some intellectuals, maybe a "good thing"). during the war, about a half a million colonial subjects were conscripted--donning the blue uniform and fighting for France. many others came to the metropole to work. those who came saw religious, economic, political rifts at the home--and they saw a war that gave the lie to French civilization.

for countless people across the world, the Great War showed that France could not and did not correspond to its lofty myths. it dealt a terrible blow to their moral standing; Europeans savagely killing each other, for four years. the contrast between savagery and civilization was now reversed.

after WWI, for growing numbers in France, Emipre seemed to expensive (especially during the depression), immoral, and unwieldy to retain. what had been a source of unification became a source for disunion.

the opposite was true in the colonies. in the 1930s and 1940s, an anti-colonial nationalism was born--in the years after WWI, this would culminate in widespread liberation.

notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part II)

(51): Historically, the practice of the lesser jihad as central to a 'just struggle' has been occasional and isolated, marking points of crisis in Islamic history. After the first centuries of the creation of the Islamic states, there were only four widespread uses of jihad as a mobilizing slogan--until the Afghan jihad of the 1980s. The first was by the Kurdish warrior Saladin in response to the conquest and slaughter of the First Crusade in the eleventh century. The second widespread use was in the Senegambia region of West Africa in the late seventeenth century... Militant Islam began as a movement led by Sufi leaders (marabout) intent on unifying the region against the negative affects of the slave trade... The thrid time jihad was widely waged as a 'just war' was in the middle of the eighteenth century in the Arabian peninsula, proclaimed by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1702-1792), who gave his name to a contemporary doctrine identified with the House of Saud, Wahhabism. Ibn Wahhab's jihad was declared in a colonial setting, on an Arab peninsula that had been under Ottoman control from the sixteenth century. It was not a jihad against unbelievers. Its enemies included Sunni Muslim Ottoman colonizers and Shi'a 'heretics,' whereas its beneficiaries were a newly forged alliance between the ambitious House of Saud and the new imperial power on the horizon, Great Britain... The fourth widespread practice of jihad as an armed struggle was in the Sudan when the anticolonial leader, Muhammad Ahmed (1844-1885), declared himself al-Mahdi in 1881 and began to rally support against a Turko-Egyptian administration that was rapidly becoming absorbed into an expanding British empire. The battle for a jihad in this context was a battle against a colonial occupation that was both Muslim (Turko-Egyptian) and non-Muslim (British).... Armed with no more than spears and swords, the Mahdists won battle after battle, in 1885 reaching the capital, Khartoum, where they killed Charles Gordon, the British general and hero of the second Opium War with China (1856-1860), who was then governor in the Turko-Egyptian administration. [Of course,] once the victorious al-Mahdi moved to unite different regions..., the anti-colonial coalition disintegrated into warring factions in the north, and a marauding army of northern slavers in the south. As the war of liberation degenerated into slave raids, anarchy, famine, and disease reigned. It is estimated that the population of Sudan fell from around 7 million before the Mahdist revolt to somewhere between 2 and 3 million after the fall of the Mahdist state in 1898.
(53): As in Saudi Arabia and West Africa in previous centuries, the experience of Sudan also showed that the same jihad that had begun as the rallying cry of a popular movement could be turned around by those in power--at the expense of its supporters.
(53): Whereas an armed jihad was not known in the nine decades preceding the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, the call for one in radical Islamist thought can be traced to two key thinkers at the beginning of the cold War: the Pakistani journalist and politician Abdul A'la Mawdudi... and Sayyid Qutb.... As we have seen, Muhammad Iqbal had envisioned Muslim political identity not in terms of a nation-state, but as a borderless cultural community, the umma. The irony was the though the formation of Pakistan gave its Muslim inhabitants self-determination, this was as residents of a common territory and not as an umma. Instead of being the profound critique of territorial nationalism that Muhammad Iqbal had intended it to be, Pakistan was a territorial nation as banal as any other... Mawdudi seized upon this contradiction in his appeal to postcolonial Islmist intellectual. Mawdudi claimed that Pakistan was still Na-Pakistan. For Mawdudi, the Islamic state could not just be a territorial state of Muslims; it had to be an ideological state, an Islamic state. Mawdudi was the first to stress the imperative of jihad for contemporary Muslims, the first to claim that armed struggle was central to jihad and, unlike any major Muslim thinker before him, the first to call for a universal jihad."
(56): Qutb elaborated Mawdudi's thought and took it to a more radical conclusion. He made a distinction between modernity and Westernization, calling for an embrace of modernity but a rejection of Westernization...
(58): The Islamist intellectuals did not always win in the struggle against the ulama. In Iran, the ulama won a dramatic victory. The intellectual initiative in Iran is identified with the work of Ali Shariati, who sought to build on and preserve the revolutionary Shi'a identity as the identity of the oppressed...
(58): The difference between moderate and radical political Islam lay in the following: whereas moderates fought for social reforms within the system, radicals were convinced that no meaningful social reform would be possible without taking over the state. [Hassan Al-Banna vs. Sayyid Qutb]
(60): The key division among radical Islamist intellectuals concerns the status of sharia and thus of democracy in the state. Ijtihad refers to the institutionalized practice of interpreting the sharia to take into account changing historical circumstances... The attitude toward ijtihad the single most important issue that divides society-centered from state-centered--and progressive from reactionary--Islamists. Whereas society-centered Islamists insist that the practice of ijtihad be central to modern islamic society, state-centered Islamists are determined that the 'gates of ijtihad remain forever closed... The emphasis on ijtihad is also key to the thought of Sayyid Qutb and sitinguishes his intellectual legacy from the state-centered thought of Mawdudi. My argument is that the theoretical roots of Islamist political terror lie in the state-centered, not the society-centered, movement."
(61): Culture Talk sees fundamentalism as a resistance to modernity; its critics point out that fundamentalism is as modern as modernity--that it is actually a response to modernity. Both sides, however, seek an explanation of political terrorism in culture, whether modern or premodern. Both illustrate different sides of the same culturalist argument, which downplays the political encounter that I think is central to understanding political terrorism.
(63-64): [in 1975], two major influences, each a lesson from the war in Indochina, informed [a shift in US strategy]. One was drawn by the president of the US, the second by Congress. The executive lesson was summed up as the Nixon Doctrine; the legislative lesson was passed as the Clark Amendment... The Nixon Doctrine held that 'Asian boys must fight Asian wars.' It summed up the lesson of more than a decade of US involvement in Indochina. More specifically, it weight the Vietnam debacle against the conduct of relatively successful proxy wars in Laos... After Tet, the United States tried to bring the lesson of Laos to Vietnam: during the last five years of the war, from 1970 to 1975, 'Americanization' gave way to Vietnamization'
(66): Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that the US Air Force had fought 'the largest air war in military history over Laos, dropping 2,1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation--the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.'

ALGERIA

NUMBERS

population: 33,769,668 (July 2008 est.)
land use: arable land, 3.17%; permanent crops, 0.28%; other, 96.55% (2005)
ethnic groups: Arab-Berber 99%, European less than 1% (NB: almost all Algerians are Berber in origin, not Arab; the minority who identify themselves as Berber live mostly in the mountainous region of Kabylie east of Algiers; the Berbers are also Muslim but identify with their Berber rather than Arab cultural heritage; Berbers have long agitated, sometimes violently, for autonomy; the government is unlikely to grant autonomy but has offered to begin sponsoring teaching Berber language in schools)
religions: Sunni Muslim (state religion) 99%, Christian and Jewish 1%
literacy: total population, 69.9%; male, 79.6%; female, 60.1% (2002 est.)
economy: The hydrocarbons sector is the backbone of the economy, accounting for roughly 60% of budget revenues, 30% of GDP, and over 95% of export earnings. Algeria has the eighth-largest reserves of natural gas in the world and is the fourth-largest gas exporter; it ranks 15th in oil reserves. Sustained high oil prices in recent years have helped improve Algeria's financial and macroeconomic indicators.
GDP composition, by sector: agriculture, 8.1%; industry, 62.5%; services, 29.4%
labor force: 9.44 million (or, about 28% of the total population)
labor force by occupation: agriculture 14%, industry 13.4%, construction and public works 10%, trade 14.6%, government 32%, other 16%

HISTORY

THE PRE-COLONIAL PERIOD (-1830)

1000BC-642AD(appx.): The indigenous Berbers (who had inhabited the region since at least 10,000BC) of the area repelled, were subjugated, and/or coexisted with successive invasions and settlement: (1) the Carthaginians, who arrived around 900BC, established Carthage in 814BC (in present-day Tunisia), incompletely subjugated the Berbers to their South, but fell apart after the Punic Wars (264-146BC) --as a result, "by the second century B.C., several large but loosely administered Berber kingdoms had emerged. Two of them were established in Numidia, behind the coastal areas controlled by Carthage" (2) the Romans, who retained a tenuous grip on the Berbers (their lands were the "breadbasket" of the Empire, allegedly) until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476AD; (3) the Byzantines, who under the leadership of Justinian I, in the mid-500s (AD), expelled the Vandal tribes who had settled in and around Carthage after the fall of the Romans. They exercised a "precarious grip" over the Berbers until the Arab invasions: "Local opposition delayed full Byzantine control of the region for twelve years, however, and imperial control, when it came, was but a shadow of the control exercised by Rome. Although an impressive series of fortifications were built, Byzantine rule was compromised by official corruption, incompetence, military weakness, and lack of concern in Constantinople for African affairs. As a result, many rural areas reverted to Berber rule."

