No News is No News

Hollywood screenwriters hit the picket lines Monday. Screenwriters. They tell stories. They write fictions and jokes.

Which are the modern version of "news."

Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America East, is glad that his union brothers now include the staffs of two programs that have a visceral connection with their young, obsessed audiences.

“These two shows are a big source of news for a whole generation that was not around for the 1988 strike,” he said. “Losing Stewart and Colbert is something like losing Cronkite during the Vietnam War. And because they are accessed in any number of ways both on television and on the Web, ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ are exactly what we are talking about at the bargaining table.”

Try not to understand what that means.

In the Ruins of Empire

[posted by Callimachus]

Nineteen-forty-six was the year the present began. That's the way it's always been in my life. In high school and college, as a student of history, I took courses with titles like "Crucial Years" that covered "1945 to the present." They began when the shooting stopped at the end of World War II. You never had to take a course in World War II, or the inter-war period, so it was genuinely possible to think the world began in 1946.

It's convenient for the organizers of curricula and the writers of textbooks to break up the world like that. So 1945 joins other convenient "zero" dates that punctuate history: 1914, 1815, 1776, 1492, 1215, 476.

In the unconscious, Dali-esque mental calendar in my head, the gap between 1946 and "today," sixty years later, actually seems smaller than that between 1946 and, say, 1936.

That is false, of course. In my daughter's education, 2001 is likely to replace 1945. Those of us alive and adult now know just how false that will be.

Maybe awareness of that is why my reading after Sept. 11 took a turn back to 1945, and to break through the artificial barrier and thread the present with the past.

Gregor Dallas' excellent book takes a big whack at this wall. The book pictured above, Ronald H. Spector's "In the Ruins of Empire," compliments it like a matching bookend. Whereas Dallas concentrated on Europe, Spector, who also wrote the well-received Eagle Against the Sun, looks at the end of the war in Asia.

(He also earned his props to do this by writing an insightful work on the Vietnam War.)

I had been interested for some time in the complexities of race and imperialism in the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and Indonesia. I hadn't been able to find anything good on the topic until I heard about this book.

I bought it sight-unseen online. Had I picked it up in a bookstore, however, I might have put it right down again. The blurbs on the back cover tell of "a resounding lesson for our time about the failure of postwar operations in countries we were little prepared to reconstruct ... a cautionary tale that should be read by anyone interested in how we need to think about future involvements in distant lands we enter at our peril ... dismal accounts of civil war and mass slaughter, much of it provoked by the blundering victorious powers ... a painful lesson ...."

Some of this was written by fellow historians (the author of "Nixon and Kissinger" is among them) who apparently failed to read the book first, or else who came to it with brains scrambled by Iraq rage. How would you "reconstruct" jungle islands that never saw World War II battles in the first place? But the reviewer has eyes firmly fixed on the present.

But this book is not yet another bid to pillage the historical record for weapons to bash Bush with. Spector wrote in the wake of Iraq and obviously is aware of it. His choice of words and the framing of certain scenes reflects that awareness. But he is genuinely interested in his historical topic for its own sake, not as a cudgel to punish the present.

This review, which includes the memorably descriptive phrase "When the Japanese formally laid down their arms in mid-August 1945, the entire continent of Asia immediately became shrouded in a thick fog of peace," gets the gist of the story's strangeness:

Friends and foes became hard to distinguish. Before they could be repatriated, some idealistic Japanese soldiers - and not a few who feared indictment for war crimes - deserted the Imperial Army and stayed behind to battle for Indonesian independence. Others fought alongside the Vietminh against the French and the British in Vietnam, while those still wearing the Imperial chrysanthemum stood guard - fully armed and with bayonets fixed - when U.S. forces landed at Inchon to begin the occupation of Korea. Many of Chiang Kai-shek's generals, having attended the Japanese military academy, used Japanese troops to fight the Communists. Spector, a professor of history and international relations at George Washington University, reports that the Japanese patrolled rail lines and broke a Communist-led strike in Shanghai and that as late as November 1946, some 80,000 Japanese troops were operating under Chiang's command.

Often the victors were simply clueless, trying to govern with limited intelligence as they groped around in the dark. Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru once mocked the U.S. occupation in Japan for "its generally happy ignorance of the amount of requisite knowledge it lacked." Despite the services of a very competent OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), the United States was remarkably ignorant of the region. Armed only with "a few pages on Korea" from a 1905 travel guidebook, for example, and with no knowledge of the language, U.S. occupation forces hired former Japanese occupiers and suspected Korean collaborators to explain life on the peninsula to them. A confused U.S. proconsul in Seoul declared to a stunned Korean populace that the Japanese would continue to govern the country. It took months to undo the damage.

When Spector does address Iraq directly, toward the end of the book, he notes that the "lessons" supposedly learned in that recent war often conflict one another ("Only a long occupation can succeed." "A long occupation leads to resentments and rebellions.")

Turning back to his historical topic, Spector writes, "On all of these generalizations, the story of the liquidation of Japan's empire casts a bright light of ambiguity." And don't ever trust any history book that tells you otherwise. Where Spector is willing to make his own generalizations they can seem bland at first, but they really are crucial insights for people tearing their hair out with rage over Iraq, and with American "defeat" and "failure" there:

The successes and failures in East and Southeast Asia in 1945 and 1946 were often the result of factors far beyond the power of generals and soldiers to halt or redirect.

He quickly adds the very definition of "success" and "failure" is dicey in this situation. Success for whom? By what path? For how long?

Another no-brainer lesson that yet seems to have been forgotten: "Occupations proceeded most smoothly where soldiers of the occupation force found a basis for at least limited cooperation and friendship with the locals," and "where the occupiers and the occupied shared common, or at least compatible, interests."

As the entire American experience in Iraq attests; from the Kurdish welcome to the early cooperation from Shi'ite provinces, to the recent turn-around in Anbar. Finally, there's this warning:

The most deleterious effects of the Allied military presence developed not through blunders or misjudgments of those charged with carrying out the occupations, but when the highest levels of government acted indecisively, had mistaken notions or no notions at all about what was actually happening on the scene, and neglected or ignored reports from the field.

