] 124.5 War is Culture: Global Counterinsurgency, Visuality, and the Petraeus Doctrine nicholas mirzoeff I N oNe of his sigNatUre reversals of accepted wisdom, Michel Foucault modulated Carl von Clausewitz’s well- known aphorism on war and politics to read, “Politics is the continu- ation of war by other means” (48). That is to say, even in peace, the law is enacted by force. In conditions of state- determined necessity, that force appears as a direct actor in legitimizing what Giorgio Ag- amben calls “the state of exception.” In En glish law the term would be “martial law” (Agamben 7). By extension, if globalization has again become the “global civil war” (Arendt) that was the cold war or has created a new state of “permanent war” (Retort 78), then war is global politics. So what kind of war is the war in Iraq (Reid)? It is now being waged by the United States as a global counterinsurgency. In the field manual Counterinsurgency issued by the United States Army in December 2006 at the instigation of General David Petra- eus (Bacevich), counterinsurgency is explicitly a cultural war, to be fought in the United States as much as it is in Iraq. Cultural war, with visuality playing a central role, takes “culture” to be the means, location, and object of warfare. In his classic novel 1984, George Or- well coined the slogan “war is peace” (199), anticipating the peace- keeping missions, surgical strikes, defense walls, and “coalitions of the willing” that demarcated much of the twentieth century. In the era of United States global policing, war is counterinsurgency, and Nicholas mirzoeff, professor of me- the means of counterinsurgency are cultural. War is culture. Glo- dia, culture, and communication at New balized capital uses war as its means of acculturating citizens to its York University, is the author of Watch- regime, requiring both acquiescence to the excesses of power and a ing Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global willingness to ignore what is palpably obvious. Counterinsurgency Visual Culture (routledge, 2005) and An Introduction to Visual Culture (2nd ed.; has become a digitally mediated version of imperialist techniques to routledge, 2009). produce legitimacy. Its success in the United States is unquestioned: [ ] © 2009 by the modern language association of america 1 2 war is culture: global counterinsurgency, visuality, and the petraeus doctrine [ PMLA who in public life is against counterinsur- gency, even if they oppose the war in Iraq or invasions elsewhere? War is culture. The publication of the new counterin- surgency strategy, designed both for strategic planning and for daily use in the field, marks a transformation of the revolution in military affairs (RMA). At the end of the cold war, anxious about its declining role and about the possibility of new minor conflicts, the United States military launched the revolu- tion in military affairs. The term revolution was not used idly. For, as the counterinsur- gency manual shows, the army has been a devoted reader of revolutionary theory from Lenin to Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. The RMA was designed to give the military the advantages of speed and surprise usually held by guerilla and revolutionary groups. The Rumsfeld strategy in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, marked by a hi- tech, high- speed, lethal force capable of accomplishing significant goals with a relatively small number of per- sonnel, was the high point of this revolution, its reign of terror. Its height of ambition was to turn the military strategy into a cultural project. In a 1997 essay published in the Ma- rine Corps Gazette, one general argued: “it is no longer enough for Marines to ‘reflect’ the society they defend. They must lead it, not politically but culturally. For it is the culture we are defending” (qtd. in Murphy 83). The end of Rumsfeldism was by no means the end of the cultural politics of war. Counterinsur- gency is the permanent continuation of the RMA. The doctrine contains a timeline for its predetermined success and continued ap- plication in the extended future, measured as far as fifty years ahead. Like its predecessors, such as the now- notorious COINTELPRO program (1956–71), this strategy centers on the interpenetration of United States public opinion with events in Iraq. It should be read as a technique of discipline, normalization, and governmentality, in the manner taught to us by Foucault. In everyday politics, the ] 124.5 Nicholas mirzoeff 3 refusal to engage with the counterinsurgency strategy has now marginalized the antiwar movement and all but removed Iraq from the headlines. In the first half of 2008, the three major television networks in the United States devoted a total of 181 minutes to coverage of the Iraq war in their nightly newscasts. As an indication of its radicality, the new counterinsurgency manual has already been downloaded from the Internet over two mil- lion times, making it a global best seller. In an extraordinary step, it was republished by the University of Chicago Press in a twenty- five- dollar hardcover edition, complete with an endorsement from the Harvard professor Sarah Sewall (US, Dept. of TK). She calls the new doctrine “paradigm shattering” because it argues for the assumption of greater risk in order to succeed, requiring “civilian leadership