Lloyd C. Gardner/Marilyn B. Young: Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn From the Past (2007, New Press)

Found this in the library, and thought I'd at least scan through it. I wound up reading more than I thumbed past, the introduction the main thing skipped. The quote section lists all of the chapters (except the introduction). Some I didn't bother quoting from, but even those pieces are not without interest. Gardner and Young are revisionist (i.e., antiwar) historians from the Vietnam era, so this has the feel of the now-older generation confronting the new war -- not same as the old war, but all wars seem to have a lot in common. Vietnam then and Iraq now are distinct enough. America then and now differ in subtler ways, with much of the similarity mere convergence -- the warmongers still lie, because they have to lie to sell wars like these. At least one chapter is missing: the one about how the Iraq war's protagonists see themselves in the context of Vietnam. This has become increasingly weird ever since Bush invoked the analogue of the Tet Offensive as proof of current success. Supposedly Gen. Petraeus, the Great White Hope sent in to lead the last-chance-for-victory surge, is qualified for the job by his unique expertise as the one guy who faced and mastered the lessons of Vietnam. That in itself would be fodder for a whole chapter, but only if the book, like the war, is to remain an open project.

Among various profound insights below, one that stands out is how none of the counterinsurgency theorists have figured out how to win hearts and minds. I think that's because there's no way to force someone to love you. It's also because those who blunder into such wars are enamored with force -- had they not been, they wouldn't have picked the fight in the first place. And make no mistake: both Vietnam and Iraq were wars of American choice, wars that could easily have been avoided way before US political leaders dug in so deep they convinced themselves that leaving would be even worse than losing. Nowhere in the history of either war did we consider trying to satisfy the hearts and minds that actually existed. We always assumed they wanted to be like us because we never entertained any other possibility. That winds up being the tightest of all linkages between the two wars. It is the lesson we didn't learn from Vietnam, the lesson we repeated senselessly in Iraq. It is endemic to the worldview of two generations of American chauvinists: today's neocons and yesterday's paleoliberals.

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1. David Elliott: Parallel Wars? Can "Lessons of Vietnam" Be Applied to Iraq" (pp. 17-18):

I teach a course on U.S. foreign policy and a course on the Vietnam War. Until 2004 I made great efforts to avoid linking Iraq and Vietnam. The "lessons of Vietnam" are numerous but often contradictory. Perhaps the most salient of these is to be very careful in applying analogies. Yuan Foong Khong, a former student at the Claremont Colleges, now at Oxford, wrote a classic book titled Analogies at War, in which he painstakingly analyzed the various ways in which analogies were misused by U.S. officials during the Vietnam War. The book appeared in 1992, just as U.S. foreign policy decision makers were grappling with the new and unfamiliar terrain of the post-Cold War world. Khong analyzed in detail how and why decision makers resort to analogies when confronted with novel problems. They serve as a cognitive filter that transforms the unfamiliar into something recognizable and reduces complexity to manageable proportions. The pitfalls of this conceptual screening process are many, however. The wrong analogy may be chosen -- perhaps Kennedy and Johnson would have been better served by cautions about the French experience in Indochina than by bracing lessons from Munich and Korea. Or a potentially useful analogy may be misinterpreted or misapplied, as in the case of the misguided application of British experience int he Malayan Emergency to Vietnam.

(p. 29):

While [Thomas] Ricks's book [Fiasco] has been justly praised for documenting the follies and blunders of the Bush administration in Iraq, it also perpetuates the myth that there could have been a smarter way to achieve the same objective.

It isn't clear why U.S. commanders seemed so flatly ignorant of how other counterinsurgencies had been conducted successfully. The main reason seems to be a repugnance, after the fall of Saigon, for dwelling on unconventional operations. But the cost of such willful ignorance was high. "Scholars are virtually unanimous in their judgment that conventional forces often lose unconventional wars because they lack a conceptual understanding of the war they are fighting," Lt. Col. Matthew Moten, chief of military history at West Point, would comment a year later.