In places where the situation in Asia could offer some guidance in Iraq, the record is too mixed to read. Some critics decry the disbanding of the corrupt Iraqi army after Saddam's fall because it eliminated the only force capable of keeping order. The Allied use of Japanese troops to keep order after the surrender in Tokyo might be an example of an alternative policy. But the results there were mixed: Such policies were violently opposed by horrified local populations, whom the Japanese sometimes continued to brutalize. But in some other cases the Japanese did essential work in keeping order.

Nonetheless, there is room to notice more degree of sameness between now and then than Spector describes. The collapse of Japan was a "catastrophic success" for the Allies, yet the postwar disposition of the Japanese Empire was a problem that loomed for years. Apparently no one had a plan for it.

The American and British leaders formed their policies with a constant glancing back at a war-weary public that only wanted an end to fighting and the troops brought home. Other political considerations interfered with clear thinking.

And the major differences ought to be noted. In Iraq, America appeared in force for the first time in history in 1991, and left at once. Twelve years later it returned to overthrow an indigenous dictator.

In Asia in the 1940s, the Japanese chased out European colonial overlords from Asian nations, then ruled themselves with varying degrees of local complicity and general brutality. Then the Allies defeated Japan in Japan, and turned up to occupy the outposts of its empire with the old colonial authorities in tow.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson was how completely the mythical power of the Europeans dispelled. Once the local population had seen them defeated by Asian -- the Japanese -- the British, Dutch and French never could hope to rule uncontested again.

A few more lessons ought to be noted. One is the radically different career of the Philippines -- the only American colony in the region, and outside the purview of Spector's book (it had been liberated before the surrender). There, as Spector notes, the local population fought aggressively against the Japanese invaders alongside the Americans, and continued to resist in some cases after the American defeat. That exception is a telling clue to the effectiveness of the light-handed rule of American colonial policies.

The stories in Spector's book also affirms the strong anti-colonial mentality of America, a point hammered home as well in Derek Leebaert's fine history of the Cold War. Americans, from Roosevelt on down, were bluntly unwilling to help France and Britain re-establish their empires, and were unwilling to shed their own blood or anyone else's in such distasteful work. Ho Chi Minh, among others, looked on the Americans as liberators at first -- from the French as well as the Japanese.

But the pressure on Western Europe from the Soviets and national communist parties convinced Washington its priorities lay in strengthening the economies of Britain, France, and the Netherlands. And if that meant propping up the corrupt colonial empires in Asia, so it must be. That was, in Asian terms, a tragic mistake, a "failure," and most of the Americans working in Asia who knew anything about it warned the government so. But was there a better choice?

Dangerous Questions

[posted by Callimachus]

Cpl. John Matthew Bishop, a Marine serving his second tour in Iraq, wrote an essay that ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He tells of the first death of a friend in the war, a loss that still haunts him despite the other deaths that followed. And he takes the opportunity of our attention to his grief to give us the straight talk we need to hear:

First, war should never be an enterprise undertaken by nations that require certainty. Uncertainty and setbacks are a part of war and a daily reality on the streets of Iraq. No professional soldier feels betrayed when, in the course of a mission, he encounters hiccups, dilemmas, or bad odds. Nor does he feel betrayed because his mission involves death, for that is the predictable plight of a soldier: to kill and to be killed, to "do and die" as chance or destiny dictates. But to watch one's brethren cut down as America alternately pounces, vacillates, backpedals and chases her tail - this is a betrayal beyond reckoning.

Second, as great patriots such as Daniel die for causes they presume their nation is committed to achieving, a great nation, in turn, accepts nothing less than the victory for which it has bade its sons and daughters bleed.

On either part - soldier and nation - there is the presumption of honor.

And so regardless of what determination America reaches concerning the fate of Iraq, I urge her, so long as she exists, never to enter another war unless she goes to win. Should she ask her sons and daughters to take up arms, may she honor their sacrifices with the unflagging conviction and strength of conscience that is necessary to achieve victory. And if she cannot stomach the stakes involved, if the sacrifices of young men such as Daniel do not bolster her resolve but merely plunge her deeper into moral confusion and hysteria, may she, for her own good and for the good of the world, cease pretending at war altogether.

Right. War may be "diplomacy continued by other means," or whatever the phrase is. But it also is a fight to the death, for those actually in it. Don't start it if you don't mean to win it. Don't think you can just walk away in the middle of it. Don't vote for it, then say you didn't really have the time to think about what you were voting for, or say you only voted for it because you thought it would be easy.

And that path leads very quickly into the uncomfortable set of questions Americans generallly avoid.

Here we are, again, finally, in Vietnam. Iraq is not Vietnam. But the homefront now is the homefront then: Free speech producing a steady stream of artful anti-American propaganda eagerly embraced by the enemy, important political and media leaders on both sides with agendas that transcend the mission on the battlefield, a media whose prime purpose is to shove the biggest spash instantly into publication and then go get another one 15 minutes later.

The weaknesses are woven into our identity, our American-ness. They cannot be cured out of us. Which is why our successful wars typically have been run in parallel with repression of dissent, suspension of rights, propaganda, and something close to temporary totalitarianism. Until 1950 or so, the home front was the lesser danger when America went to war. Now it is the battlefield.

Now we face a patient and ruthless enemy with an ideology from the Dark Ages that yet knows how to manipulate the latest technology and exploit every non-military weakness we have.

Corporal Bishop says: Do it right, or don't do it at all.

Of Vice and Men

Theodore Dalrymple, the British essayist whose background is as a medical doctor and psychiatrist, has an old-fashioned view of the world that allows for right and wrong and a belief that Western Civilization is the best answer yet devised to the human situation. Which means a lot of people will pigeonhole him as a conservative.

