Old Wars in New Rhetoric

...Not only are we ready to forget historical precedent...

...Upper Burma was a nation in a way that Lower Burma was not...

...We found only villagers...

...Don't Knowism creeping up there, what with a president who's half dead...

...Unlike Hall, who only had to worry about the war in the field, Crosthwaite had to worry about the home front as well...

...What is past is prologue, and as I reflect on the Vietnam war and the alacrity with which we plunged into it—and as I compare the way we approached counter-insurgency as something exciting and new with the sober musings of Hall in A People at School and Crosthwaite in The Pacification of Burma, I am reminded of the old French phrase that the more things change, the more they remain the same, and of the American slang, "So what else is new...

...We thought reprisals necessary, and we tried...

...the advantage of the insurgent in being able to arouse hostility against foreign rulers...

...Before quoting from it again, however, it is important to recall the historical background of this period...

...The book is A People at School, written by a British civil servant, H. Fielding Hall, and first published in 1906...

...and one civil officer rose into fame by capturing or killing the famous leader, Hla-U, once a week for a whole open season...

...The World War II generation over-learned the lessons of Munich and misapplied them to Vietnam...

...thing new to combat something new...

...We could have downplayed the so-called newness of revolutionary warfare and placed it in some sort of historical context...

...He hurried off to fetch another bracing whisky and soda...

...And this they did...

...Oh, I know, there have been times of triumph, but generally it's been a matter of eight per cent or ten per cent or twelve per cent...

...As I view the contemporary scene, however, I see little evidence that America has changed its ways...

...Hall's book is worth quoting because it illustrates the ageless quality of revolutionary warfare...

...America was embarked on a great new adventure: to prove that revolutionary warfare could not succeed...

...The American War of Independence was not only the first great revolution of the modern era—most people forget that it preceded the French Revolution by more than a decade—but it was also the direct progenitor of what the Communists like to call "wars of national liberation...

...Has it made the slightest difference...

...to hit, you must be able to see...

...It was basically these theories of insurgency and revolutionary warfare that the counter-insurgents were attempting to counteract in the early 1960s...

...But is this a good thing, what with the energy crisis, the run on sterling, inflation, and everything...

...Or is this something out of the French Indochina war, the memoirs of a French soldier fighting the Viet Minh...

...Yet our own country had been founded as a result of one of the classic insurgencies of history...

...Magsaysay's suppression of the Huk uprising in the Philippines in the early 1950s was also cited...

...When you went out to look you found nothing...

...The period hardly rates a footnote in most history books, and in the overall history of man, perhaps that is justified...

...Anyone who was anyone was talking about it...

...Only through an understanding of the past as an integral link with the present, as something that adds depth to direct generational experience...

...When the United States first began to develop theories of insurgency and counter-insurgency in the early 1960s, most experts, as I have noted, tended to pooh-pooh the experiences of the past...

...Perhaps the present generation will, in turn, over-learn the lessons of Vietnam with unforeseen consequences for the future of the world...

...It is not to the credit of the United States that we ever undertook such a thing in the past and will be less to our credit if we repeat it here today...

...the inability to separate and distinguish the enemy insurgent...

...It took the British five years to "pacify" Burma after their initial conquest, and it is this period that Hall covers in his book...

...A NIGHT OF TRIUMPH "It looks as though we've won at last," an Englishman remarked to me with satisfaction...

...The British conquest was swift, and within four weeks of the initial invasion the British were in full possession of the capital at Mandalay...

...Joseph Kraft, writing on counter-insurgency in Harper's in 1964, was much more reflective of the mood of the times when he wrote: "The point of departure for the doctrine [of counter-insurgency] lies in the theory that the Communists have developed a new kind of warfare— revolutionary warfare...

...No doubt there are those who believe that there is no significance whatever to the fact that America ignored other examples of insurgency in making the plunge into Vietnam, especially remote examples like the pacification of Burma...

...Yesterday's news is already a long time ago...

...they never made a movement but what they were 'scouring the country.' "One gallant officer so distinguished himself with his pen that he obtained the name of Fitz Bulletin...

...Hasn't made much difference, has it...

...All these years I've been a Don't Know, and I've followed our showing in the polls with a sense of deep shame...

...Look at China...

...Yes, sir...

...Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh had developed a diabolical form of warfare that they dubbed "revolutionary warfare," and America was out to prove that it wouldn't work...

...In the end, they argue, nothing would have changed in any case, even had we studied the past...

...He is presently stationed in Washington, D.C...

...Look at France...

...Vietnam was a tragic mistake that could have been avoided had we understood the past...

...The Don't Knows...

...The civilian of course also reported to his superior...

...But there was little reliance on earlier historical experience...

...The British learned the hard way in Burma, as we were to learn in Vietnam, that search and destroy operations were not successful in pacifying a country...

...They would collect for some attack and then disperse...

...As the war dragged on, an Anti-Imperialist League developed, dissent became rampant, and the war became embroiled in American politics...

...You had only to go out a mile to observe it...

...There is little doubt that there are still many historical precedents in the field of insurgency that have yet to be brought to light...

...So they turned dull events into colorful reports: "Some men never came within ten miles of an insurgent leader but 'they very nearly captured'" him...

...And take this country...

...Hall's Burmese experience mirrors the "search and destroy" operations in the Vietnam war...

...A companion book on that Burmese period is The Pacification of Burma, by Sir Charles Crosthwaite, the chief commissioner of Burma from 1887 to 1890 who had the overall responsibility for the British pacification effort...

...If you accept the theory that there are really no lessons to be learned from history, the rest follows easily...

...The mass of Burmese were still free to rebel and fight...

...The British gobbled up Burma in three stages...

...It was a challenge —the kind America likes...

...Look at Italy...

...The Don't Knows just didn't seem to know how to get it together...

...But that is exactly my point...

...Nobody knows if they have a government, and even if they know that they still don't know who the government is...

...I tell you, sir, it's a night of triumph...

...In retrospect, it is easy to see that there was nothing preordained in the stance that we took...

...Mao referred to his tactics as guerrilla warfare, but he added an element that gave the warfare its revolutionary character: he linked guerrilla warfare to finite political goals...

...What do you mean, 'we've won...

...And yet, I am convinced that man cannot so easily ignore the past...

...While the two prime official exponents of counter-insurgency in the early Sixties—Walt Rostow and Roger Hilsman—tried to put the record straight by putting revolutionary warfare into some kind of historical perspective, nobody was really listening, the operators least of all...

...They never found a pot of rice-cooking in a jungle but they 'had rushed a dacoit camp...

...Look at the rest of Europe...

...The prevailing American attitude was that there was no need to look to the past for examples of this type of warfare because we were dealing with something new...

...Nobody knows who's in charge anywhere...

...Semantics aside, the tactics used by George Washington's guerrilla harassment of the British, coupled with the use of military force to attain popular political goals, form the basis of modern revolutionary warfare...

...Americans believe in direct experience, and each generation tends to over-learn what it experiences directly...

...Rostow, in his speech in 1961 at the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, said—in reference to Mao, Ho, General Giap, and others—that "it is historically inaccurate and psychologically dangerous to think that these men created the study and tactics of guerrilla warfare to which we are now responding...

...they claimed that mere guerrilla warfare—which indeed had a long history —was not to be confused with modern "revolutionary warfare" as espoused by Mao and exported abroad as "wars of national liberation...

...The occupation of the capital and the removal of the king, however, did not mean that the Burmese were through...

...There was an inscription on the corpse to the effect that he had been a traitor and so was killed...

...The credo becomes: There are no parallels in the past, and there is nothing to be learned...

...You conveniently forget Santayana's dictum that he who does not learn from the past is condemned to repeat it...

...In the end, the United States, as the counter-insurgent, succeeded in pacifying the Philippines, largely through an overwhelming superiority in modern weaponry and soldiery, though the struggle was admittedly long, brutal, and domestically divisive...

...The World War I generation over-learned the agonies of involvement in world affairs and became isolationists in the Twenties and Thirties...

...Just look at the situation...

...Mao, for example, in expounding his theory that revolutionary warfare should proceed from a war of movement to a war of position used George Washington's campaigns as precedent...

...The leaders were villagers, the rank and file were villagers...

...On the surface, Upper Burma appeared to be captured...

...The point is this: by the early 1960s, when the United States began to develop its theories on counter-insurgency, there was already a body of historical precedents upon which it could rely...

...It is ironical that while American counter-insurgency experts were ignoring the past—even our own American Revolution—the Communists were studying it to advantage...