and support” for the long war (qtd. in Power 9). This presumed novelty is located in a recog- nizably conservative interpretation of history and culture. In the first pages of the counter- insurgency manual, insurgency itself is defined as existing on a continuum from the French Revolution of 1789 as one “extreme” to a “coup d’état” as the other (1-5).1 Counterinsurgency, imagining itself quashing all modern revolts from the French Revolution to the military coup, thus figures itself as legitimacy. It seeks both to produce an acquiescent national cul- ture and to eliminate insurgency, understood as any challenge to power. It does so not simply by means of repression but by the progressive application of techniques of consent under the imperative “culture must be defended.” The counterinsurgency manual offers an in- strumental definition of power as “the key to manipulating the interests of groups within a society” (3-55). But power alone is not enough: “Victory is achieved when the populace con- sents to the government’s legitimacy and stops actively and passively supporting the insur- gency” (1-14). Dominance must be accompa- nied by a consensual hegemony that generates the legitimacy of counterinsurgency in thought 4 war is culture: global counterinsurgency, visuality, and the petraeus doctrine [ PMLA and deed. At that point, the war will have ren- dered a culture in its own image. It is impor- tant to note the audacity of this strategy, for “legitimation” is precisely the weak point of constitutional theories of the state in general and the state of exception in particular. In a move typical of the radical right, that potential weakness is turned into a point of strength as counterinsurgency assumes legitimacy as both its justification and mission. The counterinsurgency strategy has therefore produced the militarization of what the army calls “culture” in general and visual- ized media in particular. Legitimacy must in the end be literally and metaphorically visible for all to see. Consequently, “media activities” can be the primary activity of an insurgency, according to the army, while “imagery intel- ligence” in the form of still and moving im- ages are vital to counterinsurgency (US, Dept. of the Army 3-97). Judging that intelligence relies on the following understanding: “Cul- tural knowledge [is] . . . essential to waging a successful counterinsurgency. American ideas of what is ‘normal’ or ‘rational’ are not uni- versal” (1-80). This apparent gesture to cul- tural relativism is in fact a rationalization of cultural hierarchy: the army asks its soldiers not to accept difference but to understand that Iraqis cannot perform like Americans. Consequently, readers are advised to con- sult such apparently unlikely works as Small Wars: A Tactical Handbook for Imperial Sol- diers (1890) by Charles E. Caldwell, produced at the height of British imperialism. Such references reframe counterinsurgency as the technical management of imperial domin- ions, even as the notion that Iraq is a small war undermines the public assertion that it is the equivalent of the Second World War. Instead, it locates the Iraq war as a technique of government instead of as an existential struggle. The 1940 Small Wars Manual argues that “[s]mall wars are operations undertaken wherein military force is combined with dip- lomatic pressure in the affairs of another state ] 124.5 Nicholas mirzoeff 5 whose government is unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.” In the coun- terinsurgency manual, military intervention is understood as militarized bio- power: the preservation of life, determined by foreign policy interests. Counterinsurgency now ac- tively imagines itself as a medical practice: “With good intelligence, counterinsurgents are like surgeons cutting out cancerous tissue while keeping other vital organs intact” (US, Dept. of the Army 1-126). It was not for noth- ing that Saddam Hussein was shown under- going a medical inspection after his capture in 2004, a visualization of counterinsurgency as biopower. Its obscene counterpart was the cell-p hone- captured video of Saddam’s execu- tion, “accidentally” released to emphasize the counterinsurgency’s power over bare life. The counterinsurgency manual often draws parallels with the imperial hero T. E. Lawrence’s experience in “Arabia,” citing his maxim “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly” (1-155) as one of the “paradigm shattering” paradoxes that con- cludes the opening chapter. Lawrence himself had advised that his “ Twenty- Seven Articles” on working with Arab armies was intended only for those engaged with the Beduouin, and he was, after all, promoting an anti- imperial Arab revolt. He also advised bor- rowing a slave as a manservant. On the other hand, for all his racialized characterizing of the “dogmatic” Arab mind, Lawrence insisted that the would- be ally of the Arabs must “speak their dialect of Arabic” (Brown 160; see also 153-59). The United States Army has just begun offering soldiers a pamphlet with some two hundred Arabic words and phrases, spelled out phonetically. Lawrence’s evocation in the counterinsurgency relies greatly on his heroic cinematic representation in Lawrence of Arabia (1962, dir. David Lean), with Peter O’Toole in the starring role. By figuring itself as Lawrence, counterinsurgency blends the 6 war