This assertion would come as a surprise to the many scholars of the Vietnam War and other "insurgencies" who point to the underlying political issues as the factors that decided the outcome, rather than the application of refined military techniques. Indeed, the very mantra of "winning hearts and minds" -- often cited by military proponents of counterinsurgency -- is a reflection of this key point. No U.S. strategist in Vietnam ever devised a method of "winning hearts and minds" -- and none of the counterinsurgency enthusiasts lauded by Ricks seems to have a plan for winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis under conditions of military occupation. Recall Richard Cohen's statement that "the lesson of Vietnam is that once you make the initial mistake, little you do afterward is right. If the basic policy is flawed, the best tactics in the world will not salvage it."

2. Alex Danchev: "I'm with You": Tony Blair and the Obligations of Alliance: Anglo-American Relations in Historical Perspective.

3. Wilfried Mausbach: Forlorn Superpower: European Reactions to the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq (pp. 76-77):

To Europeans, America was anything but "at war." As Reinhard Bütikofer, political director of the German Green Party, tried to explain, "In this country, you have all these emotions that make even the word 'war' very different for Americans and Germans. America has its 'wars' against drugs and illiteracy. . . . Germans associate war with the near-total destruction of their cities and homeland." Half a year after the terrorist attacks, the German ambassador in Washington confessed that he had to constantly remind his backstops in Berlin "that the United States still considers itself to be at war," whereas "most Germans don't feel they are at war, with all the terrible connotations of destruction, defeat, and occupation" that it held for them. If Germans think of war, they think of alarms driving them into cellars and air raid shelters almost every day for three years at a time; they think of the trials of organizing the most basic needs of life in bombed-out cities among broken pipes and tons of rubble. The British think of their own ordeal under the constant threat of German bombers throughout the summer of 1940. Russians think of a murderous war that raged on their soil for almost four years, leaving behind an unfathomable scene of destruction and more than 25 million dead. The Dutch think of the echo, day in and day out, of German boots on the cobbled streets of their occupied hometowns as they were cowering behind drawn curtains. No, Europeans did not believe that Americans were "at war." At the same time, their own collective memories of war made them obtuse to the profound impact that September 11 had on the American psyche.

(pp. 78-79):

Now, however, the two countries [France and Germany] ganged up against the United States, provoking much of American media to switch into full campaign mode. A doctored front-page photo in the New York Post replaced the heads of the French and German representatives to the UN with weasel faces. In the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Hitchens described Chirac as a "positive monster of conceit" and "a rat that tried to roar." Capitol Hill cafeterias had to wipe the "French" from fries and toast on their menus. A Nashville morning talk show called for "a boycott of all things French, from Perrier to champaignes to wines and French w-h-i-n-e-s, French berets, French pastries," and made an exception for French kissing only because of Valentine's Day. Shock jocks near Atlanta offered people the chance to demolish a Peugeot for ten dollars. Even those who vented their anger in less destructive ways complained in letters to the editor about France and Germany conspiring against the United States on the global stage and about their cynical enthusiasm for supporting America's enemies. As Justin Vaïsse summed up, "In unfriendly American eyes, France is a cowardly and effete nation that never met a dictator it couldn't appease. It is immoral, venal, anti-Semitic, arrogant, insignificant, and nostalgic for past glory. It is also elitist, dirty, lazy, and it is anti-American." In light of all this, it is hardly surprising that bumper stickers appeared reading "Iraq now, France next," and that the French ambassador in Washington wondered whether the media was not conveying the impression that, in fact, this order had to be reversed.

In retrospect, this was one of the most embarrassingly stupid parts of the run up to the war -- nothing more than an infantile temper tantrum. That it happened now looks like an admission of how shaky the case for war actually was.

4. Gareth Porter: Manufacturing the Threat to Justify Aggressive War in Vietnam and Iraq (pp. 88-89):

One of the most chilling parallels between Vietnam and Iraq is the way in which the war planners deliberately created threats out of whole cloth to justify going to war. They felt they had to have a serious threat, because without it, political resistance would have been too strong, whether inside the government, outside it, or both. A comparison of the two cases underlines a common characteristic of aggressive war in a democratic system.

