“So what have you heard about this class? Why are you here at West Point and why are you in this class?”
That was the first question posed at the beginning of the semester. Honestly, I’m glad Sam McKiernan just skipped over the first question and answered why she was enrolled in the class. Nobody really wants to admit why they’re here. Usually, they just give the Reader’s Digest version (“I just wanted to serve my country and go to college”) because our real reasons are too personal to get into and nobody wants to make Lesson One Introductions into a Dr. Phil episode. All of this aside, going around in a circle and talking about ourselves is something I love about lesson ones. If the Academy has taught me anything, it’s that cadets are good at two things: Talking about the Academy and talking about themselves. I am particularly good at the latter, though I have absolutely no idea what reason I gave for taking the class. Honestly, the semester is already a bit of a terrible blur.
What is absolutely not a blur is my constant grappling with what exactly “Winning the Peace” is. Besides a near-perfect term for describing the amorphous academic concept of achieving “victory” in “peacetime” I had little idea what all it meant. I signed up for the class because people said good things about it. To my knowledge, that’s the only reason why people sign up for any class. Since that first lesson where I sat there and prayed I wouldn’t have to reveal why I left Washington and Lee (and risked ending a very promising relationship) and came here, I suppose I have a grasp for what exactly the class is about. And what it’s not. And what my problems are with the underlying idea that drives this course.
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Colonel Seidule is a great guy. I wasn’t sure if he was great or perhaps just another really smart guy that is destined to teach here until the end of days, but I knew he was great when we entered the abomination that is the (former) ballroom in Cullum Hall. It was in there that a cadet asked the good Colonel why West Point had vomited 21st-century technology in a grand, baroque 19th-century room. That was when he said it was a travesty and he wished it had never happened. Great guys have that kind of appreciation for history. It’s too bad his department isn’t full of people like him, or the world for that matter.
Lesson Two was about context. Context is a really funny thing. It’s funny because most of the time, it’s absent. If you pick up a newspaper, you’re bound to get a story about how soldiers got attacked. Most of the time a newspaper (or news on the TV) will not explain why the soldiers got ambushed, what motivates the enemy (or even what their organizational affiliation is-“al-Qaida affiliated” or “Taliban” is a catch-all) nor will it explain the strategic importance of prevailing over the enemy or what is at stake in the current conflict. And so it goes: a nation of 300 hundred million people, most of them reasonably intelligent, not many understanding why their countrymen are getting shot at in a place that resembles the moon moreso than any other worldly location. People get paid to report “the facts” but nobody trusts the public enough to frame the rationale for continuing the war there.
Context is what history is, really. I understand why they don’t call it the “Context Department” because that sounds like it’s supporting the background information on something else, but that’s exactly what it is. The Cullum Hall field trip was context for cadets, the context of our place in the whole grand landscape of history. Understanding that our forefathers marched across this continent and fought a long struggle against an indeterminate and complex web of enemies is what we needed. The Strategic Studies Institute readings were the context we needed for how the grown-ups go about planning for post-war scenarios. What was striking about the 2003 piece wasn’t how much it did not foresee but how much it did, and what makes it tragic is that it wasn’t followed in the problematic “Phase IV” of operations in Iraq. The 2005 piece, on the other hand, was tragic because it was so pessimistic and became obsessed with the failure rather than looking to the possibility of a victory. These two pieces are fairly brilliant on their own, but the context of when and where they were written is what makes them decipherable and important to us, over a half decade later.
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Sometimes I feel like “Winning the Peace” is a series finale for my cadet career. Colonel Jack Jacobs is one of my current instructors in Mass Media and Politics, Professor Welton is my current law instructor, COL Jebb taught SS486 last semester, Major Bundy taught me Political Thoughts and Ideas, and Dr. Sherlock taught me everything else for the last two years. I tend to believe that really intelligent people are considered really intelligent because they found out what they are good at and they stick to it.
Colonel Jacobs just tends to be good at everything. He’s one of those guys that you swear is a fictional character that you’d love to have as your dad (like Atticus Finch from “To Kill a Mocking Bird” or Ed Harris from…all of his movies). Statistically speaking, most people do not earn the Medal of Honor, make a fair million dollars or so on Wall Street or is a commentator on MSNBC. Statistically speaking, most people do not do all of those things. And yet, here he is. I believe that once you have accomplished any of those things, you’re more than qualified to say whatever the hell you want to anyone, anywhere. The Medal of Honor alone means that he’s essentially a rock star whenever he’s around military people (or well-informed civilian folks) and we will always hang on his every word. Luckily for everyone involved, he doesn’t waste words and he literally always has something interesting to say. He may be the most interesting man in the world.