...The fact that we preferred to approach revolutionary warfare as something new and different—and publicized it as such—meant the chances of avoiding the war altogether were considerably diminished...

...It was like thrusting a spear through water that closed behind it and left no sign of its passage . . . Their object was never to meet us in open fight, but to harass us on the march, to attack us at night, to boycott us and make our rule impossible...

...In the Philippines after the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898, America became involved in a model insurgency-counter-insurgency situation that paralleled Vietnam, in that America was a foreigner trying to counter a native insurgency with popular support...

...Americans are a now people—we believe in the present, not the past...

...When we inquired where the enemy was, they shook their heads and said they knew of none . . . "Organized enemy there was none...

...You forge ahead with the great adventure because the past is dull and highly irrelevant...

...Upper Burma had never seriously been conquered before, and though the British now held the major cities, their power did not extend much beyond them...

...Certainly the Philippine insurrection alone offered proof of the agonies inflicted on the American psyche by an insurgency war abroad which many people felt was being fought to achieve goals contrary to America's anti-colonial tradition...

...Anyone reading the above will probably stop at this point to wonder where this remarkable passage comes from...

...As Hall noted, the "lesson to be learned was that columns moving through a country did not pacify it...

...Most experts on the subject were willing to rely on the British experience in Malaya in the 1950s and the French experience against the Viet Minh in Vietnam during the same period...

...Nobody knows who's running anything...

...As I have indicated, Hall's book illuminates one such precedent, the insurrection in Burma in the late 1800s and the "pacification" years, a precedent uncannily similar to Vietnam in the 1960s...

...ALEXANDER COCKBURN in The Village Voice, March 7, 1974...

...Such admonitions fell on deaf ears...

...Yet our policymakers preferred to approach the insurgency and counter-insurgency of the Sixties as something new and to ignore the past as irrelevant...

...Mao had written tracts in which he advanced the theory that the moment a war of resistance dissociates itself from the masses of the people, it dissociates itself from the hope of ultimate victory...

...Unfortunately, the definitive work on insurgency has yet to be written—a book that would trace revolutionary warfare from the earliest beginnings in Greek and Roman times, and even before, up to the present...

...I found he was the headman of a neighboring village who before I came had rendered some service to the troops...

...He said it was vital that "simple-minded militarists be made to realize the relationship that exists between politics and military affairs...

...Critics of the Vietnam war have often mentioned the difficulties of getting good, hard factual reports on exactly what happened and why...

...The stock market will be paralyzed, waiting for some hint as to future action by the Don't Knows...

...By Sunday crowds intoxicated with ignorance will be sweeping down Whitehall, exulting in their triumph...

...you must get at your enemy...

...While Hall and the British counter-insurgents waited for the day when they could "have a fight and get a little nearer the end," the Burmese insurgents became popular heroes to the peasantry...

...And it was very difficult to make their reports interesting...

...There was something exciting about doing someDino J. Caterini is a Foreign Service officer with the U.S...

...They first chopped off pieces at the edge of the Burmese Empire—the maritime provinces of Arakan and Tenas-serim in 1825 and so-called Lower Burma, including Pegu and Rangoon, in 1852...

...In commenting on field reports in Burma in the 1880s, Hall noted that the troops "were split into innumerable little columns that marched about on their own account and sent in reports of their doings to the general...

...The first time I went out with a small reconnoitring [sic] party we saw about half a mile off in the main road the body of a man fastened to a tree...

...Vietnam was an unwinnable war, and the disastrous political and military consequences to America abroad, coupled with the demoralizing effect of the war on our domestic social fabric, were predictable results, based on a study of the past...

...Don't Knows...

...But now read this: "I want to express as emphatically as I can my disapproval of the policy of this country in lending our armed forces toward enforcing the domestic affairs of other countries...

...That was evident enough...

...You begin from scratch and approach each problem in isolation...

...King Thibaw, the last of the Burmese kings, was dethroned and sent into exile...

...They claimed that this "credibility gap" was inherent in bureaucratic structures, that reports from lower to higher echelons are bound to be rosy, because those in command want to hear good news and because reports of failures reflect adversely...

...It could have made a difference...

...You could not attack, because there was nothing to attack...

...For they hoped against hope that some time we would go away...