But the comparison also reveals both a fundamental difference in the politics of Vietnam and Iraq and an enormous difference in the sophistication and skill with which deceit and manipulation were used to ensure the necessary political support for war. The neoconservatives who engineered the United States into aggressive war on Iraq faced a much tougher task in obtaining the necessary official public compliance to open the path to war than did the national security advisers to Kennedy and Johnson on Vietnam. In the early twenty-first century there was no longer an enemy perceived to be malevolent and all-powerful, and the attentive public was no longer automatically inclined to support military force when the government called for it. But the Bush war planners were much more self-conscious, systematic, and disciplined in their approach to creating the story line they needed to go to war than the war planners of the Kennedy-Johnson era.

These differences are an indication of how much the system for waging aggressive war has evolved in the more than four decades between Vietnam and Iraq. In the end, however, it is still the commonality of the two cases that stands out. Those who were pushing for aggressive war had to conjure up a threat, because nothing in the region of interest supported a case for the use of force, and they knew it. In both the 1953-65 period of the Cold War and again in the post-Cold War era (1991-2006), the United States was overwhelmingly dominant in military terms, both globally and in the regions in question. In the 1954-62 period, China was known by U.S. policy makers to be militarily weak and was on the defensive, seeking to accommodate capitalist and even feudalist regimes in the region in the hope of containing U.S. military influence in the region, especially in East Asia. The Communist movements in Southeast Asia, except for those in Vietnam and Laos, were either small and weak or supportive of the noncommunist regime. In the Persian Gulf and the Middle East in 2001, no regional state was threatening to dominate the region.

(pp. 96-97):

Just as war in Vietnam was rooted in the determination of the U.S. national security elite to maintain the dominant power position the United States held in East Asia, the roots of the war in Iraq lie in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower in 1991. But during the first post-Cold War decade, U.S. power in the region was far less dominant than it had been during the high tide of U.S. power in East Asia. As a result of the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. military obtained a semipermanent role in Iraq by creating no-fly zones for Saddam's forces in both the north and the south patrolled by U.S. planes based in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Beginning in 1998, these zones provided a vehicle the Clinton administration could use to carry out increasingly aggressive bombing operations against military targets in Iraq.

Nevertheless, the United States lacked permanent bases, and its access to facilities in the Gulf remained politically tenuous, given Saudi sensitivities about the U.S. military presence. And all across the region Arab governments were generally unsympathetic to U.S. policy in the Middle East -- especially its close relationship with Israel. The United States had no political-military allies in the region providing major bases from which it could project power into the rest of the region. That constrained U.S. political-military influence int he Middle East.

There was thus a wide chasm between the complete U.S. military dominance globally and its relatively limited military presence int he Persian Gulf. That gap frustrated the neoconservatives and hard-line officials from past Republican administrations who had attacked détente and advocated victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. This group of former top national security officials -- led by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld, and including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith -- believed the United States had both the might and the right to pursue far more ambitious political-military objectives in the Middle East and elsewhere than the Clinton administration had done in its eight years in office.

(p. 102):

The White House began intensive planning for the "Iraq rollout" in July and determined that the best time to launch a "full-scale lobbying campaign" on the coming war was the day after Labor Day when Congress reconvened. As White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. explained to the New York Times, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." A "White House Iraq Group," which included Bush's political strategist Karl Rove, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and communications adviser Karen Hughes, began meeting in August to plan in detail how the message on Iraq would be shaped in the national media.