I would write about what transpired when he came to talk to the class, but we talked about everything. Seeing as that’s the plan for this piece eventually, give me a “buy” on this and I’ll make it up later.
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Colonel Jacobs may very well be the most all-American hero that I have shared a massive, faux wooden desk with, but there are others that are very close seconds. Colonel Peterson is one of those people.
People who, in cadet parlance, “have gone through some serious shit” have a certain manner in how they speak. They speak with the same degree of conviction about everything as I do when people ask me what color the sky is. “The sky is blue!” “These British sailors are cowards.” Colonel Jacobs has that level of confidence about Every. Thing. He. Says. Its admirable. It’s great. Colonel Petersen is exactly the same way.
“We had the build a wall to test to see if the Shiite national police were responsible for ethnic cleansing.”
“The sky is blue!’
Colonel Petersen was in no small way fighting the entire Iraq War the same time 2LT Perez was killed. During those days, I’m fairly sure nobody thought we were going to win the war. I remember reading the article in the New York Times about then-LTC Petersen’s plan to erect giant walls in Baghdad, which, according to the New York Times, was to separate the Sunnis and the Shiites so they would stop butchering each other. (For the record, the Wall Street Journal was better at the active practice of journalism in this case. I wish plebes delivered that to my door.) That entire year was an awful, awful mess, but I remember thinking how that was a bad idea and getting the Sunnis and Shiites to live together probably would not be facilitated by building a giant wall between them.
Like most things, the context (or history, take your pick) for what then-LTC Petersen was doing was not properly presented. He built a wall to do in practice what academics only dare speak of doing theoretically: create a test case. He built a wall with Sunnis and Shiites inside and only let in people his soldiers checked. And, lo and behold, these people lived together without butchering each other. From there, then-LTC Petersen’s battalion could figure out how to stop the wave of Shiite domination and restore civilization to his AO.
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Mr. Witty’s article on the misadventures of Nasser’s Army in North Yemen during the dog days of the Cold War was an interesting piece on how another nation struggled to fight an unconventional war with a conventional force. What were actually intriguing were the comments regarding how it strained their military and the effects on their politics and society. Nasser’s intervention in the country had to happen because if he didn’t it would have brought into question his position as the so-called leader of the Arab world. In getting involved, he stepped into a quagmire that threatened everything he and his society had achieved up to that point. Once there, Nasser couldn’t leave in defeat. It’s as if someone did a mashup of our current situation and the Melian Dialogue.
Major Kirby’s experience in Afghanistan was not exactly related to the reading, but if I got into it here I’d get a zero for my AAR assignment. So, I won’t get into it.
*****
Dr. Sherlock is the kind of guy I want to be whenever I decide to grow up. His office features hundreds of books and stacks of paper, if a match were ever lit in there it’d burn the entire building down. I used to have no idea why he would keep all of it in his room like he was the sole curator of knowledge regarding Russia’s political economy, but I’ve come to realize a truism regarding academia. If you have to teach or write about a concept, it’s good to have the source material there. Dr. Sherlock’s presentation in class was the fourth time I’ve come across the arguments for and against the democratic sequencing argument and every time he cites the same authors. What’s interesting is that no presentation is exactly the same and depending on the class, different parts of the arguments are magnified. For instance, in Comparative Politics there was more of a discussion of Europe’s historical development of democracy and in Democratization there was more of a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of both arguments. Like all knowledge, the democratization class was skewed and subjective and emphasized different elements than in other presentations. But more on the subjective nature of knowledge later.
My complaint with the democratic sequencing theory discussed by Dr. Sherlock (and supported by Dr. Welton) is that it’s just simply untenable and built on foolish assumptions. You’d be hard-pressed to find such an isolated part of the globe that has not heard of democracy and given its primacy in the current era, it seems silly to think that a given people are genetically predisposed to want/need autocratic leadership. Some cultures in the world lend themselves to autocratic rule but it appears that history has proven that any culture can come to adopt democratic form of governance. That’s not the faultiest assumption, though.
The worst part of democratic sequencing theory is the idea that the development of a state can be controlled by some all-powerful entity. The sequencers tend to think an autocratic ruler (either on purpose or on accident) could take a country like Somalia and make it into Singapore and then eventually introduce democracy and make it into France. Yet in practice, such dismal states lack any kind of institutions and legitimacy, problems that are intertwined and mutually supporting. Nobody supports the state because it’s seen as illegitimate because it can’t do anything for anyone because nobody supports it. Furthermore, the fallacy that other, more powerful states can influence the statebuilding practices of the developing world reveals the kind of paternalism that goes along with taking a solely academic view of the development of societies and discounting the very human desire to not sit patiently for democracy to come after the full maturation of the state.
