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Wars against Disorder

Wars against Disorder-1

July 6, 2004

The use of the term "war" to refer to a concerted effort to defeat a particular problem used to seem innocuous enough to me, if a bit bizarre. The "War on Poverty" seems to have been an unfortunate innovation that soon spread to other maladies, like "drugs" and, most earnestly, "terror." The problem with this is, of course, what began as a figure of speech is now used as the template for policy: Iraq is not the first country invaded and occupied for no better reason than that the Leader could think of nothing better to do. Long before, we undertook a "War on Drugs"; the phrase was coined by Nixon in 1969 as part of a "War on Drugs and Crime," later formalized in 1970 as the "War on Drugs." That year Congress passed the "Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act" (link). At the time, the war on (domestic) Communism had subsided considerably; an actual guerrilla war against organized crime was out of the question, since the FBI refused to acknowledge the existence of organized crime.

In fact, the use of the term "war" to refer to a campaign against some disorder—drug abuse, corruption, obesity—seems to be quite old, if not the original function of military establishments. In Nation, State and Economy, a young Ludwig von Mises notes that the early state was ruled by a warlord as his personal domain, and areas not ruled by a prince—such as republics, or aboriginal associations—were regarded as blank spots on the map, without any sovereign rights worthy of consideration. The long, drawn-out scene at the beginning of Henry V, in which the Archbishop of Canterbury explains to the King why he is justified in invading France, obviously mocks his pretensions to being in the right; but if it were Venice or Genoa, rather than France, then Henry would certainly not need to discuss his justifications with anyone. Republics were, as all medieval political philosophers knew, chaos incarnate. They were disorder; things rank and gross in nature possessed them merely. Conquering them and extracting tribute from them was like unto reclaiming wasteland and tilling it.

There could be no war until there were states, and states were empires for thousands of years before there were nations. The glory of conquest and the glamour of war are all trappings of empires, not nations, but they survived and became part of how we think about the functions of government. So perhaps it's not so surprising that heads of state, especially states that aren't horrified by the w-word, would redress the flaws in society by proposing to wage a war against them—in other words, a war against disorder.

Crime is obviously not something that can be defeated by war. At least, I hope the sober reader sees this is obvious. In a war, you seek to destroy the foundations of the enemy's society—destroying crops and sacking outlying villages, bombing neighborhoods or water treatment facilities, and the like. If you were to do that to a crime-ridden neighborhood, you would destroy your own state. And you cannot "win" a war on crime; you can win a war against an adversarial state. People speaking of "losing" the war on crime, or drugs, or terror, are being carried away by their own rhetoric. If a long-serving mayor of a major city saw crime fall 40% during her term in office, she could reasonably claim to have been excellent in fighting crime. That same result in a war would be regarded as a stalemate, or outright defeat. There is excellent reason for this: the cost to a community of being subjected to a war, of paying for the full costs of it, supplying levees of troops or taxes, or of being subjected to the risk of being bombed or sacked—these are intolerable if they last for many years.

Finally, the main reason why tactics of war are utter failures against social problems is that, at the most basic, the state has to give people incentive to not do the thing they're trying to get rid of. In a war, you naturally don't have jurisdiction over the state you're fighting; in that case, you're stuck with the highly unsatisfactory option of trying to weaken the enemy state until it makes terms. If the Allies had had the ability to move freely through Nazi Germany or Militarist Japan in police cars, and take action against individuals who were contributing to the Axis war effort, then of course there would have been no need to fly overhead and obliterate entire neighborhoods. That level of direct management of the social situation came later, when the Axis nations were under Allied occupation. In a country facing a crime problem, the state has to establish the perpetrator and make distinctions in levels of crime. Executing a lad for breaking into your car may be satisfying, but it leaves the lad no reason not to join a gang and bang your nearest and dearest, once he's ventured into the car-knocking-over business.

Terrorism is really just a form of crime, with medium-to-high levels of organization; it seeks to create terror against the general population of a society (something that a guerrilla army per se does not necessarily do). The guerrilla army is usually acting on behalf of a meta-state—that is to say, either an occupied country or else a repressed population (as in the Vietnamese Civil War, or in Chechnya). If the guerrilla army has limited objectives—a power-sharing agreement, an end to occupation, or a separate state—then it only needs to convince the polity of its enemy that further prosecution of the war is too costly. Usually guerrilla armies become terrorist if their objectives are too extravagant—obliteration of jahiliyah states, for example, or imposing Communism in Argentina. But terror organizations arise for reasons analogous to criminal organizations, and they often are virtually indistinguishable.