is culture: global counterinsurgency, visuality, and the petraeus doctrine [ PMLA reflected glamour of Hollywood heroism with the colonial trope of going native, that is to say, of adopting the practices of the local cul- ture in order to defeat it. Counterinsurgency constantly mixes its present- day urgency with claims from earlier eras, evoking a genealogy of imperialism and a sense that the time of counterinsurgency is out of joint. This tempo- ral shift is both specific and general. It looks back to the Sykes- Picot agreement of 1916, which formed modern Iraq, and imagines the West re- creating the country in its own image. More generally, it looks to the First World War era as “a laboratory for testing and honing the functional mechanisms and appa- ratuses of the state of exception as a paradigm of government” (Agamben 7). In this sense, Iraq, Afghanistan, and any other ventures of counterinsurgency such as Iran, Palestine, or Pakistan are technical experiments in the production of war as culture. The goal of these experiments is a globalization of capital enabled by modern technologies of informa- tion and war framed in the political culture of high imperialism. Culture itself is understood in this con- tradictory fashion as a totalizing system, governing all forms of action and ideas in an oscillation between Victorian anthropology and the first- person- shooter video game. The anthropologist Edward Tylor first argued in his book Primitive Culture (1871) that “Cul- ture or Civilization, taken in its widest eth- nographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and hab- its acquired by man” (qtd. in Young 45). The counterinsurgency strategy similarly under- stands culture as a “web of meaning” or as an “‘operational code’ that is valid for an entire group of people,” acquired by all members of a particular society or group by means of “enculturation” (US, Dept. of the Army 3-37). According to the manual, culture therefore conditions how and why people perform ac- tions, distinguish right from wrong, and as- ] 124.5 Nicholas mirzoeff 7 sign priorities, as if it were a set of rules (3-38). The digital metaphors suggest the fully ren- dered 3- D environment of the video game that requires the designer to anticipate all possible moves by the player. Indeed, a day after the invasion of Iraq, Sony filed a trademark ap- plication for the name “Shock and Awe” to use in a PlayStation game (Galloway 70). The war game itself is played according to General Tommy Franks’s mantra: “Speed kills” (qtd. in Ricks 127). The rush to Baghdad in 2003 was presumed to be “game over,” a target that has shifted to capturing Saddam Hussein, killing Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, or defeating al- Qaeda in Mesopotamia. However, it was not long be- fore that Lieutenant General William S. Wal- lace, the then commander of United States ground forces, complained to the Washington Post that “[t]he enemy we’re fighting is differ- ent from the one we’d war- gamed against” (qtd. in Noah). The narrative now is that there is no possible way to end the game except by continuing to play, just as the latest platform games invite the player to participate in per- manent play rather than exit. The apparently unforeseen direction of the war results in part from the very rigidity of the concept of culture being deployed by the military. If “culture” dictates the rules, then there should be only one way to play the game. That cultural rules are flexible is explained in anthropological style: “For example, the kin- ship system of a certain Amazonian Indian tribe requires that individuals marry a cousin. However, the definition of cousin is often changed to make people eligible for mar- riage” (US, Dept. of the Army 3-38). It is an odd example because cousin marriage can be interpreted as incestuous. In a series of recent essays in the National Review, the Harvard anthropology PhD Stanley Kurtz has claimed that because Muslims practice parallel cousin marriage, they are incapable of becoming part of modernity. Explicitly basing his argument on Tylor, Kurtz claims that parallel cousin marriage is only found in the regions that 8 war is culture: global counterinsurgency, visuality, and the petraeus doctrine [ PMLA were part of the eighth- century CE Islamic caliphate (“Marriage”). He then goes on to blame Edward Said for the mysterious fail- ure of anthropologists to notice this immense cultural divide in humanity (“Assimilation”). Despite its tendentious character, this weap- onized theory of culture that holds ancestral Islam to be a permanent state of exception from humanity has found a ready home on the radical right and has now informed the counterinsurgency strategy. It is now Depart- ment of Defense policy that an anthropologist be attached to each combat brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan, causing much controversy within the professional ranks of anthropolo- gists (Amer. Anthropology Assn.). This role was already envisaged by the counterinsur- gency manual, which calls for a “political and cultural officer” in each unit, an updating of former Soviet tactics. Three social scientists— Michael Bhatia, Nicole Suveges, and Paula Lloyd—have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, as of March 2009 (“In Memoriam”). Visualization is the key leadership tactic that holds