5. John Prados: Wise Guys, Rough Business: Iraq and the Tonkin Gulf.

6. Andrew J. Bacevich: Gulliver at Bay: The Paradox of the Imperial Presidency (pp. 128-129):

As George W. Bush's more bellicose lieutenants saw it, the principal constraints on the use of American power lay within the U.S. government itself. In a speech to Defense Department employees just a day prior to 9/11, Rumsfeld had warned of "an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America." Who was this adversary? Some evil tyrant or murderous terrorist? No, announced the secretary of defense, "the adversary's closer at home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy."

in fact, the internal threat was by no means confined to this one bureaucracy. It encompassed much of official Washington. It included the Congress and the Supreme Court, each of which could circumscribe presidential freedom of action. It extended to the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department, which the hawks viewed as obstreperous and hidebound. It even included the senior leadership of the U.S. military, especially the unimaginative and excessively risk-averse Joint Chiefs of Staff. All of these could impede the greater assertiveness that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz had yearned for even before September 11. In order to make headway on the foreign front, each and every one of these sources of opposition on the home front had to be neutralized.

So unleashing American might abroad implied a radical reconfiguration of power relationships at home. On this score, 9/11 came as a godsend. In its wake, citing the urgent imperatives of national security, the hawks set out to concentrate authority in their own hands. September 11, 2001, inaugurated what became in essence a rolling coup.

Nominally, the object of the exercise was to empower the commander in chief to wage his Global War on Terror. Yet with George W. Bush a president in the mold of William McKinley or Warren G. Harding -- an affable man of modest talent whose rise in national politics was attributable primarily to his perceived electability -- Cheney and his collaborators were really engaged in an effort to enhance their own clout. Bush might serve as the front man, but on matters of substance, theirs would be the decisive voices. Gordon and Trainor describe the operative model this way: "The president would preside, the vice president would guide, and the defense secretary would implement," with Wolfowitz and a handful of others, it might be added, lending the enterprise some semblance of intellectual coherence.

(p. 132):

As Rumsfeld and his disciples saw it, senior military officers (especially those in the U.S. Army) were still enamored with the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force. The Powell Doctrine was rooted in an appreciation of quantity -- employing lots of tanks, lots of artillery, and lots of "boots on the ground." Rumsfeld's vision of a new American way of war emphasized quality -- relying on precise intelligence, precise weapons, and smaller numbers of troops, primarily elite special operations forces.

Implicit in the Powell Doctrine was the assumption that the wars of the future would be large, uncertain, expensive, and therefore infrequent. Implicit in Rumsfeld's thinking was the expectation that future American wars would be brief and economical, all but eliminating the political risks of opting for force. The secretary of defense believed that technology was rendering obsolete old worries about fog, friction, and chance. Why bother studying Karl von Clausewitz when "shock and awe" could make a clean sweep of things?

For Rumsfeld and his coterie, here lay the appeal of having a go at Iraq. Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan had proved something of a test drive for their ideas. The secretary of defense was counting on a swift victory over Saddam to fully validate his vision and to discredit once and for all the generals who were obstructing his reforms.

So Rumsfeld was intent on having the war fought his way. In the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom he exerted himself to marginalize the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The secretary of defense had little use for professional military advice and so, in planning the war, the chiefs played essentially no role. The compliant JCS chairman, General Richard Myers, so much under Rumsfeld's thumb that he was said by Senator John McCain to be "incapable of expressing an independent view," remained an onlooker. When one member of the Joint Chiefs dared to dissent -- army General Eric Shinseki suggesting that occupying Iraq might require several hundred thousand troops -- Wolfowitz retaliated with a public rebuke and Rumsfeld pushed Shinseki into instant oblivion.

Rumsfeld's chosen military interlocutor was General Tommy Franks, commander of United States Central Command. In a best-selling memoir published after his retirement, Franks portrays himself as a folksy "good old boy" from west Texas who also happens to be a military genius. More accurately, he was Rumsfeld's useful idiot -- a coarse, not especially bright, kiss-up, kick-down martinet who mistreated his subordinates but was adept at keeping his boss happy. Franks knew that he was not really in charge, but he pretended otherwise. Appreciating the "political value in being able to stand at the Pentagon podium and say that the Bush administration was implementing the military's plan," Rumsfeld was happy to play along.