What brought on this commentary was a letter published in the Angry Bear. That site posts the entire contents, but I'll merely excerpt from it:

The Crusades, Alive and Well: We can definitely lose this war, and as anomalous as it may sound, the major reason we can lose is that so many of us simply do not fathom the answer to the second question — 'What does losing mean?' It would appear that a great many of us think that losing the war means hanging our heads, bringing the troops home and going on about our business, like post Vietnam. This is as far from the truth as one can get. What losing really means is:
We would no longer be the premier country in the world.

The attacks will not subside [...] They want us dead, not just quiet.

The author repeatedly "slips up" and refers to the Muslim population, when he supposedly is referring to the Muslim terrorists. No matter. The letter calls for a war without quarter, without suggesting what victory could possibly entail. This is the classic example of Eliot's "tedious argument of insidious intent." He repeatedly refers to WW2, but the absurdity of the analogy is palpable. Well, Dear Readers, that is what a war against disorder is. The disorder is a problem—I am no lover of disorder, not at all—but the use of "warfare" as a means of ending disorder and restoring wholesome order, is like a car salesperson at his first day on the job, literally attempting to pull something woolen over the eyes of customers.

(To be continued)

Wars against Disorder-2

July 6, 2004

(Continued from Part 1)

I wish I knew of a compelling way to explain that outrageous demands on foreigners are the undoing of arrogant leaders. One method is to explain that, if you become habituated to demanding other countries solve your problems on pain of something awful, you cease to understand anything that goes on abroad. One can imagine the embittered old bachelor, thrice divorced, who is pathologically incapable of understanding that women are persons capable of forming goals and pursuing them; such a man spits on the dreams of his ex-wives, then wonders why they march out of his life or why courts award them alimony. I suspect when many Americans discuss what their country "should do" in redressing the threat of terrorism, or the insidious traffic in illegal drugs, they immediately imagine they are in a position to demand anything of other countries. In the previous post, I referred to a letter posted at the Angry Bear, which I'll quote again:

Why were we attacked? Envy of [...] our success [...]. The attacks happened during the administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton and Bush 2. We can not fault either the Republicans or Democrats as there were no provocations by any of the presidents or their immediate predecessors
[emphasis added—JRM]

The temerity of the writer in asserting "there were no provocations by any of the presidents" is dizzying. But it is also inevitable: unable to form reasonable judgments of what constitutes a provocation, how can he possibly spot a provocation? If we were to outline some provocations to him, and let him sniff the stench of wounds, would he not fly at us in a rage? Would he not accuse us of dividing, or blunting, our nations' resolve? Of course he would. And this letter is from a man purporting to be a retired lawyer!

Dear Readers, if we are unable to imagine how we would feel if we were treated the way our nation treats others, then we are doomed to hopeless inability to form realistic judgments about wars undertaken by our leaders. We expose ourselves to the same fate as the Germans or the Serbs, people of the common measure of virtue who wound up brooking their leaders' atrocities, and incurring global wrath. And one of the demands we have made of other nations for decades, which is grossly unreasonable, is that they are responsible for stopping the production of controlled substances on their soil by their nationals. In countries like Bolivia, this asinine conceit has forced the state to operate in opposition either to Washington or to a majority of its own citizens. In Peru, it has put a huge segment of the Quechua-speaking Native Americans in a position analogous to Palestinians under occupation, where the one opportunity they have to earn a living from their soil is snatched away from them. In Colombia, it has created a bizarre triangle of bloodshed linking the national government, the AUC death squads, and leftist movements like FARC and the ELN.

And now, at long last, I reach the point of this essay: imperialism as a war against disorder. The tactic of certifying countries for cooperation in the war on drugs was an innately imperialist act, as it sought to require that other countries subordinate the interests of their own citizens in order to please Washington. Washington, in turn, imagined it was absolved from redressing social crises in the inner cities; it could countenance the continuance of internal imperialism, in which inner cities were not governed, but occupied, by recruits from destitute rural families, for the enrichment of suburban dwellers. Unfortunately for all concerned, it increased the take of the winner in the winner-take-all drug economy that the war on drugs created.