642-909: From 642 to 669, a series of sporadic, almost mercenary Arab invasions first spread Islam to these areas. The Ummayads (661-750) launched a more systematic campaign in 670, recognizing the strategic import of these territories. "By 711 Umayyad forces helped by Berber converts to Islam had conquered all of North Africa." However resistance to the heavy-handedness of the ruling Arabs (taxation, discrimination, and even enslavement) soon took the form of an open revolt from 739-740, under the banner of Kharijite Islam (which was, in contrast to Ummayad doctrine, egalitarian and anti-racist). The Ummayads were succeeded by the Abbasids (750-1258) in 750, and exercised control over North Africa by proxy: the East was governed by Al Aghab; in the West, the Rustumid Imamate prevailed from (761-909), notable for the fact that its rulers were elected by "leading citizens."

909-1518: The Fatimids, a Shia caliphate organized by missionaries to North Africa over the course of the 800s, overthrew the Sunni rulers of the region. Though they expanded westward from the site of their first victory at Kairouan (in modern-day Tunisia) in 909, their ultimate ambitions lay in the Mashreq. As a result, they appointed a Berber dynasty (the Zirids: 972-1148) to rule in their stead. Despite these measures, "this period was marked by constant conflict, political instability, and economic decline." "For the first time, the extensive use of Arabic spread to the countryside."

For the latter half of this period, the Almoravids (1106-1147) ruled the Western portion of North Africa, after conquering "Morocco, the Maghrib as far east as Algiers, and Spain up to the Ebro River by 1106". They acknowledged the spiritual authority of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad; under their rule, "Muslim Spain (Andalus in Arabic) was a great source of artistic and intellectual inspiration." The Almoravids were toppled by the Almohads (so-called for their emphasis on the unity of God), who "took control of Morocco in 1146, captured Algiers around 1151, and by 1160 had completed the conquest of the central Maghrib and advanced to Tripolitania." Their dynasty, which hosted two of this region's most famous thinkers, Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), fell eventually in 1271.

The following three hundred years (ca. 1200-1500) saw the Western territories ruled by the Almohads in the hands of the Hafsid dynasty, which was based in Tunis. In the central Maghrib, the Zayanids exercised a tenuous hold. For much of this period, effective authority was less centralized: "Many coastal cities defied the ruling dynasties and asserted their autonomy as municipal republics. They were governed by their merchant oligarchies, by tribal chieftains from the surrounding countryside, or by the privateers who operated out of their ports. " Furthermore, the "aridity of official Islam had little appeal outside the mosques and schools of the cities"--as a result, marabouts were strong influences in rural areas, inspiring numerous uprisings and small autonomous republics.

1518-1830: In the early 1500s, after the reconquest of Grenada in 1492, the Spanish had moved to establish their authority on the Maghribi coast, "taking control of Mers el Kebir in 1505, Oran in 1509, and Tlemcen, Mostaganem, and Ténès, all west of Algiers, in 1510." However, despite the relative "ease" of these campaigns (of course they were brutal), Christian Spain never attempted to establish their authority south of these preliminary (and costly) outposts--perhaps because they sought to concentrate their efforts around the Mediterranean. Their failure to do this made it possible for the Ottomans to assert their control, instead.

In 1518, the prominent Barbary pirate Khair ad Din (aka "Redbeard" or "Barbossa"), who, together with his brother Aruj, had been operating under the Hafsids from Tunis, began a campaign to subdue the coastal region around Algeria (more-or-less establishing the modern, northern boundaries of Algeria). He did this with the patronage of the Ottomans, who in 1533 made him admiral of their fleet. "Under Khair ad Din's regency, Algiers became the center of Ottoman authority in the Maghrib, from which Tunis, Tripoli, and Tlemcen would be overcome and Morocco's independence would be threatened."

By 1587, 44 years after Khair ad Din's son had succeeded his father as beylerbey (provincial governor), the Ottomans instituted a more regular form of administration, relying upon pashas (governors) who served three-year terms (who were assisted by janissaries, recruited from Anatolian peasants, and known in Algeria as the ojaq). Turkish was the official language of the court; Arabs and Berbers were prohibited from government posts.

Over the course of the next two hundred and fifty years, this system ran into trouble on numerous occasions, and was re-formed accordingly (not by design, but by those victorious in the various feuds). From 1671-1830, for example, a dey exercised power; he was chosen by a divan, comprised of sixty nobles (at first this was the ojaq, more or less, but it gradually evolved into a group of the dey's lackeys). Remarkably, "[though] the dey was elected for a life term, ...in the 159 years (1671-1830) that the system survived, fourteen of the twenty-nine deys were removed from office by assassination."

The exact details are perhaps relatively unimportant (see, though, the block quote that follows)--the most salient fact was that the administration, like any other pre-capitalist Empire, depended heavily on the local powers that presided over any number of effectively autonomous provinces under its nominal control. In that sense, effective authority for the average citizen rested not in Constantinople, but in institutions that were entirely more local.

"The dey had direct administrative control only in the regent's enclave, the Dar as Sultan (Domain of the Sultan), which included the city of Algiers and its environs and the fertile Mitidja Plain. The rest of the territory under the regency was divided into three provinces (beyliks): Constantine in the east; Titteri in the central region, with its capital at Médéa; and a western province that after 1791 had its seat at Oran, abandoned that year by Spain when the city was destroyed in an earthquake. Each province was governed by a bey appointed by the dey, usually from the same circle of families. A contingent of the ojaq was assigned to each bey, who also had at his disposal the provincial auxiliaries provided by the privileged makhzen tribes, traditionally exempted from paying taxes on condition that they collect them from other tribes. Tax revenues were conveyed from the provinces to Algiers twice yearly, but the beys were otherwise left to their own devices. Although the regency patronized the tribal chieftains, it never had the unanimous allegiance of the countryside, where heavy taxation frequently provoked unrest. Autonomous tribal states were tolerated, and the regency's authority was seldom applied in the Kabylie."

THE COLONIAL PERIOD (1830-1962)

1830-1954: In the aftermath of decades-long tensions over piracy in the Mediterranean (eventually settled by superior European technology, ending in the Barbary Treaties; this defeat for the Dey preceded heightening tensions between him and the French), the French captured Algeria in a three-week campaign in 1930. The war pitted 34,000 of their soldiers against "7,000 janissaries, 19,000 troops from the beys of Constantine and Oran, and about 17,000 Kabyles." The invasion was violent and vicious (allegedly "disappearing" one-third of the entire Algerian population?). Almost as soon as French troops took Algiers, Charles X (of the Bourbon Restoration), who had authorized the military invasion in order to counter his declining domestic popularity, was deposed. He was replaced by Louis Philippe, the "citizen-king," who was surrounded by opponents to Charles X's decision to invade--nonetheless, withdrawing proved more difficult than invading, and in 1834 it was decided to annex the occupied population (about 3 million Muslims at that time) as a colony.

Intensive French settlement, encouraged by a nexus of private and official commercial interests, resulted in the influx of tens of thousands of European settlers (pied noirs) in the first decades of colonial rule.

the European settlers were largely of peasant farmer or working-class origin from the poor southern areas of Italy, Spain, and France. Others were criminal and political deportees from France, transported under sentence in large numbers to Algeria. In the 1840s and 1850s, to encourage settlement in rural areas official policy was to offer grants of land for a fee and a promise that improvements would be made. A distinction soon developed between the grands colons (great colonists) at one end of the scale, often self-made men who had accumulated large estates or built successful businesses, and the petits blancs (little whites), smallholders and workers at the other end, whose lot was often not much better than that of their Muslim counterparts. According to historian John Ruedy, although by 1848 only 15,000 of the 109,000 European settlers were in rural areas, "by systematically expropriating both pastoralists and farmers, rural colonization was the most important single factor in the destructuring of traditional society."

By 1848, nearly all of Northern Algeria was under French control, though not without encountering significant resistance (most notably the establishment of a Muslim state by Abd Al Qadir (he had fought the Ottomans, as well), who controlled two-thirds of Algeria in 1839; he eventually surrendered in 1847 when fully one-third of the French Army was employed, brutally and indiscriminately, against him and his rural support base).