So the hawks not only got their war but got it their way. The war plan that Rumsfeld bludgeoned Franks into drafting conformed to their requirements. It envisioned a relatively small force rushing toward Baghdad at breakneck speed, swiftly toppling the Baathist regime, and just as quickly extricating itself. Underlying these expectations were three key assumptions: that the regular Iraqi army wouldn't fight, that the Iraqi people would greet arriving U.S. and British troops as liberators, and that major Iraqi institutions would survive the war intact, facilitating the rapid withdrawal of all but a small contingent of occupying forces.

In the event, these assumptions proved fallacious. When the Anglo-American attack began, the anticipated mass defection of Iraqi forces did not occur. The Iraqi army fought, albeit poorly (although some U.S. troops found even this level of opposition disconcerting). Iraqi irregulars -- the Fedayeen -- offered a spirited resistance that caught allied commanders by surprise. Meanwhile, the welcome given to allied forces as they traversed southern Iraq proved to be spotty and less than wholehearted. Worse still, when Baghdad fell, Iraq's political infrastructure collapsed, creating a vacuum and giving rise to mass disorder.

7. Christian G. Appy: Class Wars (p. 149):

One contrast between our own time and the Vietnam era is that today we are significantly less committed to curbing the worst consequences of economic and social inequality. Though the burden of fighting in Vietnam was not equally shared, and our presidents acted as if domestic life could be as unencumbered as in the most prosperous peacetime, for much of the 1960s there was at least a significant national commitment to improving the lives of poor and working people. While the social and economic reforms of the Great Society have resulted in failures as well as successes, and its funding never came close to approximating the claims of its rhetoric, it was at least partially responsible for reducing the poverty rate from 22 percent to 13 percent between 1963 to 1973. Today working people not only supply the troops who die in our name but bear the lion's share of the economic sacrifices as we wage an apparently permanent "war on terror" without so much as a slight increase in the minimum wage.

8. Elizabeth L. Hillman: The Female Shape of the All-Volunteer Force.

9. Gabriel Kolko: Familiar Foreign Policy and Familiar Wars: Vietnam, Iraq . . . Before and After.

10. Lloyd C. Gardner: Mr. Rumsfeld's War (p. 178):

Hence long before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld's worldview encompassed a central belief in the irrationality of foreign leaders who would commit nuclear suicide by launching a missile against the United States, along with the untrustworthiness of allies or "coalitions," and the doubtful accuracy of the liberal-infested Central Intelligence Agency. To those who would call this worldview the very essence of imperial unilateralism, Rumsfeld had a ready answer -- constructing a missile shield was the only way to reassure America's allies we would be there and always willing to perform our special role as guarantor of world order because we could not be held in check by a rogue state or group brandishing a nuke. The world had been enjoying great prosperity since the Cold War, he told Congress on June 21, 2001, and the free market system spread into all corners of the world. To hesitate now in building an anti-missile system was to choose "intentional vulnerability," risking everything gained thus far and putting future expansion in jeopardy.

On SOCOM (Special Operations Command), a military unit intended by Rumsfeld as an alternative to the CIA's Operations Command (p. 190):

A big aid to Rumsfeld in planning for SOCOM was the abrupt change int eh definition of the enemy. At first President Bush referred to the 9/11 attacks as crimes, not a military action. "This is not a criminal action," Rumsfeld argued to the president, "this is war." Admirer Rowan Scarborough called the episode "Rumsfeld's instant declaration of war, and it took America from the Clinton administration's view that terrorism was a criminal matter to the Bush administration's view that terrorism was a global enemy to be destroyed." Bush issued a military order in November that characterized the 9/11 attacks as being "on a scale that has created a state of armed conflict that requires the use of the United States Armed Forces." How they would be used was up to Rumsfeld.