Colombia has to submit to a humiliating enterprise of being "certified" for the war on drugs. During the tenure of Ernesto Samper (1994-1998), the Clinton Administration was confronted with evidence that his campaign had received gigantic sums of money from the Cali Cartel. So certification was withdrawn. Later, Samper was succeeded by Andres Pastrana, who had avoided the appearance of impropriety. In fact, there was substantial pressure on the White House and Congress to certify Pastrana no matter what—withholding certification for a long time, in any event, would most likely ruin its deterrent effect and drive Colombia deeper into the embrace of the drug cartels. But the restoration of Colombia's credentials as an ally in the war on drugs was to have far-reaching consequences: by way of Plan Colombia, the USA was now paying the country over 2 billion in 3 years to arm its military and police.

There was a problem: Colombia was fighting a civil war, and it wasn't with the drug lords, it was with FARC.

I spotted this extremely helpful article on the history of Plan Colombia and believe it not only says a lot about our government's role in the Colombian civil war, but the nature of modern imperialism and wars against disorder. First, between 1999 and 2002, the US government furnished the government of Colombia $2.03 billion. This aid has continued. 83% of this has gone to the military or the police. About 7% has gone to "alternative development," which is a program to get farmers started in the business of growing legal crops.

Above U.S. objections, the government of Andrés Pastrana suspended fumigation after this first round, in order to give Plan Colombia’s alternative development component a chance to take hold. The effort to help coca-growing peasants adopt legal alternatives took the form of a series of "social pacts," in which signers would receive basic assistance, followed by technical and infrastructure support, in exchange for eradicating all their coca within twelve months after first receipt of aid. By July 2001, 37,000 families in Putumayo – just under half of the department’s population – had signed "pacts" and were awaiting assistance.
The assistance failed to arrive. Alternative development money was delayed by bureaucracy, forced to pass through several agencies before reaching the peasants: the State Department’s Bureau for International Narcotics; the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); the Colombian government’s Plan Colombia implementing agency; the Colombian government’s alternative-development agency, PLANTE; and five Colombian non-profit organizations, with no previous ties to Putumayo, contracted to deliver the assistance. The security situation in Putumayo – which, despite the presence of two army brigades, a naval brigade, and police, is marked by constant territorial disputes between guerrillas and paramilitaries – slowed aid delivery further; the FARC killed two alternative-development workers in September 2001.

Putamayo, which is located in the extreme south of the country, appears to have the largest concentration of coca growers. It is rather disturbing to observe how dilatory and feeble our government's efforts to combat coca cultivation peacefully were; only $140 million were spent on a program to replace coca as a crop, when 12 times as much was spent on arming the government. But then, only $300 million was spent to reconstruct Afghanistan—a task of some urgency in the War on Terror—while 48 times that much has been spent to date on the invasion of Iraq.

I insist on describing this as imperialism because it makes the government of Colombia a captive to Washington. The government has become a captive one, dependent on aid for means to defend itself, requiring means to defend itself because it implements policies unpopular with so many citizens. There is no need for the US to deploy troops there, or annex the country; the imperialism is carried out by our government to defend and cosmeticize policies of the past. It is self-justifying.

Appropriating $343 million for these non-military priorities between 2000 and 2002 indicates that Washington at least partially recognizes that Colombia’s crisis is too complex to solve by military force alone. It is also in line with U.S. counter-insurgency doctrine, which — though it has brought disastrous results in third-world conflict zones from Vietnam to Central America — continues to guide much U.S. aid to developing countries in conflict. Counter-insurgency is not just a military strategy: it emphasizes the importance of winning the population’s "hearts and minds" in order to restore government control over a guerrilla-dominated area. As a U.S. Army field manual explains, "The successful counterinsurgent must realize that the true nature of the threat to his government lies in the insurgent’s political strength, not in his military power. Although the government must contain the insurgents’ armed elements, concentration on the military aspect of the threat does not address the real danger."[23]
Yet the U.S. approach to Colombia appears to neglect even these basic tenets of counter-insurgency. Massive aerial herbicide fumigation is fueling anti-government sentiment in a guerrilla-controlled area. The social and economic component of Washington’s aid has been overshadowed, particularly in most Colombians’ perceptions, by the far larger military-aid outlay.