Here, he picks up two of his pet peeves from American medical journals. The second is articles on childhood obesity that focus on government as the party exclusively responsibile for solutions.

What was very striking about the two articles in the NEJM, however, was the complete absence of reference in either of them to the responsibilities of parents towards their own children, or to the cultural context in which parents have largely abandoned such responsibilities. The articles mentioned that television advertisements had made it difficult for parents to control their offspring’s diet, and that they somehow transferred the onus for making a choice about diet from the parents to the children. A majority of children now claimed that it was they, not their parents, who decided what they ate.

How old is this tendency in America? At least as old as the 1830s. Back then there was a segment of the body politic that blamed societal vices (always the same ones: crime, poverty, substance abuses) on systematic social inequalities, class oppresion, or corrupt institutions.

And there was a segment that saw individuals making bad choices or abjuring all choices. They saw a culture that too often encouraged and rewarded laziness and sensual temptation and seemed to gnaw the roots of moral behavior.

The poor are not poor because the rich are rich. Or are they? Self-improvement can raise people out of the traps they were born into. Or can it?

The unresolved tensions certainly go depper than 1830. The questions, and their clashing answers, add up to who we are, Americans.

We're mostly descended from people who left homes all over the world to come here because they believed in their individual capability to succeed on the strength of their own efforts. But they also came from places where they knew the social institutions and established religions and aristocracies kept them locked out of opportunity to succeed at home.

The believer in America says this place is different -- exceptional -- because it was built to leave the paths to success open. Equal opportunity is our mantra. The other voice says the game can be rigged, even here, and too often is. The fortunes of the two political parties have been tied to nothing more firmly than to which of those two visions the voters have uppermost in mind on election day.

The dilemma has nothing to do with big government/small government labels. The advocate of individual responsibility often wishes to use the government to encourage people in the right choices, or to make the wrong ones more difficult to obtain.

Advocates of change in the social order to promote equality and justice rarely can pass up the chance to use government to accomplish it. The few cases I can think of where they are anti-big-government are the cases where the government is so involved in protecting or promoting the system deemed evil that the advocates of change would rather the government die if it took down the institution with it. Garrisonian abolitionists, for instance.

French Lessons

A while ago, I wrote a three-part post (starting here, continuing here, and concluding here) on the war between France and Algerian insurgents in the 1950s. It seemed to me the essential birth of the asymmetrical brand of warfare that has so hamstrung American foreign policy from Vietnam to Iraq.

The revolt of Algeria in 1954, and the French attempt to repress it, are worth examining in some detail. For one, the revolt itself entwined the nightmares that evolved in the first half of the 20th century: in the fascist states, Lenin's Russia, and the Palestine wars. And when they merged they gave the world the modern terrorist movement in the form we are fighting it now, in al Qaida especially. Also, the French response offers some instructive counter-examples.

Others have noticed this, too, of course. Now the Rand organization has republished a timely analysis of the Algerian War [PDF alert] by David Galula, who deliberately sought a leadership position on the French side during the rebellion, the better to understand the tactical challenges.

Timely, because, as Bruce Hoffman writes in his forward, "This inability to absorb and apply, much less even study, the lessons learned in previous counterinsurgency campaigns is a problem that has long afflicted the world’s governments and militaries when they are confronted with insurgencies. Guerrilla groups and terrorist organizations, on the other hand, learn lessons very well."

Insurgent and terrorist movements as diverse as al Fatah, the African National Congress, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and the Tamil Tigers, for example, have cited the Algerian struggle’s influence on the strategies and tactics that they later adopted. Among the officer corps of most countries’ standing armies, however, counterinsurgency -- at least until very recently -- was disdained as a “lesser included contingency” unworthy of contemplation, much less serious study.

See if any of this sounds familiar:

• “In my zone, as everywhere in Algeria, the order was to ‘pacify.’ But exactly how? The sad truth was that, in spite of all our past experience, we had no single, official doctrine for counterinsurgency warfare.”
  
  
• “‘Ordinary banditry,’ said a highranking government official in Algiers.... By the time the insurrection was finally recognized for what it was, only drastic political and military action would have reversed the tide, and slowly in any case....”
  
  
• “The rebels realized that they could achieve the greatest psychological effect on the French and on world opinion at the cheapest price by stepping up terrorism in the main cities, notably in Algiers, which served as headquarters to most French and foreign correspondents and thus acted as a natural amplifier. A grenade or a bomb in a café there would produce far more noise than an obscure ambush against French soldiers in the Ouarsenis Mountains.”
  
  
• "Our forces were vastly superior to the rebels. Then why couldn’t we finish with them quickly? Because they managed to mobilize the population through terror and persuasion.... It was therefore imperative that we isolate the rebels from the population and that we gain the support of the population. This implied that under no circumstances could we afford to antagonize the population even if we had to take risks for ourselves in sparing it.”
  
  
• “If we distinguish between people and rebels, then we have a chance. One cannot catch a fly with vinegar. My rules are this: outwardly treat every civilian as a friend; inwardly you must consider him as a rebel ally until you have positive proof to the contrary.”
  
  
• “Reflecting on who might be our potential allies in the population, I thought that the Kabyle women, given their subjugated condition, would naturally be on our side if we emancipated them.”
  
  
• “While the insurgent does not hesitate to use terror, the counterinsurgent has to engage in police work.... The police work was not to my liking, but it was vital and therefore I accepted it.”
  
  
• “Then, five top leaders of the rebellion, including Ben Bella, had been neatly caught during a flight from Rabat to Tunis. Their capture, I admit, had little effect on the direction of the rebellion, because the movement was too loosely organized to crumble under such a blow.”
  
  
• “If there was a field in which we were definitely and infinitely more stupid than our opponents, it was propaganda.”
  
  
• “The borders with Morocco and Tunisia would easily have required 100,000 men to control with reasonable effectiveness, given their length and the local terrain. In order to save personnel, it was decided to build an artificial fence, a project which was completed along both borders by the spring of 1958.”
  
