# Posted 7:27 AM by Taylor Owen  

OPED IN EMBASSY MAG: Dave and I have the following piece in this week's Embassy. It is in part based on research I have done on the US bombing of Cambodia with Ben Kiernan, an overview of which can be read in this Walrus article.


Embassy, May 7th, 2008
Afghanistan Another Iraq? Try Another Cambodia

Of the many complexities to emerge from our mission in Afghanistan, one is particularly troublesome. Almost one-third of the Taliban recently interviewed by a Canadian newspaper claimed that at least one family member had died in aerial bombings in recent years, and many described themselves as fighting to defend Afghan villagers from air strikes by foreign troops.

This should come as no surprise. Last year, the UN reported that over 1,500 civilian were killed in Afghanistan. In the first half 2007, this casualty rate had increased by 50 per cent. The NGO community and NATO remain at odds over who is accountable for a majority of these deaths.

What is indisputable, however, is that air sorties have increased dramatically. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sorties doubled from 6,495 in 2004 to 12,775 in 2007. More critically, aircraft today are 30 times more likely to drop their payloads than in 2004.

Civilian deaths are a moral tragedy. Equally importantly, however, they represent a critical strategic blunder. It has long been known that civilian casualties benefit insurgencies, who recruit fighters with emotional pleas. While an airstrike in a village may kill a senior Taliban, even a single civilian casualty can turn the community against the coalition for a generation.

This presents military commanders with an immensely challenging dilemma: Accept greater casualties in a media environment where any and all are scrutinized, or use counterproductive tactics that will weaken the enemy in the moment, but strengthen him over the long term.

While the choice is almost impossibly difficult, it is not new. Surprisingly, the case of U.S. air strikes in Cambodia offers a chilling parallel.

Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped over 2.7 million tonnes of munitions on Cambodia, making it potentially the most bombed country in history.

While the scale is shocking, the strategic costs were devastating. Over the course of the bombing period, the Khmer Rouge insurgency grew from an impotent force of 5,000 rural fighters to an army of over 200,000, capable of defeating a U.S.-backed government.

Recent research has shown a direct connection between casualties caused by the bombings and the rise of the insurgency.

Because Lon Nol, Cambodia's president at the time, supported the U.S. air war, the bombing of Cambodian villages and the significant civilian casualties it caused provided ideal recruitment rhetoric for the insurgent Khmer Rouge.

As civilian casualties grew, the Khmer Rouge shifted their rhetoric from that of a Maoist agrarian revolution to anti-imperialist populism.

This change in strategy achieved stunning results. As one survivor explained:

"Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters.... Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told.... It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them."

Compare this to what one Taliban fighter explained to a Globe and Mail researcher: "The non-Muslims are unjust and have killed our people and children by bombing them, and that's why I started jihad against them. They have killed hundreds of our people, and that's why I want to fight against them."

The coalition risks repeating the same mistakes, and like the Khmer Rouge 30 years ago, the Taliban are capitalizing on its misguided tactics.

Amazingly, in Cambodia, American administration knew of the strategic costs of the bombing. The CIA's Directorate of Operations reported during the war that the Khmer Rouge were "using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda." Yet blinded by grandeurs of military might, the sorties continued.

The Khmer Rouge forced the U.S. out of Phnom Penh, took over the country, and the rest is a tragic history.

We know our tactics in Afghanistan have a similar effect. Civilian casualties drive a generation into the hands of an insurgency we are there to oppose.

Initially Canada deployed without Leopard tanks and CF-18s with the goal of prioritizing personal engagement and precision over brute military might. Today, however, our allies' tactics—and increasingly our own—do not adequately reflect strategic costs incurred by civilian causalities. In addition, Canada has not allied itself with other NATO members—particularly the British—to reign in the coalition's counterproductive use of aerial bombings.

