[Mb-civic] The War on Terror as an Indian War

[William Swiggard]

Tomdispatch: John Brown on the War on Terror as an Indian War

In the 1940s and 1950s, when the generation of men now ruling over us 
were growing up, boys could disappear into a form of war play -- barely 
noticed by adults and hardly recorded anywhere -- that was already 
perhaps a couple of hundred years old. In this kind of play, there was 
no need to enact the complicated present by recreating a junior version 
of an anxiety-ridden Cold War garrison state (though you could purchase 
your own H2O Missile, a water-powered toy "ICBM" in imitation of the 
sort just then being prepared by adults to pulverize the planet). For 
children in those years, there was still a sacramental, triumphalist 
version of American history, a spectacle of slaughter in which they 
invariably fell before our guns. This spectacle could be experienced in 
any movie theater, and then played out in backyards and on floors with 
toy six guns (or sticks) or little toy bluecoats, Indians, and cowboys, 
or green, inch-high plastic sets of World War II soldiers. As play, for 
those who grew up in that time, it was sunshine itself, pure pleasure. 
The Western (as well as its modern successor, the war film) was on 
screen everywhere then.

When those children grew up (barely), some of them went off to Vietnam, 
dreaming of John Wayne-like feats as they entered what they came to call 
"Indian country"; while others sallied off to demonstrate against the 
war dressed either in the cast-off World War II garb of their fathers or 
in the movie-inspired get-ups of the former enemy of another age -- 
headbands and moccasins, painted faces, love beads (those previously 
worthless baubles with which, everyone knew, Manhattan had so 
fraudulently been purchased), as well as peace (now drug) pipes. 
Sometimes, they even formed themselves into "tribes."

As it turns out, though, there was a third category of young men in 
those years -- those who essentially steered clear of the Vietnam 
experience, who, as our Vice President put it inelegantly but 
accurately, had "other priorities 
<http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2000/07/cheney.html> in 
the '60s." Critics have sometimes spoken of such Bush administration 
figures as "chickenhawks" 
<http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0434,robbins,56166,1.html> for their 
lack of war experience. But this is actually inaccurate. They were 
warriors of a sort -- screen warriors. They had an abundance of combat 
experience because, unlike their peers, they never left the confines of 
those movie theaters, where American war was always glorious, our 
military men always out on some frontier, and the Indians, or their 
modern equivalents, always falling by their scores before our might as 
the cavalry bugle sounded or the Marine Hymn welled up. By avoiding 
becoming either the warriors or the anti-warriors of the Vietnam era, 
they managed to remain quite deeply embedded in centuries of 
triumphalist frontier mythology. They were, in a sense, the Peter Pans 
of American war play.

So no one should have been surprised that, when George Bush declared his 
global war on terror, he also swore to get Osama bin Laden in this 
fashion <http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/17/bush.powell.terrorism/>: 
"I want justice. And there's an old poster out West... I recall, that 
said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive.'" Of course, that "poster" came not from 
any real experience he had in the West, but directly from the thrilling 
cowboy films of his childhood. So did his John-Wayne-like urge to "hunt" 
the terrorists down, or "smoke 'em out," 
<http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0718/p02s02-usfp.html> or (for Iraqi 
insurgents) "bring 'em on 
<http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/02/sprj.nitop.bush/>." From that 
same childhood undoubtedly came the President's repeated urge to dress 
up in an assortment 
<http://members.dslextreme.com/users/markpoyser/uggabugga/2003/mission-accomplished-thanksgiving.jpg> 
of "commander-in-chief" military outfits 
<http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/jbrown/ldw104.htm>, much in the style of a 
G.I. Joe "action figure." (Think: doll). It's visibly clear that our 
President has long found delight -- actual pleasure -- in his war-making 
role, as he did in his Top Gun, "mission accomplished" landing 
<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/10/Bushaircraft.jpg> on that 
aircraft carrier back in 2003.