  
• “Throughout the war our prisoner camps were open for unannounced inspection by the International Red Cross, the reports of which were made public.... In the best camps, efforts were made to sift the tough prisoners from the soft; where it was not done, the camps became schools for rebel cadres.”
  

Algeria was the first modern terrorist thugocracy, a nation born of a cowardly father -- European lack of will -- and a cruel mother -- unrelenting terrorism on a grand scale. Naturally, the country fell into complete economic collapse. Twenty years after he served at its first president Ben Bella admitted, "We have nothing. No industry -- only scrap iron." That would have been bad enough, but throughout the '60s and early '70s, Algeria served as "the chief resort of international terrorists of all kinds." The terrorist-state survived there, and spread its seeds across Africa and the Middle East.

The FLN in Algeria polished the model of 20th century state power in the hands of rotten-hearted leaders. Islamists later would take that model in hand, and, under a coat of green paint, attempt to pass it off as the new Caliphate.

[Hat tip: Marc at American Future, who passed this along privately]

Shocked, Shocked!

Jay Rosen thinks the "Downing Street Memo" "deserves sustained news attention, real Congressional hearings, questions and answers at White House briefings, continued blogging, serious examination by all Americans (including the President's supporters) and the interest of future historians."

Well, I say, if people are hot about it, let's play it out in the media and let people think it over. Better too much information than too little. But frankly I can't manage to be shocked by the idea that this war began the way it did, and that the political leaders had their own motives and intentions beyond those they talked about. I think many of those in the media who are ruffled by this revelation don't know much about history.

My opinion about that remains the same as it was in January:

An inquiry into the roots of any war will show that they all have much in common. For instance, a common criticism of the Iraq War is that the explanation for it started out being about one thing and ended up having goals we never signed on to.

In fact, browsing through history books convinces me that the Bush Administration's publicly stated goals at the beginning of the Iraq War remain much more consistent with the post-war reality than typically is the case.

A quibble with the Mother Country over a petty tax of three pence a pound on tea becomes the birth of a nation. A boundary dispute with Mexico over a few square miles of Texas scrub becomes a land-grab of a third of a continent and keeps the valuable port of San Francisco from defaulting to British hands. A dispute with Germany over unrestricted submarine warfare becomes "making the world safe for democracy."

The reverse also is true. What seems, after the fact, to be the great justification for a war turns out to be something that did not figure among the stated reasons for starting it. Study World War II today and you'll get a big unit on the Holocaust. How odd, then, to discover it played no part in the justification for the war at the time. Lincoln freed the slaves. But the American Civil War began as an constitutional chess match and an attempt to enforce U.S. authority in certain forts and arsenals, and to collect the tariff in Southern ports. Lincoln publicly disavowed any intention to free a single slave.

By comparison, this was one of our more "honest" wars.

Now of course, all these ultimate outcomes were in the minds of somebody somewhere in a place of power at the time the wars began. Certainly the more radical American revolutionaries were angling for independence from the first bullet. But to draw the bulk of the country they needed to hold John Dickinson and the other moderates on the platform by making a general appeal to the rights of British citizens (as most Americans still felt themselves to be). I have no doubt Lincoln desired to see slavery ended (and the free blacks shipped off to Santo Domingo), but he knew the average Northerner never would fight in that crusade, and in fact the Southern secession presented an immediate economic and political crisis that forced his hand in spite of his personal philosophy.

All wars are so much alike that to compare them in detail sheds but little light. Still, a little familiarity with history does disabuse one of the sort of sham shock some people seem to feel on entering a war down one hole and coming out another. What? You mean the causus belli wasn't ironclad?

insert 'draft' pun here

The recruitment figures for the U.S. military have gone down, and the rumblings about the need for a draft have gone up. Until I see a real concrete proposal for a new draft, I won't know whether it's a good one or not. But in the meanwhile, here are some historical observations on conscription.

Basically, I think the idea of a conscription, by itself, is not shameful, nor does it de-legitimatize a nation's war effort. But it has to be done intelligently, and carefully, and it will necessarily breed resentments and social rifts, even if it is done as well as it can be.

The natural obligation of every able-bodied man to defend his hearth, home and country against foreign aggression has been assumed for as long as agricultural implements could effectively be used as weapons. The Greek and Roman city militias, and the Anglo-Saxon fyrd compelled men into service by natural right and tradition, with no limit of term of service.

But this is not the only "natural" force at work in such situations. As the erudite British military historian Maj. Gen. John Frederick Charles Fuller, C.B., C.B.E., D.S.O., observed in writing a history of conscription through the ages, "the majority of the people are naturally adverse to risking their skins."

Volunteerism failed during the American Revolution, when much of the countryside was under direct attack by British armies. States like Pennsylvania had to draft all their able-bodied men into the militia not once but twice during the 1777 invasion, and Massachusetts and Virginia resorted to conscription in 1777 to fill their thinning line regiments.

On Feb. 6, 1778, the Continental Congress recommended that all the states adopt this policy. George Washington wrote to the president of the Continental Congress in 1778 that, "I believe our greatest and only aid will be derived from drafting, which I trust may be done by the United States." Only the French aid averted the necessity of following this plan.

Likewise during the War of 1812, again with invaders on the national soil, volunteerism failed to fill up the depleted American regiments, and Congress turned to conscription, but the sudden end of the war prevented the plan from going into action.

Nor does America offer the only example. Take France in 1791: facing invasion on all sides, the revolutionary government called up line regiments, with a militia as a supplemental force. It also sought a National Guard for home defense. In short order, France found itself with more than 2.5 million "National Guards" and only 60 of the 169 battalions of volunteers it had hoped to raise.

An army of drafted men was the norm in the 19th century, and the United States and Great Britain were alone among the great powers in not embracing that. Napoleon won all his brilliant victories with conscripted armies -- France drafted 2,613,000 men in 13 years beginning in 1800. That set the tone for the century's military strategy: "God marches with the biggest battalions."