"If Rumsfeld gets his way," asserted one of the first assessments of the future role of SOCOM, "administration hawks may soon start using special forces to attack or undermine other regimes on Washington's hit list -- without the sort of crucial public debate that preceded the war in Iraq." Pentagon officials called SOCOM the "Secret Army of Northern Virginia," falling into ranks under Donald Rumsfeld's stern gaze. Asked to describe a scenario where the Strategic Support Branch might play a role, Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas O'Connell happily obliged. "A hostile country close to our borders suddenly changes leadership. . . . We would want to make sure the successor is not hostile." Within a few weeks it emerged, in a Washington Post article, that Rumsfeld wanted his special operations forces to enter a country and conduct operations without explicit concurrence from the U.S. ambassador. In the Pentagon view, the article said, the campaign against terrorism is a war and requirse similar freedom to prosecute as in Iraq. Rumsfeld's pressure on Bush to call post-9/11 activities a "war" instead of a "criminal action" was indeed "a very big thought," and a lot had already flowed from that idea. Chief of mission authority had been a pillar of the new tension between State and Defense. "When you start eroding that, it can have repercussions that are . . . risky." Colin Powell's chief aide, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, instructed his counterterrorism coordinator, J. Cofer Black, to act as point man to thwart the Pentagon's initiative. "I gave Cofer specific instructions to dismount, kill the horses and fight on foot -- this is not going to happen."

(p. 191):

To the neocons [Ahmed] Chalabi was the "George Washington of Iraq," but the arc of his career resembled the last "George Washington" America supported, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam. Even more than the strong-willed McNamara, who thought he understood how to fight Ho Chi Minh and learned otherwise, Donald Rumsfeld knew: his intelligence sources were good -- because he had a vision of a post-Saddam Middle East welcoming American forces, as his friend Dick Cheney assured the nation, as "liberators."

The curious mix of Hobbes and Wilson that inspired such hopes for a happy outcome of war with Iraq could be seen also in Rumsfeld's embrace of "shock and awe" as the answer tot he gradualism of the Vietnam War that conservatives blamed for the defeat. It was certainly true, as Lyndon Johnson often said, that almost until the last years of the war, and whether the public thought that going into Vietnam was a mistake or not, the prevalent dissenting opinion was not to get out but to find a quick way to win.

11. Walter LaFeber: Zelig in U.S. Foreign Relations: The Roles of China in the American Post-9/11 World (pp. 204-205):

A perceptive analysis of this pre-9/11 evolution was published in the winter of 1999-2000 by Owen Harries, editor of the National Interest, often lauded as the conservatives' most influential foreign policy journal. Harries, however, dissented sharply from many conservatives and most neoconservatives.

He began with the important axiom that describes the two-century-old U.S. involvement with the Chiense: "over the years Americans have had great difficulty thinking rationally about China. They have tended to oscillate violently between romanticizing and demonizing that country and its people." Americans, Harries claimed, saw the Chinese not in accurate historical terms but through "stereotypes" such as "China as Treasure" (that is, bottomless markets), "China as Sick Patient" (thus badly needing U.S.-style democracy and Christianity), or "China as Threat -- at one time Yellow Peril, at another Red Menace, and now, in the eyes of some very vocal and not uninfluential Americans, as rival, malevolent superpower." If China did become a truly great power, Harries warned, given these long-standing stereotypes -- upon which Americans ignorant of history would depend to provide the necessary background for their foreign policies -- "the chances of a cool, sensible American reaction cannot be rated particularly high."

(p. 212):

The Chinese economic offensive, including targeting access to oil, moved well beyond Asia into regions where the country's investors had seldom been seen, regions long dominated by American dollars. In 2004, China passed Japan to become the world's second-largest oil consumer, 6.5 million barrels a day. The United States consumed 20 million barrels daily. If the acceleration of automobile sales in China continued, by 2015 it could consume an estimated 14 million barrels each day. Since world oil production and refining capacity were already running at full tilt, it was not clear where those additional 7 million of so barrels of oil would come from each day. Saudi Arabia held the globe's largest oil reserves, and since at least 1945 it had worked closely with the United States. In early 2006, the king became the first Saudi ruler to visit China, in large part because after 2002 his nation's oil shipments to the United States had declined while they so increased to the Chinese that by 2005 Saudi Arabia was their leading source of oil. In regard to Iran, China signed a $100 billion contract to import 10 million tons of liquefied natural gas over twenty-five years, and in return took a 50 percent stake in a huge Iranian oil field -- two reasons why Beijing demonstrated little interest in cooperating with Washington to sanction Iran's nuclear program.