The system of colonial administration employed by the French is best assessed in the context of the shifting contours of the mainland government: (1) till 1848, Algeria remained under military control, with the exception of pockets of civil administration in those areas where settlement was most intense (while the colons argued for full legal rights and integration with mainland France, the military argued that such measures would jeopardize colonial authority); (2) after the Revolution of 1848 till the advent of the Second Empire in 1852, some moves were made in this direction in three "civil" territories (Algiers, Oran, and Constantine), which were organized as French provinces under civil administration; (3) from 1852 to 1870, Napoleon III, who returned the colony to military rule, instituted a motley set of reforms that antagonized the colons while also not properly attending to the concerns of the bulk of the indigenous population. Though he imagined that European settlement would remain confined to the coast, his intentions were defied by the effects of his 1863 and 1865 decrees, which, it seems, accelerated the break-up of traditional institutions (like communal property) by allowing the individuals to whom they'd been given to sell to speculators; (4) from the birth of the Third Republic in 1870 onwards, civil administration was returned to Algeria; the gov't confirmed its intention to assimilate the colony into France. Over time, an "apartheid" system congealed (not that what went before was any distinct, conceptually), premised on the enfranchisement of the colons, and founded on the suppression, discrimination, and immiseration of the indigenous Muslim population (the Jews, against the will of the colons, were made citizens in 1870).

In 1871, in the aftermath of famines following from grain shortages owing to the Crimean War of 1854-1856 (in a three year period, an estimated 20% of the Muslim population of Constantine had perished), but in direct response to the 1870 order extending civil authority to previously self-governing tribal regions, rebellion racked the Kabyle region. It was suppressed in standard fashion, by collectively punishing the whole Muslim population.

Some assorted statistics relating to French apartheid:

• Because of the many restrictions imposed by the authorities, by 1915 only 50,000 Muslims were eligible to vote in elections in the civil communes.
• The bulk of Algeria's wealth in manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and trade was controlled by the grands colons. The modern European-owned and -managed sector of the economy centered around small industry and a highly developed export trade, designed to provide food and raw materials to France in return for capital and consumer goods. Europeans held about 30% of the total arable land, including the bulk of the most fertile land and most of the areas under irrigation. By 1900, Europeans produced more than two-thirds of the value of output in agriculture and practically all agricultural exports.
• In 1909... Muslims, who made up almost 90% of the population but produced 20% of Algeria's income, paid 70% of direct taxes and 45% of the total taxes collected. And colons controlled how these revenues would be spent. As a result, colon towns had handsome municipal buildings, paved streets lined with trees, fountains and statues, while Algerian villages and rural areas benefited little if at all from tax revenues.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, national consciousness had brewed in a new Muslim leadership: "It consisted of a small but influential class of évolués, other Algerians whose perception of themselves and their country had been shaped by wartime experiences, and a body of religious reformers and teachers." There were, correspondingly, various forms of anti-colonial agitation unfolding during this period (the Young Algerians, who were liberal integrationists active in the reformist movement, which was active from the 1890s to WWI; the Star of North Africa, the first group to call for Algerian independence (in 1927, it was banned in 1929), led by Ahmed Messali Hadj; AUMA, which, under the leadership of Shaykh Abd al Hamid Ben Badis, began in the 1920s to call for a return to the Islamic roots of Algeria). Any inclinations the French government may have had towards negotiating with these groups were nipped in the bud by the intransigence and influence of the white minority, who exercised almost total control over the local administration and had friends in high places in Paris. (It came closs to happening in 1936, when the FEI (comprised of evolues, led by Ferhat Abbas) and the ulema gave their approval to the Violette Plan, which would have given citizenship to a number of Muslims; however, it failed due to opposition from the colons).

1954-1962: In various forms, the struggle for independence had continued, through the events of WWII (Algeria had been governed by the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1942, of course)--after the 1945 massacre at Setif (of anywhere between 6,000 to 45,000 civilians, after a march organized by Abbas's AML, which had the support of Hadj and the ulema, for national liberation had turned violent and killed 103 Europeans), affairs had arguably become irreversibly polarized. On November 1, 1954, the FLN launched an uprising which marked the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. Their increasing success over the next two years was met with very harsh repression by the French (which began, in particular, after the FLN killed 123 Pied Noir civilians in August 1955). By 1956, many nationalist groups, spurred by the repression of the colonial state, had joined the FLN, (with the notable exception of Messali Hadj, whose feud with the FLN resulted in almost 5,000 deaths in "Cafe Wars" in France.) 1956 also saw the Battle of Algiers, as the FLN sought to take the fight to the cities. Though General Jacques Massu employed "whatever means necessary" to dismantle the FLN infrastructure in Algiers, the battle had demonstrated the fact of their popular support.

By 1957, the FLN had evolved into a force of 40,000--in general, they fought as a guerrilla force, and were hardly engaged conventionally. Even still, by 1956, the French had committed almost 400,000 troops against them (including about 170,000 Muslim Algerians)--counterinsurgency tactics, as expected, ranged from napalm and aerial bombardment to the mass relocation of Algerian peasants to "safe zones" (almost 2 million, in all!).

In 1958, the crisis in Algeria led to the overthrow of the French Fourth Republic in a coup d'etat--De Gaulle took over on May 29, 1958, after Parliament approved his candidacy. The idea was that he was the only man who could give direction to the French government (the French feared a repeat of the 1954 debacle in Indochina). Though upon taking power, he had reassured the pied noir population of his support (and had proposed a new constitution for the French Fifth Republic that included an integrated Algeria), events turned in the FLN's favor by 1959. De Gaulle, in September of that year, spoke of self-determination for the Algerian population.

In January 1960, the pieds noir in Algeria, feeling betrayed, launched an insurrection as the police and army stood by. Though it was eventually pacified, another insurrection in April 1961 (this time a "general's putsch", organized by some renegade units and colons vigilantes) threatened the government's writ in a very serious way. De Gaulle was now ready to abandon the pieds noirs. From this, independence became an inevitability: talks with the FLN re-opened in May 1961, a ceasefire was agreed to, effective March 19, 1962--in their final form, these Evian Accords legislated Algerian independence. A vicious three month campaign of pro-pieds noir terrorism notwithstanding (120 bombs a day planted by the OAS), on July 1, 1962, Algerians held a referendum on independence. The vote was nearly unanimous. A few days later, independent Algeria was established.

INDEPENDENCE AND AFTER (1962-2009)

1962-1965: In the immediate aftermath of independence, almost 10% of the population fled for Paris (" most of the 1,025,000 Pieds-Noirs, as well as 81,000 Harkis (pro-French Algerians serving in the French Army"). Appended to the devastation of war, this exodus left Algeria in tatters: "the exodus of the colons deprived the country of most of its managers, civil servants, engineers, teachers, physicians, and skilled workers--all occupations from which the Muslim population had been excluded or discouraged from pursuing by colonial policy. The homeless and displaced numbered in the hundreds of thousands, many suffering from illness, and some 70 percent of the work force was unemployed. Distribution of goods was at a standstill. Departing colons destroyed or carried off public records and utility plans, leaving public services in a shambles. "

FLN leader Ahmed Ben Bella took over as independent Algeria's first president. In his March Decrees of 1963, he announced a program to bring the abandoned land, houses, factories, etc., under state control; additionally, however, the spontaneous cooperatives that had emerged amidst the chaos were to be supported.

At the same time, under Ben Bella's authority, bureaucratic and dictatorial tendencies were clearly in evidence. As Vijay Prashad writes, "The 1963 Constitution of Algeria abolished all political parities except the FLN, and elevated the president of the FLN to the sole formulator of State policy. The energy of the Algerian Revolution would now be concentrated in the body of the president, who for the moment was Ben Bella."

Similarly, the FLN's somewhat opportunistic seizure of the leadership of the anti-colonial struggle reflected the tenuous nature of the alliances that had formed in opposition to the French. It was unsurprising, then, that these began to come apart at the seams, as the FLN one-party state congealed. Indeed, talk of securing the power of the vanguard party against those defying the "general interest" are best situated in the context of these anxieties. Thus, though Ben Bella had support in the National Assembly, he moved to repress other resistance to his rule (in the form of an opposition group eventually led by Ait Ahmed (the FFS-- a Berber Socialist party founded in 1963, and still in existence today); general opposition included also the communists, Messali Hadj, Mohamed Boudiaf of the PRS (or Socialist Revolution Party)). There were also regional insurgencies that needed supressing--in the Kabylie and Southern Sahara (These partly merged with what was left of the general resistance led by Ait Ahmed and Boudiaf).

Ben Bella attempted to further establish his authority by purging figures who were loyal to then minister of defense, Boumediene. Up until this point, it seems, Boumediene had been complicit in the construction of a one-party State, who sought to command the national liberation project in the name of the people (and, of course, against their explicit politics). Nonetheless, Ben Bella went too far, his attempts eventually backfiring in a bloodless military coup, on June 9, 1965. (According to Prashad, however, it was actually Ben Bella's rapproachment with the organized left, perhaps threatening the Army, that inspired to Boumediene to action).