It's not surprising either that a critic who spent real time up close 
and personal with top Bush administration figures, Colin Powell's former 
Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson, would accuse the President of 
"cowboyism." 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1597461,00.html> Nor should 
it be strange that various neocon writers close to this administration 
and in thrall to the same spirit should lovingly quote American military 
men who also believe themselves out on some Western frontier. Robert 
Kaplan <http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=3650>, for instance, 
cites one officer as saying, "The red Indian metaphor is one with which 
a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine 
field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat 
challenge of the early 21st century."

Many things have changed in our world in recent decades. For one thing, 
hundreds of years of history have more or less disappeared into the 
entertainment/media maw. In films like Dances with Wolves, which came 
out at the time of the first American war in Iraq, the Indians have 
turned all warm and fuzzy and are now the veritable Ewoks of our planet. 
In the meantime children on their floors and in their video games still 
shoot down innumerable evil ones ready to ambush them, but so many of 
them are now off this planet: demons, supervillains, mutants, and 
aliens. They are surely the first generation in memory to pass a full 
childhood without fighting old-style Indian Wars on their floors or 
playing "cowboys and Indians." And yet the paradigm of the frontier and 
of the Indian Wars settled deep into the American soul. So again, it 
should not be surprising that the now officially grown up boys, who have 
the power to make war on the world, should still imagine themselves in 
their beloved movies of long ago and that the framework of the Indian 
Wars, however suppressed and transformed, remains in some fashion deeply 
with us.

Surprising, however, is how little attention this has gotten. 
Fortunately, John Brown, a former State Department official who resigned 
to protest the coming invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and who has previously 
written on Bush's Global War on Terror 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2293> for Tomdispatch) now 
takes up this theme and ushers us provocatively into the secret frontier 
dreamland of our rulers. Tom


        "Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet"

    Ten Ways to Interpret the War on Terror as a Frontier Conflict
    By John Brown

    The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is, like all historical events,
    unique. But both its supporters and opponents compare it to past
    U.S. military conflicts. The Bush administration and the neocons
    have drawn parallels between GWOT
    <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/podhoretz.htm> and World War II
    as well as GWOT and the Cold War. Joshua E. London, writing in the
    National Review
    <http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/london200512160955.asp>, sees
    the War on Terror as a modern form of the struggle against the
    Barbary pirates. Vietnam and the Spanish-American War
    <http://www.usgennet.org/usa/topic/spanamerwar/> have been preferred
    analogies for other commentators. A Pulitzer-prize winning
    journalist, Anne Applebaum
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/06/AR2005120601217.html>,
    says that the war in Iraq might be like that in Korea, because of
    "the ambivalence of their conclusions." For others
    <http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList575/3C2914F52152E565C1256E60005C84C0>,
    the War on Terror, with its loose rhetoric, brings to mind the "war
    on poverty" or the "war on drugs."

    I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the War on Terror: as
    a twenty-first century continuation of, or replication of, the
    American Indian wars, on a global scale. This is by no means
    something that has occurred to me alone, but it has received
    relatively little attention. Here are ten reasons why I'm making
    this suggestion:

    1. Key supporters of the War on Terror themselves see GWOT as an
    Indian war. Take, for example, the right-wing intellectuals Robert
    Kaplan and Max Boot who, although not members of the administration,
    also advocate a tough military stance against terrorists. In a Wall
    Street Journal article
    <http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005673>, "Indian
    Country," Kaplan notes that "an overlooked truth about the war on
    terrorism" is that "the American military is back to the days of
    fighting the Indians." Iraq, he notes, "is but a microcosm of the
    earth in this regard." Kaplan has now put his thoughts into a book,
    Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, which
    President Bush
    <http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=9428>
    read over the holidays. Kaplan points
    <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18611> out that "'Welcome to Injun
    Country' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the
    Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq.... The War on Terrorism
    was really about taming the frontier."

    As for Max Boot, he writes
    <http://www.hooverdigest.org/023/boot.html>, "'small wars' -- fought
    by a small number of professional U.S. soldiers -- are much more
    typical of American history than are the handful of 'total' wars
    that receive most of the public attention. Between 1800 and 1934,
    U.S. Marines staged 180 landings abroad. And that's not even
    counting the Indian wars the army was fighting every year until
    1890." A key GWOT battlefield, Boot suggests, is Afghanistan, noting
    that "[i]f the past is any indication of the future, we have a lot
    more savage wars ahead."

