P O R T E PATRICK PORTER is a lecturer in the Praise for Military Orientalism Westerners have long fetishized the idea of “Orien- R Defense Studies Department at the British tal” warfare, hoping to either emulate the strategies Defense Academy, King’s College, University of “This important new book takes a fresh and detailed look at the role of foreign armies or assimilate members of Eastern London. of culture, culturalism, ethnocentrism, and perceptions of the ‘other’ and “martial races,” such as Sikhs or Gurkhas, into in strategy. It should be required reading for any strategist or student their ranks. Samurai warriors, obedient to an ancient of international aff airs who seeks to understand the complex hybrid code of chivalry and honor, and the Mongol hordes confl icts in which we now fi nd ourselves.” —David Kilcullen, author of thundering across the steppe—these exotic visions The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One have thrilled Western imaginations for centuries. Yet, at the same time, today’s Eastern warriors, “Military Orientalism seeks to expose the perils of using culture as a such as the Taliban and Hezbollah, are treated with means to understanding war, whether it unfolds in the East or (implic- skepticism, and their success is acknowledged only itly) closer to home. It is a rich and wide-ranging text that displays a grudgingly in the West. These contradictory positions depth of historical reading to good eff ect and is beautifully written.” throw into question the romantic notion that race, —Daniel Neep, University of Exeter culture, and tradition determine how armies fi ght. “This is a timely and important book. It is timely because culture shapes Military Orientalism argues against the idea the confl icts in which we fi nd ourselves engaged as never before. It is that culture dictates the strategy of war. Culture is important because smartly, comprehensively, and systematically it de- powerful, Patrick Porter asserts, but it encompasses molishes the dangerous myth that the enemies of the West are archaic an ambiguous repertoire of ideas rather than a clear curiosities or medieval throwbacks from another era. This is a message code of action. To divide the world into Western, that the West needs to take to heart—and soon.”—Christopher Coker, Asiatic, or Islamic ways of war is a misconcep- London School of Economics tion, one that profoundly impacts our approach to present and future confl icts, especially the “War “Patrick Porter’s skeptical but constructive approach to the ‘cultural turn’ on Terror.” Porter also emphasizes the danger of in strategic studies and practice is the principal argument that is thus fetishizing the exotic, which complicates a more far missing from public offi cial and scholarly debate. Military Oriental- accurate understanding of the enemy. Launching ism is a provocative challenge to those among us who have embraced a rare investigation into the history of this trend a cultural theory of strategy too enthusiastically and uncritically. This as it has appeared in the work of Herodotus and timely book is a must-read corrective to the fallacies in the current numerous other fi ctional and nonfi ctional narra- unduly cultural strategic orthodoxy.”—Colin Gray, University of Reading tives, Porter strikes at the heart of the fear, envy, and wonder inspired by the Oriental warrior. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK www.cup.columbia.edu ISBN 978-0-231-15414-7 Jacket Design: Fatima Jamadar Eastern War Through Western Eyes Jacket Image: Samurai of the Chosyu clan, during the Boshin War period by Felice Beato taken from Wikipedia under Commons basis 9 780231 154147 COLUMBIA MILITARY ORIENTALISM CRITICAL WAR STUDIES SERIES Series Editors Tarak Barkawi (Centre of International Studies, Cambridge University) and Shane Brighton (Birkbeck College, University of London) War transforms the social and political orders in which we live, just as it obliterates our precious certainties. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the fate of truths offered about war itself. War regularly undermines expectations, strategies and theories, and along with them the credibility of those in public life and the academy presumed to speak with authority about it. A fundamental reason for this is the frequently narrow and impoverished intellectual resources that dominate the study of war. Critical War Studies begins with the recognition that the unsettling character of war is a profound opportunity for scholarship. Accordingly, the series welcomes submissions from across the academy as well as from refl ective practitioners. It provides an open forum for critical scholarship concerned with war and armed forces and seeks to foster and develop the nascent encounter between war and contemporary approaches to society, history, politics and philosophy. It is a vehicle to reconceive the fi eld of war studies, expand the sites where war is studied, and open the field to new voices DAVID KILCULLEN The Accidental Guerrilla––Losing Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One PATRICK PORTER Military Orientalism––Eastern War Through Western Eyes PATRICK PORTER Military Orientalism Eastern War Through Western Eyes Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2009 Patrick Porter All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Porter, Patrick, 1976– Military orientalism : Eastern war through Western eyes / Patrick Porter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-15414-7 (alk. paper) e-ISBN 978-0-231-80040-2 1. Military art and science—Asia. 2. War and society—Asia. 3. Asia—History, Military. 