1965-1978: Under Boumediene's authority, "the state dominated society and ruled in the name of socialism." Nationalization increasingly stood for anti-democratic control by the State. "The military played a larger role in society." Revenue from oil and gas reserves played a significant role in the charade of socialism from above. Politically, he cracked down further on the organized left. In all these senses and more, Prashad argues, by the late 1960s Algeria "had moved from an attempt to create a socialist state to a state capitalist one, with a parasitic bourgeoisie confident beside the strong arms of the military."

1978-1992: Boumediene died in December 1978, after which a struggle for succession ensued. As a compromise to the two principal candidates, a relative outsider (but also army man), Chadli Bendjedid, took power in February 1979. He moved to liberalize the economy; in his first Five Year Plan (1980-1984), for example, which turned many state-controlled industries over to private hands. Nonetheless, Algeria suffered from a serious economic crisis throughout the 80's--a state of affairs which deteriorated after a dramatic 1986 fall in the price of oil (oil prices had been declining throughout the decade).

Benjdedid also had to confront an increasingly militant Islamist opposition (can this be theorized as the inevitable outcome of the failure to meaningfully politicize the public?)--he did so by a combination of appeasement and repression: arresting prominent activists but also modifying family law in patriarchal ways. A wave of general outrage from 1985 to 1988 culminated in the the riots of October 1988 (which began as student and worker strikes). In the State's effort to re-assert its control through declaring a State of Emergency, about 500 were estimated killed and 3,000 arrested.

Widespread public agitation in the wake of this incident prompted Benjedid to move towards reform. A new constitution was promulgated in February 1989 (dropping "socialist" from the description of the Algerian state), liberalizing the political sphere but also curtailing women's rights. Local and provincial elections in June 1990 were won by the Islamists (the FIS), but largely because secular parties boycotted--in the aftermath, the FLN attempted to curb electoral laws in their favor, and declared martial law from June to September 1991 under a gov't of national reconciliation, after the FIS responded with a general strike and general agitation.

Nonetheless, the FIS contested the first round of the December 1991 elections, and won handily, trouncing the FLN. This prompted panic amongst the ruling elite, who feared an FIS takeover--on January 11, 1992, members of Benjedid's cabinet dissolved parliament and declared the elections null and void, cancelling the second round and banning all religious parties. Both the FIS and FLN clamored for a return to the electoral process, but police and troops countered with arrests and repression. On February 9th, 1992, a one year state of emergency was announced--Mohammed Boudiaf returned from exile to head the caretaker government.
Massive demonstrations erupted in cities.

1992-2009: All this, of course, set the stage for the Algerian civil war, a conflict which claimed more than 160,000 lives between 1992 and 2002, and pitted the MIA (guerillas in mountains) and the GIA (guerillas in towns)--whose stregnth peaked at 40,000 in 1994, which is also when the GIA and MIA split (which became the AIS), over the question of the latter's loyalty to the FIS (who were locked in soon-to-fail peace talks)--against the military. It was notoriously brutal, claiming the lives of significant numbers of civilians. Nonetheless, it began to subside in intensity after 1997, when the AIS opted for a unilateral ceasefire; the GIA was rent apart by internal divisions, though sporadic fighting continued until about 2002.

Elections in Algeria resumed in 1995 (parliamentary elections were held in 1997). Both of these were won by the Army's party, the National Democratic Rally (RND). In 1999, however, the FLN candidate, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had allied himself with Boumedienne at the time of Ben Bella's overthrow, won the presidency in ultimately uncontested elections (opposition candidates had pulled out, citing fraud concerns). Even still, in April 2004, he was re-elected, with 85% of the vote in an election deemed free and fair (though his opponents cite State control of the media). He is seeking a constitutional amendment, which would allow him to seek a third term.

As character assassination attacks on Sen. Barack Obama have now taken over Sen. John McCain's campaign, and because McCain cites his military experience as of prime importance, now is the time to focus closer attention on a facet of the Arizona Senator's own character. This is related to his 23 combat missions for Operation Rolling Thunder - the Pentagon's name for U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.

the forgotten vietnam-iraq parallel:
The Republicans are showing an uncanny ability to control the public debate. Remember just a couple of months ago, when it was Democratic Party gospel that this was indeed a war we couldn’t win? Somehow the gospel is being rewritten. As the Washington Post reports, the Dem party line now says that we are indeed “making progress” on the military front. Our troops are doing a superb job. It’s just those incompetent Iraqi politicians — looking for “power, revenge, and personal advantage,” Hillary Clinton says — who are blocking the path to a glorious victory.
(...) Long ago, historians of the Vietnam war noted that the intense debate about the war that gripped America rarely made much reference to the suffering of the Vietnamese people. Only “peaceniks” on the far left paid much attention to the two million or more Vietnamese who died, to the corpses and torched villages and napalmed children that were the living — and dying — reality of the war. In the mainstream, where the “serious” discussion unfolded, the only question that mattered was: What is this war doing to the USA? Is it to our benefit to keep on fighting, or are we better off withdrawing?
(...) Is it Bush and Cheney or their antiwar critics who are wearing the white hats? That’s for you to decide. In either case, political leaders and the mainstream media make it clear that you are deciding for a particular vision of what America is all about, what makes America great, and what direction America should take in the future. What happens to the people of Iraq is mentioned only in passing, if at all.
(...) Sad to say, this is probably a fairly accurate reflection of U.S. public opinion. Most people here don’t care too much what happened to the people of Vietnam or what is happening to the people of Iraq. A recent poll showed that the average American thinks under 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died in this war — a vast underestimate. More importantly, the number of Iraqi dead scarcely figures into the public debate. As with the Vietnam war, it’s all about what is happening to us.
(...) That is why Bush’s speechwriters could take the gamble of raising the specter of Vietnam, and why they may very well win. Since the war was turned into a fictional drama, few people know, or care, what really happened in Vietnam. Therefore, it’s easy to change the story around. Few can refute Bush’s absurd version, in which the forecast “bloodbath” supposedly actually happened, and the U.S. withdrawal triggered the Khmer Rouge outrages in Cambodia.
(...) On all those counts, the yarn Bush is spinning could easily prove a winner. It says that we were close to winning in Vietnam. But then the antiwar “cut and run” crowd snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. That let loose a bloody tide of chaos that engulfed southeast Asia, humiliated the U.S., and emboldened the terrorists, who now want to make Iraq a home base from which to launch their next attack upon us. But we have a chance to right all those wrongs — to stem the tide of chaos, regain our pride, crush the terrorists, keep our children safe, and show what America is really made of — if only we have the courage to fight for God’s truth.

bush rewrites history:
“The price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. By the way, he’s counting the victims of the Khmer Rouge, who came to power only after the U.S. ruined Cambodia.
(...) he’s not counting the three million people the U.S. killed in Southeast Asia during that war.

bush, vietnam, and 14 more GIs dead:
Naturally, Mr. Bush fails to note that if the United States had never been in Vietnam, there would not have been the need to add these terms to "our vocabulary." It was the decision by Washington to refuse the right of the Vietnamese to hold countrywide elections as agreed to in the 1954 Geneva agreements and the subsequent machinations by the US military and intelligence agencies to install a client government in southern Vietnam that created the situation that precipitated all of the newly termed phenomena.

thoughts on afghanistan, paraguay, and iraq:
Remember when the U.S. used to claim things like '250 Vietcong' killed during a firefight, most of whom turned out to be civilians? On April 27 the U.S said 'more than 130 Taliban' were killed after Special Forces called in air strikes during a two-day battle in western Afghanistan. Except local residents said there were no Taliban in the village and that the dead included many women and children. With U.S. and NATO forces relying more and more on air power, large numbers of civilian casualties are inevitable.
(...) Drugs. With the help of the CIA, the U.S.-supported regime in South Vietnam and Laos shipped opium from Laos to Thailand, making the Vietnam War ground zero in the heroin epidemic that gripped Europe and the U.S in the late '60s and early '70s. For details see 'The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,' and Frontline's 'Guns, Drugs and the CIA.' Well, 2006 was a banner year for opium production in Afghanistan and, according to an investigation by the Financial Times, Afghan government claims that it had eradicated 21,000 hectares of poppies in Kandahar and Helmand provinces 'bore little resemblance to reality.' Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world's opium.
(...) Meanwhile, a number of NATO members are having second thoughts about the Afghan adventure. A recent Der Spiegel poll indicates that 57 percent of Germans want to withdraw from Afghanistan.
(...) 'It costs a couple of hundred dollars for a bomb,' says Sunil Ram, a professor at the American Military University in West Virginia, 'but they can knock out a $3 million or $4 million vehicle, and kill troops that cost millions of dollars to train.'
[on to paraguay]
(...) Lugo's politics are populist-he calls himself 'the bishop of the poor' and says he is 'inspired by some elements of socialism.' There is a lot to work with in Paraguay. It has the singular distinction of having the most unequal distribution of land in Latin America. Some one percent of the population owns 77 percent of the land.
(...) Benjamin Dangl, editor of Upsidedownworld.com, who has traveled widely in the area, says 'for Paraguay, Lugo is a revolutionary.' Dangl says Lugo could 'significantly' change the culture of repression and corruption, but that 'he is not Evo Morales or Chavez. He isn't likely to do too many radical things economically. Perhaps he will be more like Tabare Vasquez of Uruguay.' He says radicals are more 'hopeful' than they are 'satisfied' with his candidacy.
[iraq]
(...) So why are weapon systems that don't work being sent into war? Because Boeing and Bell made $20 billion off of the V-22, and General Dynamics raked in $11 billion on the Stryker. And now the Army and the Marines are pushing for a new Mine Resist and Ambush Protected (MRAPS) armored vehicle. The Pentagon ordered almost 8,000 of them at a cost of $8.4 billion from the International Truck and Engine and an Israeli armor maker. Plans are to order thousands more. War may be Hell, but for some, Hell is very profitable.