    2. The essential paradigm of the War of Terror -- us (the attacked)
    against them (the attackers) -- was no less essential to the mindset
    of white settlers regarding the Indians, starting at least from the
    1622 Indian massacre of 347 people at Jamestown, Virginia. With rare
    exceptions, newly arrived Europeans and their descendants, as well
    as their leaders, saw Indians as mortal enemies who started the
    initial fight against them, savages with whom they could not
    co-exist. The Declaration of Independence condemned "the inhabitants
    of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of
    warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and
    conditions." When governor of Virginia (1780), Thomas Jefferson stated:

        "If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end
        proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond
        the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely
        do for them and us."

    President Andrew Jackson, whose "unapologetic flexing of military
    might" has been compared <http://hnn.us/articles/978.html> to George
    W. Bush's modus operandi, noted
    <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/andrew.htm> in his "Case for
    the Removal [of Indians] Act" (December 8, 1830):

        "What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and
        ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic,
        studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished
        with all the improvements which art can devise or industry
        execute, . . . and filled with all the blessings of liberty,
        civilization, and religion?"

    Us vs. them is, of course, a feature of all wars, but the starkness
    of this dichotomy -- seen by GWOT supporters as a struggle between
    the civilized world and a global jihad -- is as strikingly apparent
    in the War on Terror as it was in the Indian Wars.

    3. GWOT is based on the principle of preventive strike, meant to put
    off "potential <http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1019-29.htm>,
    future and, therefore, speculative attacks" -- just as U.S. Army
    conflicts against the Indians often were. We have to get them before
    they get us -- such is the assumption behind both sets of wars. As
    Professor Jack D. Forbes wrote in a 2003 piece, "Old Indian Wars
    Dominate Bush Doctrines," in the Bay Mills News:

        "Bush has declared that the US will attack first before an
        'enemy' has the ability to act. This could, of course, be called
        'The Pearl Harbor strategy' since that is precisely what the
        Japanese Empire did. But it also has precedents against First
        American nations. For example, William Henry Harrison, under
        pressure from Thomas Jefferson to get the American Nations out
        of the Illinois-Indiana region, marched an invading army to the
        vicinity of a Native village at Tippecanoe precisely when he
        knew that [Shawnee war chief and pan-tribal political leader]
        Tecumseh
        <http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_038300_tecumseh.htm>
        was on a tour of the south and west."

    4. While U.S. mainstream thinking about GWOT enemies is that they
    are total aliens -- in religion, politics, economics, and social
    organization -- there are Americans who believe that individuals in
    these "primitive" societies can eventually become assimilated and
    thus be rendered harmless through training, education, or
    democratization. This is similar to the view among American settlers
    that in savage Indian tribes hostile to civilization, there were
    some that could be evangelized and Christianized and brought over to
    the morally right, Godly side. Once "Americanized," former hostile
    groups, with the worst among them exterminated, can no longer pose
    any threat and indeed can assist in the prolongation of conflicts
    against remaining evil-doers.

    5. GWOT is fought abroad, but it's also a war at home, as the
    creation after 9/11 of a Department of Homeland Security
    illustrates. The Indian wars were domestic as well, carried out by
    the U.S. military to protect American settlers against hostile
    non-U.S. citizens living on American soil. (It was not until June 2,
    1924 that Congress granted citizenship to all Native Americans born
    in the United States.) While engaged in the Indian wars, the U.S.
    fought on its own, without the help of foreign governments; such has
    essentially been the case with GWOT, despite the support of a few
    countries like Israel, the creation of a weak international
    "coalition" in Iraq, and NATO participation in Afghanistan operations.

    6. America's close partner Israel, which over the years has taken
    over Arab-populated lands and welcomes U.S. immigrants, can be
    considered as a kind of surrogate United States in this struggle.
    Expanding into the Middle East, the Israelis could be seen as
    following the example of the American pioneers who didn't let
    Indians stand in their way as they settled, with the support of the
    U.S. military, an entire continent, driven by the conviction that
    they were supported by God, the Bible, and Western civilization. "I
    shall need," wrote Thomas Jefferson
    <http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/joshua/manifest.html>, "the favor of that
    Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old,
    from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with
    all the necessities and comforts of life." Less eloquently, Ariel
    Sharon
    <http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/01/last_of_the_new_jews.html>
    put it this way: "Everything that's grabbed will be in our hands.
    Everything we don't grab will be in their hands."