Both the North and the South began the Civil War with the intention of using volunteer armies, even though European experience had shown for generations that they were unsuited to modern wars. Both sides eventually turned to conscription, but circumstances forced the South to do so a few months sooner than the North.

What the Confederacy (and the United States) did differently when calling out its volunteers in 1861 was to set a limit on their terms of contract. This was done obviously with an eye to politics, and it came back to haunt both sides: the South a few months sooner and more severely than the North.

In the initial upwelling after Sumter, the South, expecting a quick victory or a European intervention, mustered in most of its volunteers for only one year. But the North was even more short-sighted (and also constrained by a militia law that dated from the Whisky Rebellion) and only called its men to three months' duty. Three years was a more common term of enlistment for a conscripted man in Europe (Prussia, for example). It may not have been short-sightedness at all, of course: if you tell a young man you're going to take him away from his family, his farm, his sweetheart, his education, his trade for three years and more, he's likely to feel his ardor for your cause grow a bit chilly.

Albert B. Moore, in "Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy," seems to regard the South's great mistake not as turning to conscription, but in relying at first on volunteers. "[C]onscription would have been less odious if it had been made the exclusive policy of raising armies at the outset. It might then have been regarded as a scientific way of allocating the man power of the country and distributing fairly the burdens of war. But the volunteer system was tried the first year, and after conscription was adopted volunteering was still allowed. This made conscription appear to be a device for coercing derelicts, hence the taint that attached to the conscript."

The North was fortunate in a way it never could have foreseen, because three months gave it just enough time to get the boys in uniform, give them big parades, and send them off into one battle, where they got chased off the field. Most of the three-month men in the regiments I've studied immediately signed up again. They had something to prove, having lost once, and they had had enough of a taste of army life (all of it in the late spring and early summer) to make it seem like a grand hunting trip.

Furthermore, the pressure on the Northern homefront to enlist (or reenlist) in July 1861 was enormous: the Union's defenses had melted in the wake of the first Bull Run, and the people were being told that the national capital, and their own homes beyond it, lay wide open to rapacious Rebel hordes. The panic was over in a few weeks, but those happened to be the crucial weeks in which Lincoln called for, and got, 500,000 troops. And he got them for three years.

Thus the North was able to postpone its enlistment crisis. The South was not so lucky. It rested on the laurels of Bull Run, confident that the war was won, and awaited European recognition. It wasted the summer and fall, and by the time it prepared for action again the enlistments were running out and the boys in arms, who had done their duty well, were eager to see home again.

The manpower crisis facing the Confederate armies in the spring of 1862 was a result of legislative incompetence, specifically, the Confederate Provisional Congress' foolish re-enlistment law of Dec. 11, 1861. The "bounty and furlough act" demonstrated, in the words of historian John C. Ropes, that "the difference between an army and a congeries of volunteer regiments was not appreciated." Every soldier who re-enlisted for three years or for the duration of the war was promised a bounty of $50 and a 60-day furlough. He could choose his arm of the service, and if he did not like his company, he could join a new one. Men could elect their own officers, "rewarding those who curried favor by laxity and demoting those who had enforced discipline," in the words of Douglas S. Freeman.

Freeman wrote, in "Robert E. Lee": "A worse law could hardly have been imposed on the South by the enemy. Its interpretation was confusing, its effect was demoralizing, and it involved nothing less than a reconstruction of the entire land forces of the Confederacy in the face of the enemy." He cites Union general and military historian Emory Upton, who wrote later that the bounty and furlough law should have been styled "an act to disorganize and dissolve the provisional army." The CSA Congress only made matters worse when it passed a series of hurried measures, designed to dangle more bait for re-enlistments.

When the permanent Congress took its seats shortly after this, it reversed the course and put the army on a firm, professional basis. It did so just in time, for that summer by means of drafts and threats of drafting, and by hefty bounties, the North would mobilize its manpower, which of course was vastly greater than the South's, for a long war. The Civil War was the last war that Americans tried to fight with volunteer minuteman patriotism. By the end of it, both sides had armies built up largely through conscription, threat of conscription, and (in the case of the North) offering a small fortune in bonuses to enlistees.

"In the army," Freeman wrote, "those who had intended not to re-enlist on the expiration of their terms grumbled and charged bad faith on the part of the government, but those who were determined to carry on the war to ruin or independence rejoiced that those who had stayed at home were at last to smell gunpowder. In the well-disciplined commands, men who went home at the expiration of their twelve months and returned as conscripts soon settled down to army routine." William D. Rutherford, adjutant of the 3rd South Carolina regiment, wrote home on April 18, 1862, approving the conscription bill. His only regret was that, "[t]o those who are loyal and brave, it is somewhat mortifying that their services cannot be voluntarily offered to their Country."

Confederate draft legislation was also far-sighted in attempting to provide exemptions that would allow skilled workers in essential trades to stay home and further the war effort on the job, something most other nations didn't adopt until after World War I. As it turned out, though, this provision was not used by the South as efficiently as it could have been. The exemptions are sometimes blamed because they increased the social tensions in the South. But in fact they were a progressive feature.

Historians of warfare also praise the Confederate conscription act of 1862, specifically for its exemptions. They call it the first modern draft in the world, because it recognized that industry and agricultural leadership, and organization behind the lines were as important to a national war effort as armies were. The goal of a draft isn't just to shovel as many men as possible into uniforms; it's to get the best soldiers there, and leave the best workers at their jobs. The combatants in World War I failed to realize this, and they fought each other with universal conscription, huge armies, and losses of millions of men. World War I proved "it was nothing less than a national, let alone military crime to conscript all classes of men as if they were one class and of equal value, and to fill the trenches, which were little more than altars of human sacrifice to a discredited god, with highly skilled mechanics, miners and professional men." Of course, the men who go to war always resent the men who do not. But that resentment does not necessarily make for the wisest policy when trying to guide a nation to freedom out of war.