The developmental component of Plan Colombia is a figleaf, and a discontinued figleaf at that. One may argue that Colombians are wrong to grow coca and sell it, and destroying their livelihood by chemical spraying is simply enforcing the law. But citizens of the USA aren't accepting the claim that their CO₂ emissions are the business of other nations; why should the Colombian campesinos care if their livelihood is inconvenient to us?

Again, I say this not because I am pro-cocaine, or demanding that Americans ignore their own needs. I say this because it's an example of the way we fail to imagine how others would feel about our government's foreign policies. Like the retired lawyer quoted above, we insist that adversaries have no grievances to discuss.

Another attribute of imperialism is the commercial character of warfare. Recall the greatest concentration of coca cultivation—and of fumigation—goes on in areas of the south, areas contested by FARC. This means that Plan Colombia is ineluctably drawn into arming the military to wage a civil war, something the US Congress has prohibited. The use of US personnel in this war, while arguably the more honest, and accountable thing to do, would be openly illegal. So:

The new army unit’s original mission was to attack drug-processing labs, to apprehend traffickers, and to clear armed groups from areas of drug-crop cultivation (or at least to clear them long enough for the U.S. herbicide spray planes to pass through). An August 2002 change in the law allows the Counter-Narcotics Brigade to use its equipment and training for "counter-terrorism" as well as anti-drug missions; as a result, some of the brigade’s operations may come to resemble the U.S.-supported counter-insurgency efforts commonplace in Latin America during the Cold War.
Tens of millions of dollars each year cover the rather high cost of fueling and maintaining the dozens of donated helicopters used to transport the Counter-Narcotics Brigade over roadless, dangerous southern Colombia. These are operated by U.S.-trained pilots of the Colombian Army’s Aviation Brigade, based in the central department of Tolima, for which the Bush Administration has requested over $76 million in 2003. Some of the helicopters’ pilots—including co-pilots of those used to transport the Counter-Narcotics Brigade—are not Colombian military personnel but civilians working for private U.S. companies on State Department contracts. None are U.S. citizens.
[...]
The "cap" on contractors, meanwhile, only applies to U.S. citizens. Citizens of other countries working for U.S.-funded contractors—such as the foreign nationals employed by DynCorp, Inc. to co-pilot the Counter-Narcotics Brigade’s helicopters—are not included within the "contractor cap."[54] As "Plan Colombia" gives way to "counter-terror" aid initiatives, the "troop cap" will become irrelevant if not amended.

What has been the main operational thrust of Plan Colombia? In a word, spraying. The military has been equipped to interdict suspicious aircraft, move about quickly, spray, spray, spray, and protect the sprayers. Over a million acres of coca crops have been sprayed by the Colombian military, with devastating effects for the residents: two million displaced persons, no livelihood, mass inductions into FARC, and of course, FARC's obsession with getting enough money to support ever-larger dependent personnel:

Recent statements indicate that de-populating rural Putumayo may be part of the strategy. First, there is an open recognition that the "social pact" scheme was a failure. Adolfo Franco, the Latin American Affairs chief at USAID, told a House subcommittee in April 2002 that it was a "fallacy" to believe that "large-scale assistance to provide new sources of income to 37,000 families can be identified, tested and delivered in one year." It is impossible to assist most coca-growers in rural Putumayo, a secret 2001 USAID study concluded, because of the security situation, the poor soils, and the zone’s isolation from markets.
Second, USAID is re-tooling its alternative-development effort in a way that, officials hope, will encourage coca-growers to move away from Putumayo, preferably to town centers – perhaps after being pushed out by the spray planes. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman explained in April 2002, "If you can employ somebody outside of the county, and they will move there for a job, it’s something that they ought to do." Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a key architect of U.S. drug policy, observed in September 2002 that "many of the people who are working in the coca fields of Colombia are not native – ruralists to that area. They are, in fact, urban people who, because of economic circumstances were attracted to go into the rural areas and work the coca fields. And for them, alternative development is not developing agriculture, but rather developing jobs back in the urban areas." "They will have to relocate," a State Department official told CIP in January, "though ultimately it’s their choice."