°Chains of command
On MetaMute, “Make Representation History” - on the protests around the G8, by Hari Kunzru, ELAM and Mute.
And an interesting piece by John Barker on the intellectual warriors of the anglosphere, “Armchair Spartans and The Spectre of Decadence”. It covers a lot of ground, and all worth reading, but the discussion of wars-by-proxy fought by ‘green card soldiers’ is particularly interesting:
The recruitment of mercenary soldiers has traditionally been seen as an absolute indicator of decadence, the decline of classical Athens for example, or the Carthaginians cited by Steinbeck. The armchair Spartans are all big fans of Israel (Sparta in a sea of chaos, of dangerous and inferior peoples), of its militarism and its citizen army. The USA has had to do it differently, partly perhaps because they have chosen to imprison so many young Afro-Americans rather than recruit them. Instead they have turned on the one hand to a whole host of private military companies (35 at least in the USA according to Deborah Avant) mercenaries by the strictest definition, and the recruitment of non-Americans in to the army itself. Their enthusiasm for recruiting the indigenous people of Canada, pushed the Canadian government to complain and ask for a stop to such activity inside Canada itself. But it is the ‘green card soldiers’ who provide the most numbers, and they are mercenaries more in the style of the Byzantine Empire’s use of Slavs as policemen in the Greek Peleponnese, and whose commitment was won by giving them land there. Either way, such recruitment has been attacked from the left as the buying up of cannon fodder, and from at least one component of the Bush-type right. In an incoherent piece in the National Review Mark Kirkorian (executive director of the Centre for Immigration Studies) while pointing out that ‘military service has long been a way for new immigrant groups to prove their worthiness’ is also worried. ‘First of all,’ he writes, ‘as the proportion of non-citizens in the armed forces grows, there is the real possibility that defending America will become ‘work Americans won’t do’… Not to put too fine a point on it, we should go to any lengths to avoid developing a kind of mercenary army, made up of foreigners loyal to their units and commanders but not to the Republic. It didn’t work out well for the Romans.’ And he goes on to cite the dangerous precedent of the San Patricio Battalion, a group of Irish immigrants in the US army who defected to fight for the enemy in the Mexican War.
This professional in the immigration paranoia business, argues that they should become citizens first in the proper way. At the same time it’s important to keep this phenomenon in some perspective. There are some 37,000 green card soldiers, a relatively small percentage. Michael Lind argues that ‘the groups that are truly over-represented in America’s armed forces are whites from the south and west’, and that they have grown in numbers relative to those from the north and north east. He makes reference to Confederate values, those same values Huntington was proclaiming in his first book. But these ‘Confederate’ values are not those of the Civil War when so many were prepared to die, and certainly not those of the famous Spartans led by Leonidas. The prime consideration of strategy post-Vietnam is to keep the number of Western casualties to a minimum. In addition, the ‘green card soldier’ would not exist if enough of those white southerners were there in the army; and this is especially significant in the context of the preparedness of the reservists in the armed forces, and what is required of the modern day soldier as described by Thomas Barnett.
The Iraq occupation has revealed the importance of reservists in the US force there. This system of reservists stems from the post-Vietnam mix of active and reserve forces designed to ensure that ‘when America went to war with an all-volunteer force, home town America would have to go too.’ The reservists however were to be mobilized and sent home quickly, that was the plan. In the ‘war on terror’ this has changed , but at the same time, a recent New York Times report (reprinted IHT 5/7/04), says that some military commanders comment in private that a number of reservists ‘arrive for duty ill-prepared for the challenges they face in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and in particular they lack specific combat skills that are required even of truck drivers in a war zone. They say the reservists also lack something more intangible but equally important: a warrior ethos.’ This may constitute an ‘uncomfortable truth’ for those like Huntington who trade in uncomfortable truths, yet none of which has any impact on them. Huntington’s chief cheerleader, Robert Kaplan, is one upon whom this lack of a warrior ethos must grate. His own book written from his berth as a ‘senior fellow’ at the New American Foundation, and endorsed by ex Defence Secretaries Perry and Cohen, is entitled Warrior Politics: Why Leadership requires a Pagan Ethos. The evidence is that the citizen part of the army just isn’t up to it. What they have done, the ‘white trash’ element who by and large joined up to get an education they otherwise would not get, is to take the rap for the Abu Ghraib scandal. As one of those under investigation Sabrina Harman said, ‘I knew nothing about the military except the fact they would pay for college.’ At the bottom of the American pile (Lynndie England was a chicken-plant worker), it must have been a great temptation to lord it over Iraqis, to humiliate them, when a green light had been given for them to do so. Sexual humiliation had obviously been agreed on as a means of softening up prisoners, but in this case the contradiction with the sexual Puritanism of the armchair Spartans was too much. In the event what was proved was the latent decadence of poor Americans and a failure of discipline. General Taguba’s report talked of ineffective officers (also reservists), and painted a picture of armed soldiers wandering around the prison in civilian clothes; logbooks filled with ‘unprofessional entries and flippant comments’; old friendships replacing the military chain of command; and of how the saluting of officers was ’sporadic.’