The flaws of the Southern draft were functions of all conscripted armies and prevailed in the North as well as in Europe: overzealous draft officers; the host of exemptions, widely abused, however well regulated in theory; and the ease with which the richer class of men of military age avoided service.

Not surprisingly, the Rebel soldiers hated the Conscript Law. It was unfair, and they knew it. It took the glory out of the war, and the war was never the same for them. Sam R. Watkins,serving in the First Tennessee regiment under Braxton Bragg, had this to say about it:

[S]oldiers had enlisted for twelve months only, and had faithfully complied with their volunteer obligations; the terms for which they had enlisted had expired, and they naturally looked upon it that they had a right to go home. They had done their duty faithfully and well. They wanted to see their families; in fact, wanted to go home anyhow. War had become a reality; they were tired of it. A law had been passed by the Confederate States Congress called the conscript act. ... From this time on till the end of the war, a soldier was simply a machine, a conscript. It was mighty rough on rebels. We cursed the war, we cursed Bragg, we cursed the Southern Confederacy. All our pride and valor had gone, and we were sick of war and the Southern Confederacy.

A law was made by the Confederate States Congress about this time allowing every person who owned twenty negroes to go home. It gave us the blues; we wanted twenty negroes. Negro property suddenly became very valuable, and there was raised the howl of "rich man's war, poor man's fight." The glory of the war, the glory of the South, the glory and pride of our volunteers had no charms for the conscript.

That was how he felt, and how his companions felt, in the spring of 1862. It was a low point of the war. They would have walked away from it, but they couldn't, so they didn't. They went back to the business of war, of being an army, which is a highly illogical business, after all, as Sophocles knew. The war went on, and their lives went on, and things looked different. Of the invasion of Kentucky that summer, Watkins wrote:

I remember how gladly the citizens of Kentucky received us. I thought they had the prettiest girls that God ever made. They could not do too much for us. They had heaps and stacks of cooked rations along our route, with wine and cider everywhere, and the glad shouts of "Hurrah for our Southern boys!" greeted and welcomed us at every house. Ah, the boys felt like soldiers again. The bands played merrier and livelier tunes. It was the patient convalescing; the fever had left him. he was getting fat and strong; his step was buoyant and proud; he felt ashamed that he had ever been 'hacked'; he could fight now. It was the same old proud soldier of yore. ... New recruits were continually joining our ranks. ...[O]ur pride was renewed and stood ready for any emergency; we felt that one Southern man could whip twenty Yankees."

America has fought its post-Civil War conflicts with overwhelmingly drafted armies. Roosevelt started beefing up the U.S. military by a draft in late 1940, even before America was at war. Here's what he said about it:

On this day more than sixteen million young Americans are reviving the three-hundred-year-old American custom of the muster. They are obeying that first duty of free citizenship by which, from the earliest colonial times, every able-bodied citizen was subject to the call for service in the national defense.

It is a day of deep and purposeful meaning in the lives of all of us. For on this day we Americans proclaim the vitality of our history, the singleness of our will and the unity of our nation. ... In the days when our forefathers laid the foundation of our democracy, every American family had to have its gun and know how to use it. Today we live under threats, threats of aggression from abroad, which call again for the same readiness, the same vigilance. Ours must once again be the spirit of those who were prepared to defend as they built, to defend as they worked, to defend as they worshipped. The duty of this day has been imposed upon us from without. ... [T]hose who have created the name and deed of total war-have imposed upon us and upon all free peoples the necessity of preparation for total defense.

A year later, he extended the terms of men who were already in service, just like the Confederacy did. Here's what he said about it in his message to Congress describing the step:

I realize that personal sacrifices are involved in extending the period of service for selectees, the National Guard and other reserve components of our army. ... Nevertheless, I am confident that the men now in the ranks of the army realize far better than does the general public, the disastrous effect which would result from permitting the present army, only now approaching an acceptable state of efficiency, to melt away and set us back at least six months while new units are being reconstituted from the bottom up and from the top down with new drafts of officers and men.

Vietnam, Again

Still thinking about the American attitudes during the Vietnam war, after reading Vietpundit's offer to express about it, and seeing follow-ups and feedbacks from other Americans with Vietnamese roots, like Bleeding Ear.

And, maybe, still wishing I had a better answer to give them. America just performed poorly, on any number of levels, in that time and place. One modern history book I often refer to titles its chapter on the 1960s and '70s "America's Suicide Attempt." How about it? What should have been a time of proper balancing -- bringing long-due fairness and equality and equal opportunity to women, minorities, blighted cities, and the land and water itself -- became a perfect storm of loathing in the minds of many people, and instead of seeing what they were for, and working to create it, they fixated on what they were against, a set of effigies that merged into a leviathan image of The Man: militaryindustrialracistmalechauvinistpigwhiteAmeriKKKa.

Read it in Hunter S. Thompson's famous passage recalling the spirit of rebellion in the 1960s: "There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil." Where was it going? What did it propose to do? What were the consequences? Everything is muddy except the image of Old and Evil.

When the '60s protest generation felt its wave crest and then recede, many took refuge in academe. From the universities they carried on their abrasive critique of everything conventional in America. The planners and soldiers in the Vietnam war were torn apart, in dissertation after disseration, for their reliance on delusional images.

They noticed something: America's military men in Vietnam confounded that war with the old 19th century Indian wars. This site is an academic paper that explores that language:

American soldiers in Vietnam routinely called enemy territory "Indian Country." In her study of the Vietnam War, Fire in the Lake, Frances Fitzgerald argues that the term "Indian Country" was more than just a joke or a figure of speech: "It put the Vietnam War into a definite mythological and historical perspective: the Americans were once again embarked upon a heroic ... conquest of an inferior race." General Maxwell Taylor, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the mid-1960s, defended the policy of "pacification" in Vietnam by using the analogy of Indians and the frontier: "It is very hard to plant the corn outside the stockade when the Indians are still around. We have to get the Indians farther away in many provinces to make good progress."