the surge in history:
Military escalation was also LBJ's answer to unrelenting attacks by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese in an uncontrollable civil war -- an increase from 16,800 advisers in 1963 to 545,000 combat troops by 1968. But compare that with Bush's increase of about 28,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. If more than half a million troops couldn't succeed in Vietnam, is a total U.S. force of more than 160,000 likely to pacify Iraq? And what can be done when one escalation doesn't do the trick? The more you double down, Johnson and Nixon found, the harder it is to cut your losses.
(...) [the chronology of withdrawal] We do know that despite Nixon's and Kissinger's behind-the-scenes pragmatism, they continued the fighting for four bloody years -- punctuated by their Cambodian "incursion" in the spring of 1970, a U.S.-backed South Vietnamese offensive in Laos in 1971 and the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972. Throughout, they knew that victory was impossible but hoped that military pressure on Hanoi would force the North Vietnamese into what Nixon called "peace with honor" -- a deal that could end the United States' commitment while preserving its international credibility.
(...) Bush's political concerns are far less personal. He wants a Republican successor, but he faces no direct electoral retribution. No matter what happens in Iraq, his presidency will end in January 2009. That frees him up considerably to stay the course -- despite the unease that doing so is creating among the GOP's presidential candidates and among congressional Republicans who fear that Iraq will cost them the chance to win back the Hill.

why do they hate the US?:
If he only read Time magazine, he would know that bin Laden, who had just finished fighting a successful, U.S.-backed holy war against the Russians, was enraged by the Saudi king's decision to allow American forces onto the Arabian Peninsula in 1990 – he wanted to expel Saddam from Kuwait. And if Matthews were to quickly peruse the Jim Leher Newshour Website, it would reveal bin Laden's "fatwa" of 1996, which is titled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." Pretty subtle, huh?
(...) The only reason anyone listens to or follows bin Laden is because he points at specific foreign policies of the U.S. in order to maintain that he is the one fighting on the defensive. Michael Scheuer, the former head analyst at the CIA's bin Laden unit, and author of Imperial Hubris, told me this himself. He said that the Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980's railing against American culture and the entire region yawned. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, kept his pitch straight and to the point – and it worked. He told them that America was the aggressor, and sited 6 specific policies as evidence:
1: The bases in Saudi Arabia
2: Unquestioning support for Israel (The 1996 Fatwa came on the heels of the first Qana massacre in Lebanon)
3: The no-fly zone bombings and blockade of Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands of people (now replaced on the jihadist sales pitch list by the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan which have killed hundreds of thousands more)
4: Support for dictators across the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, etc.)
5: Pressure on the oil producing states to keep their prices set where America wants them
6: Support for Russia, China and India in their wars against Muslims
(...) They have a following because they point at concrete examples of how the U.S. government makes life worse for the average guy in the Islamic World – when it's not taking it from him outright.
(...) As Professor Robert A. Pape proved in his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism – by studying every single individual suicide bomber on Earth between 1980 and 2004 – the one characteristic that all suicide bombers have in common is the presence of foreign combat forces in their country – not Islam. Whether it's is Sikhs in India, the Communist and atheist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Hamas in Palestine, al-Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia and Egypt crashing planes in the United States or Sunni insurgents in Iraq.
(...) here's veteran intelligence beat reporter James Bamford, (By no means whatsoever is this man a blame-America-first political radical of any description. He's simply a journalist): "Ayman al-Zawahiri argued that al-Qaeda should bring the war to 'the distant enemy' in order to provoke the Americans to strike back and 'personally wage the battle against Muslims.' It was that battle that bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted to spark [with the 9/11 attacks]. As they made clear in their declaration of war 'against Jews and Crusaders,' they believed that the United States and Israel had been waging war against Muslims for decades. Now their hope was to draw Americans into a desert Vietnam, with bin Laden in the role of North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh." It is very important to emphasize: They want to suck us in so they can bleed us dry and then push us out for good – while empowering themselves in the process.
(...) Bin Laden couldn't have laid out his strategy more clearly than in his speech of October 2004: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. ... So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."
(...) Overthrowing the tyrant Saddam Hussein, who bin Laden reviled as an "infidel" and a "socialist," however, was an additional "gift" to the al-Qaeda movement in the words of former CIA-man Scheuer. The Bush team's invasion killed a few birds with one stone for bin Laden: It got rid of the Ba'athists, put tens of thousands of Americans within rifle range and it created a training ground and propaganda tool for new recruits.
(...) Also in 2005, the Saudi government and an Israeli think tank did studies tracking the individual jihadists traveling to Iraq to be trained in fighting Americans. They both found that virtually all of them were youngsters who had been radicalized by the invasion of Iraq – that the only thing older jihadists had to do with it was in sending them off.
(...) So you see, foreign occupation – American foreign policy – is a "major contributing factor" in creating terrorism today, just as it was in the years before September 11th.

air power and the american empire:
World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb. An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a sharp reversal of the pattern of World War I and of most earlier wars, a substantial majority of the dead were noncombatants. [1] The air war, which reached peak intensity with the area bombing, including atomic bombing, of major European and Japanese cities in its final year, had a devastating impact on noncombatant populations.
(...) Bombs had been dropped from the air as early as 1849 on Venice (from balloons) and 1911 in Libya (from planes).
(...) A series of international conferences at the Hague beginning in 1899 set out principles for limiting air war and securing the protection of noncombatants from bombing and other attacks. The 1923 Hague conference crafted a sixty-two article "Rules of Aerial Warfare," which prohibited "Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants." It specifically limited bombardment to military objectives, prohibited "indiscriminate bombardment of the civilian population," and held violators liable to pay compensation. [3] Securing consensus and enforcing limits, however, proved extraordinarily elusive then and since.
(...) The strategic and ethical implications of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have generated a vast contentious literature, as have German and Japanese war crimes and atrocities. By contrast, the US destruction of more than sixty Japanese cities prior to Hiroshima has been slighted both in the scholarly literatures in English and Japanese and in popular consciousness in both Japan and the US. It has been overshadowed by the atomic bombing and by heroic narratives of American conduct in the "Good War", an outcome not unrelated to the emergence of the US as a superpower. [5] Arguably, however, the central technological, strategic and ethical breakthroughs that would leave their stamp on subsequent wars occurred in area bombing of noncombatants prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A.C. Grayling explains the different responses to firebombing and atomic bombing this way: ". . . the frisson of dread created by the thought of what atomic weaponry can do affects those who contemplate it more than those who actually suffer from it; for whether it is an atom bomb rather than tons of high explosives and incendiaries that does the damage, not a jot of suffering is added to its victims that the burned and buried, the dismembered and blinded, the dying and bereaved of Dresden or Hamburg did not feel." [6]
(...) If others, notably Germany, England and Japan led the way in area bombing, the targeting for destruction of entire cities with conventional weapons emerged in 1944-45 as the centerpiece of US warfare. It was an approach that combined technological predominance with minimization of US casualties in ways that would become the hallmark of the American way of war in campaigns from Korea and Indochina to the Gulf and Iraq Wars and, indeed define the trajectory of major wars since the 1940s. The result would be the decimation of noncombatant populations and extraordinary "kill ratios" favoring the US military. Yet for the US, victory would prove extraordinary elusive. This is one important reason why, six decades on, World War II retains its aura for Americans as the "Good War", and why Americans have yet to effectively come to grips with questions of ethics and international law associated with their area bombing of Germany and Japan.
(...) The twentieth century was notable for the contradiction between international attempts to place limits on the destructiveness of war and to hold nations and their military leaders responsible for violations of international laws of war (Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals and successive Geneva conventions, particularly the 1949 convention protecting civilians and POWs) and the systematic violation of those principles by the major powers. [7] For example, while the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals clearly articulated the principle of universality, the Tribunals, both held in cities that had been obliterated by Allied bombing, famously shielded the victorious powers, above all the US, from responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Telford Taylor, chief counsel for war crimes prosecution at Nuremberg, made the point with specific reference to the bombing of cities a quarter century later:

"Since both sides had played the terrible game of urban destruction -- the Allies far more successfully -- there was no basis for criminal charges against Germans or Japanese, and in fact no such charges were brought . . . . Aerial bombardment had been used so extensively and ruthlessly on the Allied side as well as the Axis side that neither at Nuremberg nor Tokyo was the issue made a part of the trials."