4. Asia—Foreign public opinion. 5. Orientalism—Western countries. 6. East and West. 7. Culture conflict. 8. Military art and science—Western countries. 9. War and society—Western countries. 10. Public opinion—Western countries. I. Title. UA830.P66 2009 355.02095—dc22 2009012515 ∞ Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in India c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ‘We are facing an army of barbarians in Korea, but they are barbarians as trained, as relentless, as reckless of life, and as skilled…as the hordes of Genghis Khan.’ (Hanson Baldwin, New York Times, July 1950) ‘The Oriental tradition, however, had not been eliminated…On September 11, 2001 it returned in an absolutely traditional form. Arabs, appearing suddenly out of empty space like their desert raider ancestors, assaulted the heartlands of West- ern power, in a terrifying surprise raid.’ (John Keegan, October 2001) ‘American ground troops are going to have to learn to be more like Apaches.’ (Robert Kaplan, 2004) ‘What do they know, this bunch of flip-flop, dress-wearing bastards… Fuck, they actually know what they are doing.’ (Corporal Quentin Poll, Afghanistan, 2006) As America and its allies fear military failure abroad, culture is being touted as the key to strategy and even the essence of warfare. The War on Terror has revived interest in the foreign and the bizarre. But what is the relationship between war and culture? And what drives our fascination in the first place? Our fixation with the exotic nature of our enemies is powerful but often misleading. Powerful, because we articulate anxieties about the West through visions of the enemy, as irrational fanatic, noble savage, mystical genius, or timeless primitive. Misleading, because ‘Eastern’ warriors are mostly not static cultural captive. They are dynamic strategic actors. From Imperial Japan to the Taliban, from warlords to suicide bombers, we find people breaking traditions and remaking cultures in pursuit of victory. Culture is better approached not as a clear script for action, but as an ambiguous repertoire of ideas through which people make strategy. It is this lack of cultural determinacy that helps explain why war is so full of surprises. CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 Pepsi Cola versus Death 1 The Cultural Turn 6 Definitions: Orientalism and Culture 13 The Argument 15 Some Caveats 19 Chapter Outline 21 1. The Embattled West 23 Western Confidence, Western Crisis 24 The Hybridity of War 32 Savage Wars of Peace: the Colonial Context 37 The Twentieth Century: ‘Yellow Peril’ and ‘Ancient Hatreds’ 48 2. Rethinking War and Culture 55 Why Culture Matters 56 Culture, Colonialism, and Myth 57 War and the Exotic 60 Tribal War and Primitive Fantasies 68 Eastern Wisdom? Texts and Contexts 71 Strength and Weakness 75 Culture and War: Rethinking the Relationship 82 3. Watching the Rising Sun: Observing Japan at War 85 Conclusion 109 4. The Ghost of Genghis: Mongols and the Western Imagination 111 Introduction 111 vii CONTENTS Monsters or Marvels? 114 Unveiling the Captains 120 The Mongols Romanticised 127 Conclusion: the West v. Itself 140 5. Exotic Enemy? America, the Taliban and the Fog of Culture 143 A War of Cultures 144 Busted Flush or Deathless Army? 146 The Taliban: Rise, Fall and Rise 149 The Fog of Culture 151 Breakers of Tradition 160 Conclusion 170 6. Hizballa, Israel and the 2006 ‘July War’: TheDivine Victory 171 The July War 172 Israelis and Arabs at War 175 Great Expectations, Tough Surprises 179 Great Expectations 182 Psywar and Self-Portraits: the Propaganda War 184 Making Culture Local 188 Conclusion 189 Conclusion 191 Beyond the Wild East 191 Notes 199 Index 255 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A thousand thanks to Michael Dwyer at Hurst for making the whole project possible and steering it through, and to Columbia University Press for agreeing to co-publish. Thanks also to the editors, Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, for the honour of including this in their ‘Critical War Studies’ series. Others also contributed in many ways. For their advice, criticism and support, I am indebted to Dan Neep, Theo Farrell, Jeannie John- son, Alex Marshall, Mark Adams, Rob Dover, Huw Bennett, Paul Domjan, Chris Tripodi, Huw Davies, Niall Barr, Vanda Wilcox, David Betz, Katherine Brown, Derek Gregory, Tim Bird, Pauline Kusiak, Jeni Mitchell, Stephen Biddle and Robert Saunders. I am also grateful to participants in forums at the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington, on ‘Governance and Intel- ligence’ at Loughborough University, at the International Studies Asso- ciation Conference, New York, and at the Defence Studies Department at Staff College for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the argument. This book would not have been possible without the help of the staffs of various archives, including the National Army Museum, the National Archives, the Liddell Hart Archive, the National Security Archive and the Hoover Institution. Three chapters draw on articles in War and Society, Parameters and Orbis; thanks to the editors and publishers for their permission to re- publish them in a much expanded form in this book. I am also grateful to the officers at Staff College for their curiosity, intelligence and humour. Without their influence, this could not have been written. To Ronald Ridley, Nick Stargardt, Adrian Gregory, John Moses and Hew Strachan, great mentors and teachers, go my lifelong thanks. ix