Cambodia offers a powerful example of aerial warfare run amok. What is Canada doing to ensure we don't relive the failures of the past? (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:06 AM by Taylor Owen  

COULD IT BE THE END?



...or maybe it's just a flesh wound...

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# Posted 6:21 AM by Patrick Porter  

THE CITY THAT BURNS: Hitler, it seems, had visions of destroying New York, unleashing firestorms with suicide missions.

And this as early as 1937. Previously, I had thought this had come much later:

As Germany’s defeat loomed during the final months of World War II, Adolf Hitler increasingly lapsed into delusional fits of fantasy. Albert Speer, in his prison writings, recounts an episode in which a maniacal Hitler “pictured for himself and for us the destruction of New York in a hurricane of fire.” The Nazi fuehrer described skyscrapers turning into “gigantic burning torches, collapsing upon one another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the dark sky.”

I don’t know whether it exists, but there should be a study of the different ways the destruction of New York has been imagined by its haters.

It figures in Ian Baruma and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism, which shows that the city was loathed as the embodiment of debauched materialism and cosmopolitanism, and Judaic conspiracy.

Sayyid Qutb, intellectual father of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and heavily influential on Al Qaeda, went to New York in 1948, and saw it this way.

After 9/11, Bin Laden bragged that ‘Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.’

The Twin Towers, of course were likened by some evangelist visionaries as analogues to the Tower of Babel.

There is an undertone of this, a secularized version, in some of the wilder wings of environmentalism and their reactionary nostalgia for a utopian pre-industrial past, where vast tidal waves are unleashed on New York by Mother Earth as payback for the vandalism of the planet.

It also crops up in more petty ways. When New York suffered an electricity blackout in 2003, a snide Oxford man of the far left told me he was glad, because consumerist New Yorkers could feel the pain of Iraqis. New York wasn’t the first city I imagined being a stranger to collective suffering. (And there’s that violent hate of consumerism again).

So there you go. Nazis, jihadists, eco-warriors, evangelists and the far left can all find something in the metropolis to hate, one of the more ironic signs of its greatness. (3) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:52 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG MEGA-SUPER-UPDATE SPECTACULAR: It's hard to live up to a headline like that, but I think I've got a pretty decent story to tell. I've mentioned in passing that I've been travelling abroad for the past few months. Well, that was a euphemism. I was in Iraq, working as an analyst for the Coalition's counter-IED task force.

That wasn't a secret per se, but I was instructed not to blog about my job until I got home from Iraq. When people ask what exactly I was doing in Iraq, I like to say that if I told them I'd have to kill them. Sadly, that just isn't true. I won't go into it right now, but the broad contours of my work had to do with some pretty general questions about the insurgency that lots of people are asking.

I got home from Iraq three weeks ago. Forty-eight hours later, I started working as a full-time volunteer on the foreign policy and national security staff for McCain 2008. I've taken a leave of absence from day job so that I can work a lot more hours for a lot less pay. (Just more proof that I'm an irrational, impractical, delusional ideologue.)

Now let me toss out my third hand grenade: I'm getting married. I proposed to Susanna six days after coming home from Iraq. We hope to get married some time in the spring of 2009. I don't recall off-hand if I ever mentioned Susanna by name on OxBlog. I've generally tried to separate my personal life from my blogging. But this is just too big and too exciting (at least for me).

So, lots of big changes in my life, none of them conducive to frequent blogging. (Some of you may be quite thankful for that.) In Iraq, I could blog, but I was almost always too tired after work. Now I'm too tired and I can't go around expressing political opinions because being part of a campaign means having some discipline. I hope I can work something out where I can blog as part of the campaign, but that's up in the air for the moment.

Now to close on another random note. I'm writing this post sitting next to a window with a panoramic view of downtown Seoul. I made a commitment almost six months ago to do several days of research in South Korea. From the little I've seen, Seoul is an amazing city and I hope to come back when I have time to enjoy it.