(...) From 1932 to the early years of World War II the United States was an outspoken critic of city bombing, notably but not exclusively German and Japanese bombing. President Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the warring nations in 1939 on the first day of World War II "under no circumstances [to] undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities." [9] Britain, France and Germany agreed to limit bombing to strictly military objectives, but in May 1940 German bombardment of Rotterdam exacted 40,000 civilian lives and forced the Dutch surrender. Up to this point, bombing of cities had been isolated, sporadic and for the most part confined to the axis powers. Then in August 1940, after German bombers bombed London, Churchill ordered an attack on Berlin. The steady escalation of bombing targeting cities and their noncombatant populations followed. [10]
(...) After entering the war following Pearl Harbor, the US continued to claim the moral high ground by abjuring civilian bombing. This stance was consistent with the prevailing view in the Air Force high command that the most efficient bombing strategies were those that pinpointed destruction of enemy forces and installations, factories, and railroads, not those designed to terrorize or kill noncombatants. Nevertheless, the US collaborated with indiscriminate bombing at Casablanca in 1943, when a US-British division of labor emerged in which the British conducted the indiscriminate bombing of cities and the US sought to destroy military and industrial targets. [11] In the final years of the war, Max Hastings observed that Churchill and his bomber commander Arthur Harris set out to concentrate "all available forces for the progressive, systematic destruction of the urban areas of the Reich, city block by city block, factory by factory, until the enemy became a nation of troglodytes, scratching in the ruins." [12] (...) From 1942 with the bombing of Lubeck followed by Cologne, Hamburg and others, Harris pursued this strategy. The perfection of onslaught from the air, or what should be understood as terror bombing, is better understood, however, as a British-American joint venture.
(...) With German artillery and interceptors taking a heavy toll on US planes, pressure mounted for a strategic shift at a time of growing sophistication, numbers and range of US aircraft, and the invention of napalm and the perfection of radar. Ironically, while radar could have paved the way for a reaffirmation of tactical bombing, now made feasible at night, in the context of the endgame of the war what transpired was the massive assault on cities and their urban populations
(...) On February 13-14, 1945 British bombers with US planes following up destroyed Dresden, a historic cultural center with no significant military industry or bases. By conservative estimate, 35,000 people were incinerated in a single raid led by. [13] The American writer Kurt Vonnegut, then a young POW in Dresden, penned the classic account: [14]

"They burnt the whole damn town down . . . . Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who'd simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A fire storm is an amazing thing. It doesn't occur in nature. It's fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn't a damned thing to breathe."

