Is America Becoming a Monarchy?

I just finished watching yesterday the miniseries The Kennedys. Made for an approximate budget of $12 million it had very good acting by the principle stars--who not only looked but sounded like the characters that they portrayed. Barry Pepper should win an Emmy for his portrayal of Bobby.  Having failed to meet the fine artistic standards set in recent years at the History Channel by such fare as Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Shop, Axemen, and Pickers the series ended up being broadcast on Reelz Channel, a small channel specializing in showing Hollywood films of recent decades and running movie reviews.

The miniseries, like previous Hollywood efforts on the subject, was torn between dealing with the Shakespearean elements of the Kennedy clan and the actual events of the Kennedy administration. It compromised by covering Joe Kennedy Sr.'s career in the first hour along with some flashbacks and then dealing with the Kennedy administration in five hours. John F. Kennedy's rise is shown in the second episode. The one episode that dealt with the subject matter of this blog was the sixth episode on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although the Bay of Pigs invasion is the subject of part of the third episode and Vietnam is briefly mentioned in the seventh episode.

I first studied the Cuban Missile Crisis in high school and subsequently studied it at university as an undergrad and in graduate school because, along with the start of World War I in June-August 1914, it is the classic crisis in international relations. Previously Hollywood has portrayed the crisis in the 1973 made for television Missiles of October, with William Devane as Jack Kennedy and Martin Sheen as Bobby, a 1980s miniseries on the Kennedys in which Martin now becomes Jack, and the 2000 Kevin Costner film Thirteen Days. I would say that this most recent version is superior to that of The Missiles of October but inferior to that of Thirteen Days. This is primarily because I liked the actors performance more in The Kennedys, but it lacked the budget to portray the action outside the White House taking place in Cuba and elsewhere. 

The Kennedy administration only became Camelot after the assassination in Dallas and it was in retrospect that JFK was instantly transformed by the media into a second Lincoln and the family into America's royal family. I have never believed in the Kennedy assassination theories, partly because most of them make very little logical sense and ignore the evidence of the case and partly because never having been a great fan of Kennedy I never required a villainous conspiracy to give his death proper meaning. And so I do appreciate this latest effort's sticking to the facts and portraying Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin.

America has always had an aristocracy of powerful political clans that dominated politics in different eras. For the first century of American independence it was the Adams dynasty--which produced one vice president, two presidents, a secretary of state, and the vice presidential nominee of an antislavery third party. It achieved this record largely due to merit rather than due to any royalist tendencies on the part of the American people. Competing with the second and third generations of the Adams dynasty were the Harrisons of Virginia and Ohio. This clan produced two generals and two presidents: William H. who died after a month in office in 1841 and grandson Benjamin who was president from 1889 to 1893 after having served as a general in the Civil War. The next powerful family was the Roosevelts who dominated the first half of the twentieth century. They were following by the Kennedys and the Bushes. Prescott Bush was a contemporary of John F. Kennedy's in the senate and George H.W. Bush's and George W. Bush's careers coincided with the remarkable senate career of Teddy Kennedy. Incidentally the latter was never seen nor even mentioned in the miniseries, which seems a very strange omission. 

The United States began as a constitutional republic populated by people who rejected a monarchy and did not want to be involved in a series of foreign wars for raison d'etat.  Starting in the second half of the twentieth century with our new status as a superpower we abandoned both these beliefs. It is now about time that we abandon our two royal families, the Kennedys and the Bushes, return to a politics based on merit and wars based on real need.

So when our royal court in waiting, Hollywood, begins making miniseries about the Bush dynasty, I just ask it to use the same standards as they used in portraying the Kennedys. This should make for at least two or three movies about the ending of the Cold War, the liberation of Kuwait, and the fall of the Butcher of Baghdad. After all, the Kennedys engaged in a war against Castro and he is still in power.

Is Counterinsurgency Warfare a Scam?

Some liberal writers have written as if counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare aka low-intensity or asymmetrical warfare is all a scam to support big defense budgets and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. COIN warfare was first developed as a field of military science in the 20th century by the British army based on its experience in colonial conflicts in Africa and the Middle East and by the U.S. Marine Corps based on its experience fighting "banana wars" in Central America and the Caribbean in the 1930s. It then underwent major modification based on British experience in colonial conflicts in the 1950s and the French experience in Indochina. It is continuously evolving based on experience. The lessons derived are genuine, even if they are often misapplied.