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Every brilliant person sticks to their strengths. Colonel Jebb sticks to human security. I know she’s really educated on a number of subjects and has written about every subject area that pops up on Wikipedia’s “International Relations” entry. But at the end of the day, her passion is in this “human security” concept.
This concept is the idea that we in the military and our policymaking civilian counterparts need to be aware that “security” is necessarily associated with non-traditionally military aspects of living. When people lack clean water to drink, or food to eat, or a functioning society to be in, then they are now technically insecure. We call this insecure because it is in this state that they are bound to take action that could lead to a less secure world. That is, they are more susceptible to actively (or passively) contributing to the deterioration of the state by being a refugee, disregarding the state and embracing other communal identities, joining a violent non-state actor, the list goes on.
Someone in class asked how one would figure out the necessary areas to cover in order to ensure “human security.” Colonel Jebb responded that one has to know the “facts on the ground.” I thought that was sort of a weird way of thinking about situations–who is to say what the “facts” actually are? I’m no postmodernist but it seems that perception not only colors reality, sometimes it defines it. I agree with the Colonel that talking to as many different perspectives as possible is what will allow for a more complete grasp on reality, but that’s not my largest objection.
My largest objection is that by framing everything in the language of “security” we move far too much about the human condition into the realm of strategic studies. Human security includes numerous different fields. The reading and presentation name or hint at around a dozen, so let’s just focus on one. Ensuring “gender security” and making sure men and women are treated the same in foreign cultures is a bizarre notion that is extremely problematic and self-defeating for five reasons.
First, placing different aspects of human living in a security discourse elevates that particular issue into a new level of importance. Security studies as a serious academic endeavor is relatively new but a solid, defining idea of this strand of academia is that security precedes all else. Security inherently demands a rejection of normal means to deal with a problem and the taking up of extraordinary means. The logic of security is that failure to act brings considerable risk. I have seen this in this class and nearly every SOSH class in which an argument about American security policy comes up. We debate if the United States should do action X, action Y or no action at all. Inevitably, someone mentions if we take no action, we risk another 9/11. Considering the psychological weight that 9/11 carries in each of our generations and our nation in general, absolutely nobody will argue inaction.
Second, by making this a question of security and necessarily inviting (sometimes false) debate between one action or another, we necessarily make the suffering of these people into primarily a military issue, into a threat. A preteen girl in sub-Saharan Africa being treated as a second class citizen is miserable and should not occur. Humans have walked on the moon, and yet we have this sort of inexcusable behavior occurring in the world. But let’s not target this behavior as primarily a threat to our security or as something that may lead to another 9/11. Let’s care about other people not as means to something else that concerns the safety and wellbeing of our people, let’s care about other people because it’s the right thing to do.
But that presents the next, third, problem. As I brought up in class, such an expansive view on our nation’s security not only invites but demands an infinitely regressive attitude regarding our involvement in the affairs of other nations. This fits right in with Zakaria and the sequencers’ view of how powerful states can and should influence the state-building of developing states. Truth be told, most nations in the world today haven’t shown themselves adept at self-government as of late, but to make the wellbeing of all citizens of the world the chief concern of the United States (either wedded to the language of security or not) is problematic, but do we have an alternative? Adams said we don’t go out looking for monsters to slay, but Jefferson called us the Empire of Liberty. Which is it? Even if had the capability, would it be healthy for our democracy to have our state dominated by its own crusade for the betterment of everyone else?
Fourth, as much as we discuss the need to enhance the power and stature of our colleagues in the State Department, it is clear that the Defense Department will be the primary (if not the sole) actor in the near future. Talk of “securing” the gender equality of the good people of Niger or Togo will lead down one road in Washington, and that’s to the Pentagon. Clearly, State needs more resources, personnel and an attitude adjustment. But opening up the language of security to contain everything will not make State and other civilian agencies better able to address problems now or in the near future. It will simply lead to a more military-centric solution.
Fifth, it was said that the chief solution to human security problems is more government, no matter what kind of government that state has. Colonel Jebb discussed how our military helped ensure greater border protection in Africa through making the military (that answers to a dictator) more proficient. The line of thinking is that failed states are the primary evil here, therefore anything is preferable. I argued that the kind of government does actually matter. While the Communist Party of China has succeeded in running a government that can feed its entire people, its disastrous policies have led to 24 million men without even the possibility of marrying anyone. Somehow, a government that allows the equivalent of the greater New York City metropolitan area’s population to get in this situation is not a government that can check all the blocks on the “human security” checklist.