...We failed to learn from the past in our approach to revolutionary warfare in Vietnam because it was easier to forget the past than to remember it...

...America's well-trained army was pitted against Filipino guerrilla bands, and, just as in the Vietnam war sixty years later, America in the Philippines faced all the problems of a foreign counter-insurgent trying to pacify a nationalist uprising: a shadow insurgent government working side-by-side with the established authority...

...I don't mean Conservatives, Labour, or Liberals...

...Military action," he wrote, "is a method used to attain a political goal...

...Of course it is...

...No, no...

...the excellent intelligence of the insurgent native...

...I believe not...

...A triumph for the Don't Knows...

...The type of warfare being employed by the Communists wasn't exactly guerrilla warfare as we had known it in the past...

...Revolutionary warfare, we preached, required new techniques in the art of war, and we were taken in by our own propaganda...

...Was this approach valid...

...Day after day we marched out through these barren hills to the villages beyond and looked for foes...

...You think things are going your way now...

...Then in 1885, the British —in an effort to torestall French expansion of their Indochina empire—invaded, conquered, and annexed Upper Burma, the cultural and historical heartland of the Burmese people...

...The pacification experts in Burma were faced with many problems that remind us of Vietnam: disputes in Parliament, hostility in the press, opposition from the public, and even a "credibility gap...

...it was a new strain of deadly virus, and counter-insurgency was the newly emerging antibody that would soon gain enough strength to destroy it...

...They tilled their fields and looked upon us curiously...

...They were native to the area and tended to remain in place...

...the ease with which the insurgent could hide his arms and take on the appearance of a peaceful cultivator...

...The politicians, their advisers, and the operators in the field felt that wars of national liberation, and especially the Vietnam war, represented a "new ball of wax" and that there was not much to be learned by examining older forms of guerrilla warfare...

...you must know where to strike...

...Nixon won't know who to ring up and congratulate...

...They certainly are, by God...

...By tomorrow morning the Don't Knows will be in charge in Great Britain...

...It is a sordid chapter in American history...

...We're gaining ground everywhere...

...Disillusioned by the American refusal to grant them independence, the Filipinos fought a revolutionary war against America from 1899 to 1906...

...Those are the words of Senator Bratton of New Mexico spoken in 1932—forty-two years ago—in support of the Senate resolution to prohibit the sending of more American troops to Nicaragua—a six-year "revolutionary war" in which American troops acted as counter-insurgents and which most Americans have conveniently forgotten...

...Worst thing is when some chap gets elected who thinks he knows what to do...

...Kissinger won't know who to meet at the airport...

...The British, as counter-insurgents, moved on without roots in the soil...

...But now read this: "We were in a very hostile country...

...We were standing in the British consulate, listening to the election results come in over the BBC world service...

...Had we understood that past examples of insurgency showed clearly that there were never any easy solutions, that well-developed insurgencies are always long and involved affairs, and that a counter-insurgency operation by a foreigner in a foreign country is seldom popular either at home or abroad—had we understood all that, we might never have become involved at all...

...Is this a personal account of an American soldier's experiences in Vietnam...

...It was only after the Americans had driven the Spaniards from the Philippines that a full-scale insurgency developed against American rule...

...The Burmese there had deep feelings of identity because Upper Burma represented a compact nationality with a glorious past going back nearly a thousand years, a past understood through legends and songs by even the humblest of peasants in the fields...

...But the Vietnam war and the theories of insurgency and counter-insurgency which it spawned make a study of the pacification of Burma by the British an instructive venture...

...How do we break through the narrow confines of direct generational experience to something broader and more realistic...

...Information Agency, which he has served in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia, Europe, and Africa...

...The American Revolution, the Philippine Insurrection, Nicaragua, Vietnam—the past is a drag, the average American believes...

...But to retaliate you must have some one to retaliate on...

...By the time the sun sets over Westminster tomorrow night the Don't Knows will be in total control...

...I mean Us...

...even the immediate past is shunted aside with indecent haste...

...And we saw nothing...

...The account comes from a little-known book, long out of print, covering an insurgency war which very few people, even so-called experts on counter-insurgency, have ever heard of: the British pacification of Burma in the eighth decade of the Nineteenth Century...

...The man has just said it's deadlock, anarchy, a constitutional crisis even...