(...) Although far worse was in the offing in Japan, Dresden provoked the last significant public discussion of the bombing of women and children to take place during World War II, and the city became synonymous with terror bombing by the US and Britain. Coming in the wake of both the Hamburg and Munich bombings, the British government faced sharp questioning in parliament. [16] In the United States, debate was largely provoked not by the destruction wrought by the raids, but by an Associated Press report widely published in the US and Britain stating explicitly that "the Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of the great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler's doom." American officials quickly acted to neutralize the report by pointing to the widely publicized great cathedral of Cologne, left standing after US bombing as a symbol of American humanity, and by reiterating US adherence to principles restricting attacks to military targets. Secretary of War Henry Stimson stated that "Our policy never has been to inflict terror bombing on civilian populations," claiming that Dresden, as a major transportation hub, was of military significance. [17] In fact, US public discussion, not to speak of protest, was minimal; in Britain there was more impassioned discussion, but with the smell of victory in the air, the government easily quieted the storm. The bombing continued. Strategic bombing had passed its sternest test in the realm of public reaction in Britain and the United States.
(...) it was in the Pacific theatre, and specifically in Japan, that the full brunt of air power would be felt. Between 1932 and 1945, Japan had bombed Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing and other cities, testing chemical weapons in Ningbo and throughout Zhejiang province. [18] In the early months of 1945, the United States shifted its attention to the Pacific as it gained the capacity to attack Japan from newly captured bases in Tinian and Guam. While the US continued to proclaim adherence to tactical bombing, tests of firebombing options against Japanese homes throughout 1943-44 demonstrated that M-69 bombs were highly effective against the densely packed wooden structures of Japanese cities. [19] In the final six months of the war, the US threw the full weight of its air power into campaigns to burn whole Japanese cities to the ground and terrorize, incapacitate and kill their largely defenseless residents in an effort to force surrender.
(...) The goal of the bombing assault that destroyed Japan's major cities in the period between May and August 1945, the US Strategic Bombing Survey explained, was "either to bring overwhelming pressure on her to surrender, or to reduce her capability of resisting invasion. . . . [by destroying] the basic economic and social fabric of the country." [23] A proposal by the Chief of Staff of the Twentieth Air Force to target the imperial palace was rejected, but in the wake of successive failures to eliminate such key strategic targets as Japan's Nakajima Aircraft Factory west of Tokyo, the area bombing of Japanese cities was approved. [24]
(...) The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas. Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror in the survivors, with jellied gasoline and napalm that would create a sea of flames. Stripped of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade detection, the bombers, which had been designed for high-altitude precision attacks, carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. [25] The attack on an area that the US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners. Whipped by fierce winds, flames detonated by the bombs leaped across a fifteen square mile area of Tokyo generating immense firestorms that engulfed and killed scores of thousands of residents.
(...) Police cameraman Ishikawa Koyo described the streets of Tokyo as "rivers of fire . . . flaming pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves blazed like 'matchsticks' as their wood and paper homes exploded in flames. Under the wind and the gigantic breath of the fire, immense incandescent vortices rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening, sucking whole blocks of houses into their maelstrom of fire."
(...) Nature reinforced man's handiwork in the form of akakaze, the red wind that swept with hurricane force across the Tokyo plain and propelled firestorms across the city with terrifying speed and intensity. The wind drove temperatures up to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, creating superheated vapors that advanced ahead of the flames, killing or incapacitating their victims. "The mechanisms of death were so multiple and simultaneous -- oxygen deficiency and carbon monoxide poisoning, radiant heat and direct flames, debris and the trampling feet of stampeding crowds -- that causes of death were later hard to ascertain . . ." [27]
(...) The survey concluded -- plausibly, but only for events prior to August 6, 1945 -- that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. The largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly."
(...) How many people died on the night of March 9-10 in what flight commander Gen. Thomas Power termed "the greatest single disaster incurred by any enemy in military history?" The Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that 87,793 people died in the raid, 40,918 were injured, and 1,008,005 people lost their homes. Robert Rhodes, estimating the dead at more than 100,000 men, women and children, suggested that probably a million more were injured and another million were left homeless. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Police offered a figure of 124,711 killed and wounded and 286,358 building and homes destroyed. The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors' accounts. [28] With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peak levels as high as 135,000 per square mile, the highest density of any industrial city in the world, and with firefighting measures ludicrously inadequate to the task, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo were destroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fire blocked tens of thousands fleeing for their lives. An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out areas. Given a near total inability to fight fires of the magnitude produced by the bombs, it is possible to imagine that casualties may have been several times higher than the figures presented on both sides of the conflict. The single effective Japanese government measure taken to reduce the slaughter of US bombing was the 1944 evacuation to the countryside of 400,000 children from major cities, 225, 000 of them from Tokyo. [29]
(...) No previous or subsequent conventional bombing raid ever came close to generating the toll in death and destruction of the great Tokyo raid of March 9-10. The airborne assault on Tokyo and other Japanese cities ground on relentlessly. According to Japanese police statistics, the 65 raids on Tokyo between December 6, 1944 and August 13, 1945 resulted in 137,582 casualties, 787,145 homes and buildings destroyed, and 2,625,279 people displaced. [30] Following the Tokyo raid of March 9-10, the firebombing was extended nationwide. In the ten-day period beginning on March 9, 9,373 tons of bombs destroyed 31 square miles of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. Overall, bombing strikes destroyed 40 percent of the 66 Japanese cities targeted, with total tonnage dropped on Japan increasing from 13,800 tons in March to 42,700 tons in July. [31] If the bombing of Dresden produced a ripple of public debate in Europe, no discernible wave of revulsion, not to speak of protest, took place in the US or Europe in the wake of the far greater destruction of Japanese cities and the slaughter of civilian populations on a scale that had no parallel in the history of bombing.
(...) US planes ruled the skies. Overall, by one calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [32]
(...) Between January and July 1945, the US firebombed and destroyed all but five Japanese cities, deliberately sparing Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital, and four others. The extent of the destruction was impressive ranging from 50 to 60% of the urban area destroyed in cities including Kobe, Yokohama and Tokyo, to 60 to 88% in seventeen cities, to 98.6% in the case of Toyama. [33] In the end, the Atomic Bomb Selection Committee chose Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki as the pristine targets to display the awesome power of the atomic bomb to Japan and the world in the event that would both bring to a spectacular end the costliest war in human history and send a powerful message to the Soviet Union.
(...) Michael Sherry has compellingly described the triumph of technological fanaticism as the hallmark of the air war that quintessentially shaped the American way of fighting and heavily stamped remembrances of the War ever after: "The shared mentality of the fanatics of air war was their dedication to assembling and perfecting their methods of destruction, and . . . doing so overshadowed the original purposes justifying destruction . . . .The lack of a proclaimed intent to destroy, the sense of being driven by the twin demands of bureaucracy and technology, distinguished America's technological fanaticism from its enemies' ideological fanaticism."
(...) Wartime technological fanaticism in my view is best understood as a means of operationalizing national goals. Taken for granted were the legitimacy and benevolence of American global power and a perception of the Japanese as both uniquely brutal and inherently inferior. Technology was harnessed to the driving force of American nationalism, which repeatedly came to the fore in times of war, and was fashioned under wartime conditions, beginning with the conquest of the Philippines in 1898 and running through successive wars and police actions in Latin America and Asia that spanned the long twentieth century. In other words, technological fanaticism is inseparable from American nationalism and conceptions of a benevolent American-dominated global order. In contrast to British, Japanese and other nationalisms associated with expansive powers, the American approach to the postwar order lay not in a vision centered on the acquisition of colonies but in a global network of military bases and naval and air power that only in recent years has begun to be understood as the American way of empire.
(...)Throughout the spring and summer of 1945 the US air war in Japan reached an intensity that is still perhaps unrivaled in the magnitude of human slaughter. [35] That moment was a product of the combination of technological breakthroughs, American nationalism, and the erosion of moral and political scruples pertaining to the killing of civilians, perhaps intensified by the racism that crystallized in the Pacific theatre. [36]
(...) The most important way in which World War II shaped the moral and technological tenor of mass destruction was the erosion in the course of war of the stigma associated with the systematic targeting of civilian populations from the air, and elimination of the constraints, which for some years had restrained certain air powers from area bombing. What was new was both the scale of killing made possible by the new technologies and the routinization of mass killing or state terrorism. If area bombing remained controversial throughout much of World War II, something to be concealed or denied by its practitioners, by the end of the conflagration it would become the acknowledged centerpiece of war making, emblematic above all of the American way of war even as the nature of the targets and the weapons were transformed by new technologies and confronted new forms of resistance. Indeed, for six decades the US (and those fighting under its umbrella) has been virtually alone in fighting wars and police actions notable for their reliance on airpower in general and the deliberate targeting for destruction of civilians, and the infrastructure that makes possible their survival, in particular. Certainly in this epoch no others have bombed on a scale approaching that of the US. The US would conceal the deliberate annihilation of noncombatants with the figleaf that Sahr Conway-Lanz describes as the myth of collateral damage, that is the claim, however systematic the bombing, that the intent was elimination of military targets, not the slaughter of noncombatants.
(...) The Nuremberg Indictment defined "crimes against humanity" as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war," language that resonated powerfully with the area bombing campaigns not only of Japan and Germany but of Britain and the US. [38] These efforts appear to have done little to stay the hand of power. Indeed, while the atomic bomb would leave a deep imprint on the collective consciousness of the twentieth century, memory of the area bombings and firebombing of major cities soon disappeared from the consciousness of all but the victims.
(...) The ability to destroy an entire city and annihilate its population in a single bombing campaign was not only far more "efficient" and less costly for the attacker than previous methods of warfare, it also sanitized slaughter. Air power distanced executioners from victims, transforming the visual and tactile experience of killing. The bombardier never looks squarely into the eyes of the victim, nor does the act of destruction have the physical immediacy for the perpetrator of decapitation by sword or even shooting with a machine gun. This may be particularly important when the principal targets are women, children and the elderly.
(...) While President Truman claimed that the Hiroshima bomb targeted a naval base, the decision to detonate the bomb in the skies above Hiroshima and Nagasaki was taken to maximize the killing of their inhabitants and the destruction of the built environment. It was also calculated to demonstrate to the Japanese government and people, to the authorities in the Soviet Union and other potential challengers of American preeminence, and to the people of the world, the omnipotence of American power and the certain destruction that would be visited on any who defied the United States. The debate over the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has reverberated throughout the postwar era, centered on the killing of noncombatants and on its significance in ending World War II and shaping the subsequent US-Soviet conflict that defined postwar geopolitics. [39] In a sense, however, the very focus of that debate on the atomic bomb, and later on the development of the hydrogen bomb, may have contributed to the silencing of the no less pressing issues associated with the killing of noncombatants with ever more powerful 'conventional' weapons.
(...) The US did not drop atomic bombs again in the six decades since the end of World War II, although it repeatedly threatened their use in Korea, in Vietnam and elsewhere. But it incorporated annihilation of noncombatants in the bombing programs that have been integral to the successive "conventional wars" that it has waged subsequently. With area bombing at the core of its strategic agenda, US attacks on cities and noncombatants would run the gamut from firebombing, napalming, cluster bombing, and atomic bombing to the use of chemical defoliants and depleted uranium weapons and bunker buster bombs in an ever expanding circle of destruction. [40] Indiscriminate bombing of noncombatants has been responsible for the most massive destruction and loss of life throughout this epoch, even while the US staunchly maintains that it does not deliberately kill civilians, thereby hewing to Conway-Lanz's collateral damage principle to protect it not only from political criticism in the US, but also from international criticisms.
(...) In that war, it was not the bombing of cities but Nazi genocide against Jews, Catholics, Romany, homosexuals and other Germans as well as Poles, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and Japanese slaughter of Asian noncombatants that exacted the heaviest price in human lives. Each of these examples had its unique character and historical and ideological origins. All rested on dehumanizing assumptions concerning the "other" and produced large-scale slaughter of noncombatant populations. Japan's China war produced notable cases of atrocities that, then and later, captured world attention. They included the Nanjing Massacre, the bombings of Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, Chongqing and other cities, the enslavement of the comfort women, and the vivisection experiments and biowarfare bombs of Unit 731. Less noted then and since were the systematic barbarities perpetrated against resistant villagers, though this produced the largest number of the estimated ten to thirty million Chinese who lost their lives in the war, a number that far surpasses the half million or more Japanese noncombatants who died at the hands of US bombing, and may have exceeded Soviet losses to Nazi invasion conventionally estimated at 20 million lives. [41] In that and subsequent wars it would be the signature barbarities such as the Nanjing Massacre, the Bataan Death March, and the massacres at Nogunri and My Lai rather than the quotidian events that defined the systematic daily and hourly killing, which have attracted sustained attention, sparked bitter controversy, and shaped historical memory.
(...) The war dead in Europe alone in World War II, including the Soviet Union, have been estimated in the range of 30 to 40 million, fifty percent more than the toll in World War I. To this we must add 25 to 35 million Asian victims in the fifteen-year resistance war in China (1931-45), approximately three million Japanese, and millions more in Southeast Asia. Among the important instances of the killing of noncombatants in World War II, the US destruction of Japanese cities is perhaps least known and least controversial. In contrast to the fierce and continuing debate over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nazi extermination of Jews and others, and the far smaller-scale allied bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and such Japanese atrocities as the Nanjing Massacre and the vivisection experiments of Unit 731, the US firebombing of Japanese cities has virtually disappeared from international and even American and Japanese historical memory of the war.
(...) In World War I, ninety percent of the fatalities directly attributable to the war were military, nearly all of them Europeans and Americans. Most estimates place World War II casualties in Europe in the range of 50-60 percent noncombatants. In the case of Asia, when war-induced famine casualties are included, the noncombatant death toll was almost certainly substantially higher in both absolute and percentage terms. [42] The United States, its homeland untouched by war, suffered approximately 100,000 deaths in the entire Asian theater, a figure lower than that for the single Tokyo air raid of March 10, 1945, and well below the death toll at Hiroshima or in the Battle of Okinawa. Japan's three million war dead, while thirty times the number of US dead, was still only a small fraction of the toll suffered by the Chinese who resisted the Japanese military juggernaut. These are numbers of relative casualties that the US, by fighting no war on its own soil since the Civil War, and by adapting strategies that maximize its technological and economic strength and minimize its own casualties, would replicate to even greater numerical advantage in subsequent wars.
(...) World War II remains indelibly engraved in American memory as the "Good War" and in important respects it was. In confronting the war machines of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the United States played a large role in defeating aggressors and opening the way for a wave of decolonization that swept the globe in subsequent decades. It was also a war that catapulted the United States to global supremacy and established the institutional foundations for the global projection of American power in a network of military bases and unrivaled technological supremacy.
(...) For most Americans, in retrospect World War II seemed a "Good War" in another sense: the US entered and exited the war buoyed by absolute moral certainty borne of a mission to punish aggression in the form of a genocidal Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism run amok. Moreover, Americans remember the generosity of US aid not only to war torn allies, but to rebuild the societies of former adversaries, Germany and Japan. Such an interpretation masks the extent to which Americans shared with their adversaries an abiding nationalism and expansionist urges. In contrast to earlier territorial empires, this took the form of new regional and global structures facilitating the exercise of American power. The victory, which propelled the US to a hegemonic position which carried authority to condemn and punish war crimes committed by defeated nations, remains a major obstacle to a thoroughgoing reassessment of the wartime conduct of the US in general, and issues of mass destruction carried out by its forces in particular.
(...) At Nuremberg and subsequent trials, more than 1,800 Germans were convicted of war crimes and 294 were executed. At the Tokyo Trials, 28 were indicted and seven were sentenced to death. At subsequent A and B class trials conducted by the allied powers between 1945 and 1951, 5,700 Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese were indicted. 984 were initially sentenced to death (the sentences of 50 of these were commuted); 475 received life sentences, and 2,944 received limited prison terms. The result of military defeat, occupation, and war crimes tribunals has been protracted and profound reflection and self-criticism by significant groups within both countries. In the case of Germany -- but not yet Japan -- there has been meaningful official recognition of the criminal conduct of genocidal and other barbaric policies as well as appropriate restitution to victims in the form of public apology and substantial official reparations. For its part, the Japanese state continues to reject official reparations claims to such war victims as Korean and Chinese forced laborers and the military comfort women (sexual slaves), while the war remains a fiercely contested intellectual-political issue as demonstrated by the decades long conflicts over textbook treatments of colonialism and war, the Yasukuni shrine (the symbol of emperor-centered nationalism, empire and war), the military comfort women, and the Nanjing Massacre controversies. [44]
(...) In contrast to these responses to the war in Germany and Japan, and even to the ongoing debate in the US about the uses of the atomic bomb, there has been virtually no awareness of, not to speak of critical reflection on, the US bombing of Japanese civilians in the months prior to Hiroshima. The systematic bombing of Japanese noncombatants in the course of the destruction of Japanese cities must be added to a list of the horrific legacies of the war that includes Nazi genocide and a host of Japanese war crimes against Asian peoples. Only by engaging the issues, and above all the impact of this approach to the massive killing of noncombatants that has been central to all subsequent US wars, can Americans begin to approach the Nuremberg ideal that holds victors as well as vanquished to the same standards with respect to crimes against humanity, or the standard of the 1949 Geneva Accord which requires the protection of civilians in time of war. This is the principle of universality enshrined at Nuremberg and violated in practice by the US and others beginning with the 1946 trials, which declared US immunity from prosecution for war crimes.
(...) American self-conceptions of benevolence and justice have remained fixed not on the reality of the killing of noncombatants but on the combination of American intentions in combat and generosity in charting postwar recovery in all wars since 1945.
(...) The centrality of the wholesale killing of noncombatants through the myriad uses of air power runs like a red line from the bombings of 1944-45 through the Korean and Indochinese wars to the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In the course of six decades since the firebombing and atomic bombing of Japan, while important continuities are observable, such as the firebombing and napalming of cities, new, more powerful and versatile aircraft and weapons would be deployed in the course of successive American wars fought predominantly in Asia.
(...) LeMay recalled of Korea:

"We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon and said, 'Look, let us go up there…and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea – and they're not very big – and that ought to stop it.' Well, the answer to that was four or five screams – 'You'll kill a lot of non-combatants,' and 'It's too horrible.' Yet over a period three years or so…we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too… Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening – a lot of people can't stomach it." [47]

(...) In the course of three years, US/UN forces in Korea flew 1,040,708 sorties and dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm. Counting all types of air borne ordnance, including rockets and machine-gun ammunition, the total tonnage comes to 698,000 tons. Marilyn Young estimates the death toll in Korea, most of it noncombatants, at two to four million, and in the South alone, more than five million people had been displaced, according to UN estimates. [48]
(...) Beginning in Korea, US bombing was extended from cities to the countryside with devastating effects. In what Bruce Cumings has called the "final act of this barbaric air war," in spring 1953 North Korea's main irrigation dams were destroyed shortly after the rice had been transplanted. [49]
(...) In response to reports of Axis plans to use poison gases, Roosevelt warned that "use of such weapons has been outlawed by the general opinion of civilized mankind. This country has not used them, and I hope that we never will be compelled to use them. I state categorically that we shall under no circumstances resort to the use of such weapons unless they are first used by our enemies." [50] This principle, incorporated in US Army Field Manual 27-10, Law of Land Warfare, issued in 1954, affirmed the principle of no first use of gas warfare and bacteriological warfare. By 1956, that provision had disappeared, replaced by the assertion that the US was party to no treaty in force "that prohibits or restricts the use in warfare of toxic or nontoxic gases, or smoke or incendiary materials or of bacteriological warfare." US CBW research and procurement efforts, that began in the early 1950s and culminated in the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, resulted in the use of chemical and biological weapons both against Vietnamese forces and nature, specifically extending from the destruction of forest cover to the destruction of crops. As Seymour Hersh documents, the US CBW program in Vietnam "gradually escalated from the use of leaf-killing defoliants to rice-killing herbicides and nausea-producing gases." [51] How widespread were US gas attacks in Vietnam? A 1967 Japanese study of US anticrop and defoliation attacks prepared by the head of the Agronomy Section of the Japan Science Council concluded that more than 3.8 million acres of arable land in South Vietnam was ruined and more than 1,000 peasants and 13,000 livestock were killed. [52] In the face of US military claims that the gases were benign, Dr. Pham Duc Nam told Japanese investigators that a three-day attack near Da Nang from February 25 to 27, 1966 had poisoned both livestock and people, some of whom died. "Pregnant women gave birth to still-born or premature children. Most of the affected cattle died from serious diarrhea, and river fish floated on the surface of the water belly up, soon after the chemicals were spread." [53]
(...) Before turning to Iraq, it is worth recalling President Nixon's comments on the bombing of Cambodia as preserved in the Kissinger tapes released in May 2004. In a burst of anger on Dec. 9, 1970, when Nixon railed over what he saw as the Air Force's lackluster bombing campaign in Cambodia. Kissinger responded: "The Air Force is designed to fight an air battle against the Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war." Nixon then exploded: "I want them to hit everything. I want them to use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help out there, and let's start giving them a little shock." Here was an early warning signal of the "Shock and Awe" strategy of a generation later. Kissinger relayed the order: "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." [54] In the course of the Vietnam War the US embraced chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as integral parts of its arsenal.
(...) The new evidence makes clear that Cambodia was bombed far more heavily than was previously known, and that, unbeknownst to the American public or the world, it began not with Nixon in 1970 but on October 4, 1965. During a fall 2000 visit to Vietnam, President Clinton made available detailed Air Force records to help the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian governments to uncover the remains of two thousand missing American soldiers. The records provided specific data on place and scale of bombing. The incomplete data reveal that October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons' worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. The consequences go far beyond the dead, the injured, and the continued dangers of unexploded ordinance. As Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan argue persuasively, "Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d'état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide." [55]
(...) Second, as Seymour Hersh and others have observed, the US military, while continuing to pursue massive bombing of Iraqi neighborhoods, above all in the destruction of Falluja but even in Baghdad, has chosen to throw a cloak of silence over the air war. The major media have faithfully honored official dicta in this as in so many other ways. [57] Finally, among the George W. Bush administration's major initiatives have been the efforts to seize control of space as the centerpiece of global domination in an era that is slated to replace the bomber as the primary delivery weapon of mass destruction. [58] Air power remains among the major causes of death, destruction, dislocation and division in contemporary Iraq in a war that had taken approximately 655,000 lives by the summer of 2006 in the most authoritative study to date, that of The Lancet) and created more than two million refugees abroad and an equal number displaced internally (one in seven Iraqis are displaced). Largely unreported in the US mainstream press, and invisible in US television news and reportage, this is the central reality that confronts the Iraq people. US strategy has produced the explosive social divisions that promise to lead to permanent warfare in Iraq and throughout the region. Despite the unchallenged air supremacy that the US has wielded in Iraq since 1991 and especially since 2003, there is no end in sight to US warfare and civil war in Iraq and throughout the region. [59]
(...) We have shown the decisive impact of the final year of World War II in setting in place the preeminence of strategic bombing as quintessential to the US way of war, one that would characterize subsequent major wars that have wreaked yet greater devastation on noncombatant populations. Yet for all the power unleashed by US bombers, for all the millions of victims, in the six decades since 1945, victory against successive, predominantly Asian foes, has proved extraordinary elusive for the United States.