In the end, the issues with “human security” belie the numerous issues that exist in discussing security studies and even the concept of American strategy.
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So, what is “Winning the Peace?” Ten lessons in, I guess it’s preventing conflict and it’s also restoring peace to conflict-ridden societies. On the strategic level, it’s all about maintaining the Pax Americana. On the tactical level, it’s about figuring out a way to prevent people from killing people to create circumstances advantageous to us. But acknowledging this brings up a whole series of questions, all of it linked into the material that led to this conclusion.
How did we get to the Pax Americana in the first place? Why is the United States-a nation that has been to the moon a half dozen times-now extremely concerned with how Afghanistan (a country that looks like the moon) is developing? Context is important. And since context is history, looking back to our history is illuminating. John Lewis Gaddis wrote a book in 2002 entitled Surprise, Security and the American Experience. In it, he argues that the Bush Doctrine is nothing new but rather a continuation of two centuries of American strategic thinking. Following the burning of the White House in the War of 1812, the United States knew it could not allow hostile powers to have a significant presence in the western hemisphere. In short, they aimed to secure two continents in the hope that their children wouldn’t have to experience the awful feeling of an attack on our shores. The same logic was used by FDR and his successors as they sought to push our security obligation to new limits. Bush’s logic of preemption was simply pushing this strategic thinking to its logical conclusion. Winning the peace is not limited to the US Army hunting down Indian tribes in the late 19th century. Context is important.
So that’s how we got here, caring about the development of states like Yemen and Afghanistan. The entire manner in how we’re educated in strategic studies and political science in general lends itself to such paternalism. Like the various aspects of “human security” and the entirety of the democratic sequencing argument, strategic studies presupposes the absolute power of western states to control the conditions within developing states. This all seems oddly repudiated by the very impetus for studying security issues, which is to prevent surprise, to dominate. The entire reason why the current generation studies security is because western states were not all-powerful on 9/11 and everything we study is designed to prevent a repeat of that day.
The most difficult issue with “Winning the Peace” is the idea that establishing and maintaining peace fits within the dichotomy of win and lose. Both strategically with the Pax Americana and tactically in places like Colonel Petersen’s AO in Iraq, such a dichotomy seems sort of out of touch with reality. At what point did he “win” the “peace”? How many dead Sunnis and Shiites can be uncovered in a day and we still call it a “peace”? The Iraq War is in its final days and we have “won” a “peace” that includes periodic car bombs that we and our friends in Baghdad call “tolerable.” While I’ll be the first to say that the United States has indeed accomplished its strategic objectives in Iraq, I’m not sure if I can call the situation there “peace,” at least in absolute terms.
Dictionary.com defines “win” (with an object) as “to succeed in reaching” or “to attain or reach or gain.” It defines “peace” as “the normal, nonwarring condition of a nation, group of nations, or the world.” These definitions serve to underscore the problematic nature of “peace-winning.” To “win” is to achieve a state of accomplishing one’s goals, but in the context of “winning the peace” it really means to meet a threshold of violence that is tolerable. This threshold may or may not even be the preferred threshold held by the counterinsurgent when he enters the battle and often the tolerated threshold of violence is far higher than what originally was conceived as a victory. “Peace” as understood by this definition is something that definitely exists in the abstract. I believe it is safe to assume that a state of conflict is the normal state of humanity. Colonel Jacobs thinks it is, and he’s a fairly smart guy. To advocate “winning” the “peace” is laudable in the abstract but in practice it seems unattainable given the nature of low-intensity conflict and the inability of western states to absolutely control the developing world.
So, that’s how the class has gone so far. I do really enjoy it and I think what we are learning is of the utmost importance. I just disagree with the idea that we can “win” a state of “peace” through learning all of this. However, I think we can do just about everything up to that by utilizing this knowledge.
POSTSCRIPT: Ma’am, sorry if any of this sounds pretentious or presumptuous. I honestly do not think anyone in that class is any smarter than me and I think our speakers have been excellent and have had important concepts that absolutely need to be learned. My effort here was to write down what I thought this class was about, underscore the important parts and tie it all together to the problems I have with some aspects of the academic approach to our nation’s security.
NOTE JUST FOR THE BLOG: There’s some footnotes that didn’t copy over from Word. I’ll put them up later.