12. Marilyn B. Young: Counterinsurgency, Now and Forever (pp. 223-224):

In October 2003, as the insurgency gained strength, then Major General Raymond Odierno ordered the 4th Infantry Division to "increase lethality." [Lieutenant Colonel Nathan] Sassaman was apparently eager to comply: "When [he] spoke of sending his soldiers into Samarra, his eyes gleamed. 'We are going to inflict extreme violence.'" As the insurgency intensified, so did Sassaman's reprisals. In November, after one of his men had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade fired in the vicinity of the village of Abu Hishma, Sassaman, with the permission of his immediate superior, Colonel Frederick Rudesheim, wrapped the village in barbed wire, issued ID cards (in English), and threatened to kill anyone who tried to enter or leave without permission. In his own limited way, Sassaman used U.S. firepower as it had been used in Vietnam. In response to a single mortar round, Dexter Filkins reported, he fired "28 155-millimeter artillery shells and 42 mortar rounds. He called in two air strikes, one with a 500-pound bomb and the other with a 2,000-pound bomb." When his troops were fired on from a wheat field, Sassaman "routinely retaliated by firing phosphorus shells to burn the entire field down." Elsewhere in Iraq, the use of phosphorus shells was referred to as a "shake and bake" mission.

The results of these efforts pleased Sassaman: "We just didn't get hit after that." He did not describe, and the reporter did not ask about, the effect on the human targets. Over and over again, Sassaman met resistance of any kind with massive force, and taught his men to do likewise. Like the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, according to Sassaman and the troops under his command, understood only the language of force. In any event, it was the only language any of the Americans spoke other than English. Over the course of their tour, the men under Sassaman's command became increasingly punitive toward the Iraqis around them -- any Iraqi, all Iraqis. When a shopkeeper gave passing troops the finger, they doubled back, searched his shop, drove him to a bridge over the Tigris, and threw him in. "The next time I went back, the guy is out there waving to us," a soldier told Dexter Filkins. "Everybody got a chuckle out of that."

13. Alfred W. McCoy: Torture in the Crucible of Counterinsurgency (p. 231):

Once torture begins, its perpetrators -- reaching into that remote terrain where pain and pleasure, procreation and destruction all converge -- are often swept away by frenzies of power and potency, mastery and control. Just as interrogators are often drawn in by an empowering sense of dominance over victims, so their superiors, even at the highest level, can succumb to fantasies of torture as an all-powerful weapon. Thus, modern states that sanction torture, even in a limited way, run the risk of becoming increasingly indiscriminate in its application. When U.S. leaders have used torture to fight faceless adversaries, both communist and terrorist, its practice has spread almost uncontrollably. Only four years after the CIA compiled its 1963 manual for use against a few key Soviet counterintelligence targets, its agents were operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam that killed more than 20,000 suspects and tortured countless thousands more. Similarly, just a few months after the CIA used its techniques on a few "high target value" al-Qaeda suspects, the practice spread to the interrogation of hundreds of Afghans and thousands of Iraqis. In both cases, moreover, not only did torture spread, but the level of abuse escalated relentlessly beyond the scientific patina of the agency's formal psychological method to become pervasively, perversely brutal.

At the deepest level, the abuse at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and Kabul are manifestations of a long history of a distinctive U.;S. covert-warfare doctrine developed since World War II, in which psychological torture has emerged as a central albeit clandestine facet of American foreign policy. From 1950 to 1962, the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort that reached a cost of a billion dollars annually -- a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind. After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shocks, and sensory deprivation, this work then produced a new approach to torture that was psychological, not physical, perhaps best described as "no-touch torture."