It's foolish to fight one war under the delusion that you're fighting another. It's self-destructive -- as deadly, from a military standpoint, as using Napoleonic open-field formations against dug-in Confederates with rifles on Marye's Heights; as deadly as sending Polish horse-mounted lancers out to fight Panzer tanks. It denies the reality of the people you are fighting among -- your allies as well as your enemies. They are dehumanized, and they suffer.

But what I don't see so often studied is the way the antiwar movement took the Vietnamese-as-American Indians image into its own heart, reversing the virtues in it, and used it in its own struggle. The paper I cited above does address this:

By 1971, the Indian analogy began to be used against our Vietnam policies rather than in support of them. John Kerry, testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, quotes a fellow Vietnam veteran, a Native American: An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians. Then suddenly he stopped in Vietnam one day and said, 'My God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people.' And that's what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.

In the early 1960s, American popular culture was saturated with cowboys and Indians, Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone. During the Vietnam years this all fell into bad odor; simplistic, racist caricatures. Westerns of the later Vietnam period, like "Little Big Man" and TV's "F Troop," lampooned or exploded the mythology. The Vietnam connection was explicit in many cases. "Arthur Kopit claimed that his play Indians (1968), a meditation on Buffalo Bill and Indian-killing, was really about Vietnam."

Indians became the ultimate "other" in American history: they were seen as everything we were not. They loved their mother, the earth, while we raped it (never mind that they killed the buffalo as vigorously as the white man did, once they got their hands on the technology to do it). They were benevolent and communal (never mind their bloody tribal wars and enslavement of captives). They were deliberately non-technological while we were fools for it (as if they chose to see their children die of fevers modern medicine could cure).

To the disaffected mass in America, all that was loathsome about the United States could be separated from its opposite, and the opposite projected onto the Indians, most of whom were safely trapped in history.

The other "others" of the times included the Vietnamese. As Kerry's testimony points out, the connection quickly was made, and not just by Indian soldiers. Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill, among others, made it part of their stock in trade.

One of the best books on the war, Michael Herr's Dispatches (1978), a non-fiction account of a journalist's tour of duty with the troops, places Vietnam at the end of a succession of American betrayals and victimizations of the American Indian, starting with the European settlers on the East Coast and President Andrew Jackson's forced removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from the southeast to Oklahoma. Where did our involvement in Vietnam begin?

... you couldn't use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along.

This is interesting psychology, but it is historical nonsense. Making an iconic image of the heroic communist Vietnamese peasant fighting for freedom against the militaryindustrialracistmalechauvinistpigwhiteAmeriKKKa may validate someone's wrath and rage. But it disrespects the complexity of the case. And it does no honor whatsoever to the Vietnamese. They didn't ask to be anyone's images or icons.

Hard left intellectuals have had to jettison much of their own literary history because it embodies politically incorrect thoughts that horrify their modern minds. They cling to the few works that criticize the conventions of the day. One is Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," with its corrupt European colonialists and "pure" African souls.

Chinua Achebe, the father of modern African literature, wants none of it. "I am an African. What interests me is what I learn in Conrad about myself. To use me as a symbol may be bright or clever, but if it reduces my humanity by the smallest fraction I don't like it. ... [Y]ou cannot compromise my humanity in order that you explore your own ambiguity. I cannot accept that. My humanity is not to be debated, nor is it to be used simply to illustrate European problems."

Sound Familiar?

The insurrection never had full popular support. The empire that had established its rule, somewhat reluctantly, in this populous and fractious Middle Eastern land was the greatest the world had known.

Those who knew anything about the empire realized it was insanity to oppose its wealth and military might with makeshift weapons. Many leaders in the cities understood that more could be gained by cooperation with this occupying power than by fighting it.

But not all the people understood that, especially the country people. They resented the foreign occupiers and their alien, inferior religion. And among them, the leaders found recruits, young men convinced that God was on their side. They made suicide pacts and fought to the death.

Many of the insurgents were canny supporters of the old regime, who fought to regain political power and mistrusted the zealots. The religious rebels considered them impious. When they lacked the common enemy of the empire, the two factions turned on one another.

Soon the country was in turmoil, and even the capital city was infested by insurgents. They kidnapped powerful men who were cooperating with the occupiers, accused them of being "traitors to our common liberty," and slit their throats.

Want to know how it turns out? You'll have to go read the great historian of this war, Joseph Ben Matthias, better known by his Roman name, Flavius Josephus. But you can get a hint of the flavor of the 66 C.E. rebellion of the Jews of Palestine by reading a book written in that torn-apart country, by a man known only as Mark.

The Late Unpleasantness

Election Day 2004 looks like Election Day 1860 in more ways than most people realize. That, if I'm right, is not good news, considering the blowback from the 1860 vote.

The regional schism on this year's red-blue map has been noted and compared to that of 1860, of course. ("Jesusland" is not "Jeffdavisland," of course, and the comparison was over-emphasized in some quarters, but there's an undeniable likeness.) Like 2004, the presidential vote of 1860 followed a presidential election where the winner had carried less than half the popular vote. Democratic leaders stoked popular fears of resentment of the monopolistic power of a few corporations which had frighteningly close ties to the government and literally bought influence for the sake of continuing their economic dominance. Masses of voters cast ballots against their economic interest, but in the name of "values," or out of fear of religious fanaticism. The political landscape even featured a galvanizing act of violence, in some ways comparable in impact to Sept. 11, in the Harper's Ferry raid.

But while many of the forces at work in the 1860 election churned in the nation this year, too, their distribution among the two parties is different in some cases.

The parallels of the two divisive elections also are somewhat obscured by differences that, ultimately, don't amount to much. For instance, whereas in 2004 the national division straddled several issues -- Iraq war, terrorism, gay marriage, abortion, -- in 1860 it was concentrated in one: slavery. But the components were essentially similar: ageing Supreme Court justices, the power of Washington to overrule diverse state institutions, the rights of a minority to equal treatment, and the extension of the federal government's military power into dubious legal territory.