together the disparate components of counterinsurgency. This terminology has its own significant genealogy within the annals of imperialism, for visuality and visualization were the key attributes of Thomas Carlyle’s Hero (Mirzoeff). In Carlyle’s 1840 series of lectures On Heroes, the conservative and im- mensely influential nineteenth- century his- torian (1795–1881) argued that the Hero can “see” history in what he called “clear visual- ity.” For the masses, the Hero offers only one supreme right, the right to be led (Carlyle 79). Visuality was therefore a technique for the in- dividual dominance of the ruler and the insti- tution of sovereignty, derived from the ability of the modern general to visualize the entire battlefield that extends beyond any person’s bi- ological sight. As sovereign, visuality envisages a top- down view of the world in which only it can see what is to be done. As governance, visuality trains and commodifies vision to ac- culturate to the prevailing mode of production. ] 124.5 Nicholas mirzoeff 9 Counterinsurgency insists on heroic leadership, manifested as the ability to perceive visuality as its narrative strategy by which to play its game. In the section of the counterinsurgency manual intended to be read by officers in the field, visu- ality is defined as the necessity of knowing the map by heart and being able to place oneself in the map at any time. This mapping is fully cognitive, including “the people, topography, economy, history, and culture of their area of operations” (US, Dept. of the Army A7-7). The counterinsurgent thus transforms his or her tactical disadvantage into strategic mastery by rendering unfamiliar territory into a simula- crum of the video game’s “fully rendered ac- tionable space” (Galloway 63). When soldiers refer to action as being like a video game, as they frequently do, it is not a metaphor. By turning the diverse aspects of foreign life into a single narrative, the counterinsurgent feels in control of the situation as if a player in a first- person- shooter video game. The commander thereby feels himself to be in the map, just as the game player is emotively “in” the game. Taken together, these abilities are summarized as the “commander’s visualization,” using Car- lyle’s own term. The counterinsurgency manual embraces sovereign visuality: “Soldiers and Marines must feel the commander’s presence throughout the A[rea of] O[perations], espe- cially at decisive points. The operation’s pur- pose and commander’s intent must be clearly understood throughout the force” (7-18). In- deed it is policy that “[t]he commander’s visu- alization forms the basis for conducting . . . an operation” ( A- 20). Counterinsurgency is legiti- mate because it alone can visualize the diver- gent cultural forces at work in a given area and devise a strategy to coordinate them. Command visualization is the field version of the nineties- era RMA term “full spectrum dominance,” the visuality of our times, based on dominating “offense, defense, stability, [and] support” (Ricks 152). In Iraq alone, hundreds of millions have been spent on synthetic- aperture radar, infrared- and other aircraft- based means 10 war is culture: global counterinsurgency, visuality, and the petraeus doctrine [ PMLA of visualized surveillance, to little apparent practical effect. A very popular video game called Full Spectrum Warrior is played using a virtual- reality helmet and is now being used as a therapeutic tool for soldiers suffering from post- traumatic stress. The continued impor- tance of visualization in counterinsurgency shows that visualization is not the refutation but the development of the RMA, now domi- nated by informational control. Known as C4I, the strategy unites “command, control, com- munications, and computers for intelligence.” One instance of the C4I policy was the creation of the Iraqi Media Network by the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003. An initial $15 million no- bid contract was awarded before the invasion took place to the contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to generate television, radio, and a six- day- a- week newspaper. Against all the odds, the re- named Iraqi Public Service Broadcaster did get on the air and opened its programming with a verse from the Koran. That gesture was at once cancelled by Washington, which compelled the network to broadcast instead an hour- long daily show called Towards Freedom, produced by the British government. Unsurprisingly, six months after the war a State Department poll showed 63% of Iraqis watched al- Jazeera or al- Arabiya, but only 12% watched the government station. The response was to award a new $95 million no- bid contract to the Harris Corpora- tion, a manufacturer of communications equip- ment with no television- production experience (Chandarasekaran 133–36). Failures of this type that have been repli- cated throughout Afghanistan and Iraq have led to an acceleration of violence as a tactic. In congressional hearings and other forums, of- ficials have repeatedly described what is mani- festly torture as the application of “techniques.” For all the doublespeak at work here, counter- insurgency relies on the gradated use of force as a technique of legitimation. It is legitimate to use torturing force on the recalcitrant body of the person designated as an insurgent because