To say the least, my life isn't boring these days. (17) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:11 PM by Patrick Porter  

SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS, BLOOD TIES: In Prime Minister Gordon Brown's recent US visit, we can see the peculiar dynamics of the Anglo-American relationship at work.

This piece in the Times in particular tells us a lot about the anxieties that accompany the British/American alliance.

On the one hand, we see the competitive desire to prove that Britain is most special in America's constellation, even more than Atlanticist Sarkozy (who only got to speak to the President rather than all three candidates!) and Oz Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (who only, gasp, got a phone conversation).

The alliance with the US means that Britain can play Greece to America's Rome, and is first in a strong field of contenders for that role.

And we also get a glimpse of what the British alliance delivers the US: a sense of mystical pedigree and ancestral prestige. Thus the New England Historic Genealogical Society has found that Obama is a distant relative of Winston Churchill, himself part American, and the embodiment of Anglo-American kinship, shared burdens and world mission.

Obama's claim to a blood tie is actually more than an eager identification with Churchill. It is an American presidential tradition, but with a twist. On the accession of a new American President, there is the publication of their genealogy as it relates to the English monarchy.

Thus George Bush senior was announced as a distant relative of Queen Elizabeth II by the director of 'Burke's Peerage', and Burke's Presidential Families of the United States links Lincoln to Edward I, Washington to Henry III, and Teddy Roosevelt to Robert III, King of Scots.

Obama, wittingly or not, has updated this tradition, tracing his blood ties to an aristocrat, but one of democratic politics.

For her part, Hillary has more prosaically found a Welsh ancestor. She also discovered Jewish ancestry some years ago during a public dispute over her views on Palestine, and in a moment of real excitement, remembered in New Zealand that she was named after Edmund Hillary, who conquered Everest some six years after she was born.

But the factual truth of these claims is less interesting than what motivates them, which is a kind of compact. The US offers access to power, Britain offers the mystique of old-world prestige. And history is pressed into action to serve both.

NB: For more on this blood-tracing and much else besides, see the Hitch's Blood, Class and Empire. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:20 AM by Patrick Porter  

CLINGING TO GUNS AND RELIGION: There doesn't seem anything intrinsically offensive in Obama's remarks about the political ecology of small towns. But it might be empirically wrong.

Getting fired up about wedge issues at election time might not be what struggling folk from small towns do more than others.

According to Larry Bartels, it is college-educated urbanites who are far more attached to social issues when it comes to their voting behaviour:

Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.

Moreover, it is Ivy-League educated Presidential candidates, both Hillary and Obama, who see small-town America in this distorting way. Hillary by pandering to it, and Obama by despairing of it. (4) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:10 AM by Taylor Owen  

WOW. JUST WOW: Bill Clinton in Pennsylvania yesterday.

"I think there is a big reason there's an age difference in a lot of these polls," he said. "Because once you've reached a certain age, you won't sit there and listen to somebody tell you there's really no difference between what happened in the Bush years and the Clinton years; that there's not much difference in how small-town Pennsylvania fared when I was president, and in this decade."

I just finished listening to an abridged version of Clinton's autobiography (I just couldn't commit to the full thing). There are two things that are glaringly clear. First, it's all the evil "far right's" fault. Everything. It is never Clinton's fault. Second, and more relevant here, is that in 1992, Clinton was running a VERY similar campaign to Obama. Had Hillary been in the race, there is no doubt that he would be have mocked her as the establishment candidate. He would have been right, and he would have won. He would have done so using words, which he was at one point pretty good at. And he would have argued that a new generation was ready to have a turn in Washington. Sound familiar?

One more point. Is it really a smart idea to start attacking a whole new generation getting engaged in politics? Like Obama or not, bringing in millions of new voters is an undeniably positive result of his candidacy. Telling them they are naive, waving your wise ex-presidential finger at them, is just demeaning.

HRC: "No you can't. No you can't."

Labels: Bill Clinton

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