Another fact that obscures the parallel is the split in the 1860 Democratic Party, which fielded two candidates. But this was a non-issue in terms of the outcome; Lincoln would have won even if all the non-Lincoln votes were rolled into one opponent.[*] The double candidacy of Douglas and Breckenridge in 1860 was the alternative to a single candidate with a "flip-flopping" platform. John Kerry's reversals this year were over-emphasized because they made easy headlines and made a useful weapon for his opponents, but the trope is sufficiently true that he could be portrayed, as political cartoonists often painted him, as two distinct candidates.

1. Flip-flops and radicals

The range of views in the modern Democratic Party may be as great as it was in 1860. Part of the party is practical, centrist, and in touch with the broad base of the electorate. But much of it is cloistered in castles on a hill, obsessed with the religious wolves howling in the Republican night.

Hollywood and the universities and San Francisco are the dens of the modern-day fire-eaters: Intemperate speakers who say the whole nation is rotten and they wish they were out of it (even while claiming to be the real patriots and to represent the true vision of the Founders). Like South Carolina and the Deep South of 1860, they are too important for the party to disown but an embarrassment to moderates in places where only moderation would carry the vote.

Just as the Michael Moore Democrats and the Moveon.org commercials grabbed the microphone from reasonable people in the party, the incendiary speeches of Yancey, Rhett, Ruffin and their like filled the columns of hostile newspapers in the North in 1860. In the South, meanwhile, the words of Northern men like Thoreau, who all but deified John Brown, were read and remembered long after the majority of Northern voices who condemned Brown's terrorism were forgotten.

In 1860, those Democrats who could not split themselves in half, as the national party had done, labored to avoid saying anything to alienate either wing of the party. In his silence on key issues of the day, Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Henry D. Foster was mocked by Republican editors in Philadelphia as a "prince among political trimmers" and "the mum candidate."

2. They want to take away your rights

1860 was a time of economic dislocation. The Democrats, who had been in power for two administrations, bore the blame when the economy staggered. But that was just the base of the voters' wrath against them, and the Republicans cleverly galvanized that resentment with slavery issues such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision.

Most in the North had no sympathy for Abolitionists. The prejudice against blacks was as strong, if not stronger, in the North than in the South. Yet by turning the issue of slavery into one of "Slaveocracy" -- the supposed bid by Southern leaders to impose their will on the people of the North -- the Republicans swung the voters of the North behind their drive to capture the White House.

A reading of historical trends well-documented in 1860 would show that Southern power was rapidly waning in the growing nation, and even with the three-fifths rule, the sun had set on the era when the South and the North would balance one another. Yet the Republicans managed to convince their constituents that the South held Washington in a tight grip, and the "Slave Power" oligarchs intended to use it to impoverish the working people of the North.

When the Covode committee report on patronage corruption in the Democratic Buchanan Administration came out in the spring of 1860, it revealed, as one historian put it, "practices common to every administration since the days of Andrew Jackson." But the Republicans touted it to Northern voters as evidence of a party in thrall to slave power.

The Southerners, for their part, gave the Republicans ample ammunition. Horace Greeley said the Kansas-Nebraska Act had made more abolitionists in two months than William Lloyd Garrison had in 20 years. The Dred Scott decision, meanwhile, not only determined that one class of Americans was to be excluded from the civil rights supposedly available to all free men, it also opened the question of whether any state, new or old, could bar slavery at all. These two incidents formed the core of hundreds of stump speeches across the North in 1860.

3. Voting against economic interest

With the populace whipped up into an emotional furor, the Republicans turned their manipulative political skill to forging a link, in the minds of voters, between the interests of the common man, on one hand, and tariff protection and a homestead bill to open up Western land to exploitation.

Northern industrialists convincing their workers that the tariff was vital to the working man's interest, even though it was no longer needed for protection of industry and only lined the pockets of the manufacturers at the expense of everyone. They rallied the people to demand the government sell off Western lands at low prices -- even though the main beneficiaries of that policy turned out to be land speculators and railroad investors.

In the South, the fire-eaters succeeded in their bid to fuse, in the popular mind, the protection of slavery to the liberty of all Southern whites.

4. Swing states and values voters

There were no opinion polls in those days, but politicians studied the local and state level elections intently and knew roughly where each voting district stood and what would appeal to the voters in each place. Republicans ignored most of the nation and concentrated on three lower North states with Southern sympathies -- Illinois, Indiana and Pennsylvania. If the term "swing state" had been invented then, it would have been applied.

The GOP was a broad and loose coalition of factions that had little in common besides a common opponent, and whose agendas at times even crossed purposes. Conservative former Whigs felt especially irritated by the radicalism of some of the other wings of the party. The 1860 platform had something for everyone, including some severely unpleasant and discriminatory planks.

Throngs of recent Catholic immigrants, mostly Irish and German, had swelled the Democrats' ranks in the cities, but this provoked a backlash. At first the anti-immigrants formed their own party and vied to be the main opposition to the Democrats, but by the late 1850s the anti-immigrants and the anti-slavery men had merged into the new Republican Party.

Anti-slavery leaders in the Republican Party, like Chase and Seward, were far more radical than the mass of voters who backed them. But they managed to turn voters' attention away from that fact. Democrats were astonished that native-born Northern whites, who essentially shared their views of race relations, would cast their lots with such mad fanatics.

The degree of evangelicalism in the Northern reformers is easy to overlook today, when such Protestant intensity has so thoroughly drained out of New England. Yet to the abolitionist minority among the Republicans, anti-slavery was very much a "values" issue.

[*]For some reason, history professors keep teaching otherwise. Something in the prevailing paradigm must require them to insist that Southern Democrats were to blame for Lincoln's election in 1860. I laid out the math here, but I still get e-mails from history professors at colleges and universities whose names you've heard no doubt, insisting that, numbers be damned, the South held the power and only its internal split allowed Lincoln to win election with 39 percent of the popular vote.