    7. As for the current states that are major battlefields of GWOT,
    Afghanistan and Iraq, it appears that the model for their future,
    far from being functional democracies, is that of Indian
    reservations. It is not unlikely that the fragile political
    structures of these states will sooner or later collapse, and the
    resulting tribal/ethnic entities will be controlled -- assuming the
    U.S. proves willing to engage in the long-term garrisoning in each
    area -- by American forces in fortified bases, as was the case with
    the Indian territories in the Far West. Areas under American control
    will provide U.S. occupiers with natural resources (e.g., oil), and
    American business -- if the security situation becomes manageable --
    will doubtless be lured there in search of economic opportunities.
    Interestingly, the area outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad (where
    Americans have fortified themselves) is now referred to as the Red
    Zone <http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0929/p07s01-woiq.html> --
    terrorist-infested territory as dangerous to non-natives as the
    lands inhabited by the Redskins were to whites during the Indian wars.

    8. The methods employed by the U.S. in GWOT and the Indian wars are
    similar in many respects: using superior technology to overwhelm the
    "primitive" enemy; adapting insurgency tactics, even the most brutal
    ones, used by the opposing side when necessary; and collaborating
    with "the enemy of my enemy" in certain situations (that is, setting
    one tribe against another). What are considered normal rules of war
    have frequently been irrelevant for Americans in both conflicts,
    given their certainty that their enemies are evil and uncivilized.
    The use of torture is also a feature of these two conflicts.

    9. As GWOT increasingly appears to be
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26054-2004Dec25?language=printer>,
    the Indian wars were a very long conflict, stretching from the
    seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth -- the longest war
    in American history, starting even before the U.S. existed as a
    nation. There were numerous battles of varying intensity in this
    conflagration with no central point of confrontation -- as is the
    case with the War on Terror, despite its current emphasis on Iraq.
    And GWOT is a war being fought, like the Indian wars in the Far
    West, over large geographical areas -- as the Heritage Foundation's
    Ariel Cohen
    <http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/hl919.cfm> puts
    it, almost lyrically, "in the Greater Middle East, including the
    Mediterranean basin, through the Fertile Crescent, and into the
    remote valleys and gorges of the Caucasus and Pakistan, the deserts
    of Central Asia, the plateaus of Afghanistan."

    10. Perhaps because they are drawn-out wars with many fronts and
    changing commanders, the goals of GWOT and the Indian Wars can be
    subject to many interpretations (indeed, even Secretary of Defense
    Rumsfeld at one point was eager to rename the War on Terror
    <http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/26/news/terror.php> a "Global
    Struggle Against Violent Extremism"). For many abroad, GWOT is a
    brutal expression of a mad, cowboy-led country's plans to take over
    the world and its resources. In the United States, a large number of
    Americans still interpret these two wars as God-favored initiatives
    to protect His chosen people and allow them to flourish. But just as
    attitudes in the U.S. toward Native Americans have changed in recent
    years (consider, for example, the saccharine 1990 film Dances with
    Wolves, which is sympathetic to an Indian tribe, in contrast to John
    Wayne shoot-the-Injuns movies), so suspicious views among the
    American public toward the still-seen-as-dangerous "them" of GWOT
    might evolve in a different direction. Such a change in perception,
    however, is unlikely to occur in the near future, especially under
    the current bellicose Bush regime, which manipulates voters' fear of
    terrorists to maintain its declining domestic support.

    John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the
    State Department <http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0312-11.htm>
    over the war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily "Public Diplomacy Press
    Review," available free upon request
    <http://www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php?/newsroom/johnbrown_main>.
    The title for this paper comes from a 1692 quotation by Puritan
    preacher
    <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/oped/Fitzreview.shtml> and
    witch-hunter Cotton Mather.


http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=50043
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