Five cases are usually cited as models or exemplars for successful COIN warfare:  the anti-Mau Mau campaign in Kenya in the 1950s; the Greek civil war of 1944-49; the Malaysian emergency of 1948-60; the anti-Huk campaign in the Philippines in the 1950s; and the British campaign in Northern Ireland. These campaigns have several features in common. First, the insurgents were usually separatist or Communist guerrillas from a minority ethnic group. Second, the insurgents were usually ill equipped in terms of arms and military training. Third, the insurgents were usually cut off from significant outside assistance or in the case of the Greek rebels suddenly had that aid cut off for political reasons. Still, these COIN campaigns lasted on average about eight years before they were successful.

Some advocates of COIN warfare have cited marvelous statistics demonstrating that most guerrilla wars are unsuccessful. This is true--most are. But in cases of wars of national liberation involving guerrillas fighting either against Western colonial powers or where Western armies are doing much of the fighting--as in the Vietnam War of the 1960s, Iraq from 2004--2009, and Afghanistan--the success rate is much lower for the government. This is for several reasons. First, the publics in Western democracies are impatient and want quick results. Second, they are fickle and wars they support today they may turn against tomorrow if the cost is significantly raised. Third, if Western armies use severe repression as did the French in Algeria with their widespread torture, they risk losing public support for the war effort. Fourth, native populations are often sensitive about a Western military presence because of colonialism or imperialism and will often turn against a ruler who depends on foreign soldiers.

If we look at these five cases in detail the results are not as impressive for COIN warfare as one might at first imagine. The Mau Mau warriors were limited to machetes (pangas), and a few shotguns and hunting rifles that they were able to steal from the houses of white settlers. In Kenya the native Kikuyu ethnic group was largely interned in special camps and so many died that Holocaust historian Daniel J. Goldhagen cites it as a case of eliminationist policy in his 2009 book Worse Than War. And three years after declaring the Mau Mau emergency over the British were forced to grant independence to the colony. In all the other settler colonies in Africa the white settlers were either militarily defeated or fought to a stalemate, or, in the case of South Africa, the whites were forced to concede majority rule while they still had the upper hand.

In Northern Ireland after a quarter century of warfare, most of that time against only a few hundred republican terrorists at a time, the British were only able to declare a stalemate and the unionists were forced to make major political concessions to the Irish Catholic nationalist minority (of which the republicans were a further minority at the time). These included power sharing and a political link to the Republic of Ireland. London kept up the fight only because Northern Ireland is an integral part of the United Kingdom only nine miles by sea from Scotland.

In the other three cases the insurgents were defeated in a shorter period of time without widespread repression. In Greece the royalists had British military advisors, but Greek soldiers did the fighting. When Tito had his falling out with Stalin he cutoff deliveries of East bloc arms to the Communist rebels. The Greek army was also led by a skilled general. In the Philippines an Air Force general served as an advisor to the local defense minister. But Filipino troops did the fighting. In Malaysia the rebels were limited to the ethnic Chinese minority who were disliked by the other main ethnic groups--the Malays and the Indians. The rural Chinese could be physically isolated from the guerrillas and then a "hearts and minds" campaign was successful. A decade later the successful advisors to the counterinsurency campaigns in the Philippines and Malaysia attempted to apply their lessons to another Asian counterinsurgency campaign. The United States ended up aiding a local effort for 21 years at great cost in both blood and treasure. The United States lost because it faced an enemy with an elaborate supply network and foreign sanctuary, the support or active acquisition of much of the rural and urban populations and sympathy throughout much of the Third World. If you haven't figured out yet I'm talking about Vietnam.

Afghanistan, although not as formidable an effort as Vietnam, is closer to being Vietnam than it is to being Malaysia, Kenya, the Philippines or Greece. The Taliban insurgency is backed by the majority ethnic group in the country, the Pashtun, who straddle the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.S. Army, as in Vietnam, has a severe shortage of personnel who speak the local languages. As in Vietnam, the United States and NATO controls much of the territory by day and the insurgents control it by night.

The main rationale for the war in Afghanistan is to avoid letting the territory again become a base for Al Qaeda. But this assumes that in the Muslim world there is a shortage of failed states that can act for Al Qaeda as an alternative. Remember, Al Qaeda came to Afghanistan from Sudan in the mid-1990s when Washington pressured the government in Khartoum to expel them. Today the tribal territories in Pakistan, Somalia, the southern Philippines, and Algeria are all possible sanctuaries for Al Qaeda, if it should attempt to rebuild. There are also Arab and Turkish ghettoes in Europe that can serve that same purpose--the banlieus in France, Turkish areas in the major German cities, possibly even Albania. President Obama once famously said that he is not opposed to all wars, just dumb ones--he should seriously consider adding Afghanistan to that category.