[R-G] Refuting Colonel John Nagl

[Anthony Fenton]

Weekend Edition
November 3 / 4, 2007
Refuting Colonel John Nagl
Army's Prime Salesman of Counterinsurgency Manual Seeks to Defend  
Stolen Scholarship
http://counterpunch.org/price11032007.html
By DAVID PRICE

On November 1, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl posted a response to my  
recent CounterPunch article documenting unacknowledged use of other  
scholars' writing in the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Nagl  
contributed a foreword to the Chicago University Press edition of the  
Manual and was heavily involved in the Manual's production and  
promotion. I described him accurately in my first piece as "the  
Manual's poster boy, appearing on NPR, ABC News, NBC, and the pages  
of the NYT, Newsweek, and other publications, pitching the Manual as  
the philosophical expression of Petraeus' intellectual strategy for  
victory in Iraq."

Nagl's response can be found at http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/. A  
US Army spokesman, Major Tom McCuin, also posted this release on the  
Small Wars Journal website: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/11/

Nagl's response shirks the central points raised in my article. My  
primary aim was not, as he falsely claims, to continue an "assault on  
social scientists assisting national efforts to succeed in Iraq and  
Afghanistan," it was to examine how the University of Chicago Press's  
republication of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual was part of the  
Pentagon's efforts to convince the American public that victory in  
Iraq would occur with a new academic approach to counterinsurgency.  
That some of this scholarship turns out to be fake scholarship  
exposes the hollowness of this sales pitch.

Lt. Col. Nagl wants it both ways. He was the Manual's public  
spokesman on the well oiled media circuit where he claimed that the  
new Manual was the product of high scholarship in the service of the  
state; yet when it became apparent that somewhere along the line in  
the production of the Manual the most basic of scholarly practices  
were abandoned, he now pretends that these rules do not apply in this  
context. He has to choose how he wants to pitch the Manual:  
scholarship or doctrine. He can't have it both ways anymore. I read  
U.S. Army Spokesman Major Tom McCuin's statement as military  
doublespeak declaring a mistakes-were-made-but-the-messages-remains- 
true admission that passages were indeed used in an inappropriate  
manner, so I guess what we have here is doctrine.

I am not applying inappropriate cultural standards to this work. As I  
wrote in my original CounterPunch piece, "To highlight the Manual's  
scholarly failures is not to hold it to some over-demanding, external  
standard of academic integrity. However, claims of academic integrity  
are the very foundation of the Manual's promotional strategy."

Nagl skirts the issue of the Manual's lifting exact sentences (and of  
slightly modifying others) and reproducing them in the manual without  
quotation marks as if the problem was simply one of missing footnotes  
and citations and not of quotations. Nagl writes that it is his  
"understanding that this longstanding practice in doctrine writing is  
well within the provisions of "fair use" copyright law." Unless Nagl  
has some special legal expertise on the rights of the military to  
kidnap and republish materials protected under copyright as if it  
were their own, I am less interested in "his understanding" than I am  
in the Army's understanding of these legal matters. Can Lt. Col.  
Nagl's view be that of the Army? This would be remarkable.

Nagl claims that "military Field Manuals have their own grammar and  
their own logic." While the logic of this manual is certainly  
ideographic and not bound by the normal rules of logic, I refer Dr.  
Nagl to the partial list of pilfered sentences I provided in my  
article if he thinks the grammar of the manual is entirely its own.

Nagl pretends that this is somehow a personal matter. There is  
nothing personal about this; I wouldn't have mentioned Dr. McFate's  
involvement in any of this if she hadn't been telling anthropologists  
about her work on this chapter. She is the one who chose the media  
spotlight and demanded inspection of her work as that of a model  
military-linked scholar. My article leaves her plenty of room to  
explain how all of this happened, and I await her explanation, and to  
see the early drafts of this chapter so that we can understand just  
what happened here. That Nagl, and apparently others on the project,  
approve of such practices may be all the explanation she needs to  
make with in military circles. This is valuable information. I will  
wait to see just how widespread among other military anthropologists  
is Nagl's view that use of unattributed sources is of no consequence.  
I'm already hearing from some in this community who are distancing  
themselves from these poor practices. They don't share Nagl's view  
that it is acceptable to pilfer whatever sentences you need when  
writing "doctrine".

Nagl's response to my CounterPunch article concludes with some high- 
flown rhetoric citing General Sir William Francis Butler as saying "a  
century ago that 'The nation that draws a clear line of demarcation  
between its thinking men and its fighting men will soon have its  
thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.'" Nagl  
concludes, " I am pleased that our nation is not in that perilous  
condition, and am proud to be associated with the Army/Marine Corps  
Counterinsurgency Field Manual." Closing with this invocation of  
General Butler is an interesting choice. If anyone is demarcating  
lines separating "thinking men [and women]" and "fighting men [and  
women]" it is the military and intelligence organizations that Lt.  
Col. Nagl serves. These organizations have become so governed by  
forms of groupthink, that they are unable to accommodate academic  
critics who see the current trajectory and use of embedded  
scholarship as leading our nation deeper into crisis. By this I mean  
people like the recently retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez who know  
that the Iraq war is now "a nightmare with no end in sight". Such  
people are pushed aside for true believers. Nagl knows full well that  
Chicago's republication of the Manual was part of a public relations  
campaign to bury the views of those like Sanchez who recognize that  
President's Bush's policies have led us into a quagmire. Selling  
America a war with fake scholarship won't get us out of this mess.

The use of fake scholarship to sell the Iraq war to the American  
public only makes things worse. If we are going to get out of this  
mess, U.S. military and intelligence agencies need to call on outside  
scholars and critics to help them get it right. Army spokesman McCuin  
says that I have failed to "accept the Army's several offers to enter  
in a reasoned dialogue on the merits  or lack of merits - of the role  
anthropologists can play in helping to reduce the use of lethal force  
to achieve military and political objectives." I have no idea what  
these supposed "several offers" refer to, but I'm willing to talk  
with anyone in the Army who wants to hear my personal or  
anthropological views (informed by several stints of Middle East  
fieldwork) on how to reduce the use of lethal force by leaving Iraq.  
If the Army is interested in learning more about the limits that  
anthropological ethics place on appropriate anthropological  
interactions with the military, I'd also be willing to help get them  
up to speed.

If the Counterinsurgency Field Manual had remained an obscure  
military document, I can't imagine this exchange would be occurring.  
It was the Army's calculated decision to use the University of  
Chicago Press to try and sell the American public the notion that we  
could win the Iraq War based on intellectual principles, rather than  
shock and awe that raised the ante on claims of academic worth. If  
there are public claims that the Manual is a work of scholars, then  
the scholarship of this work needs examination, and this is precisely  
what my article does.

David Price is author of Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and  
the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Duke, 2004). His  
next book, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect  
of American Anthropology in the Second World War, will be published  
by Duke University Press in March 2008. He can be reached at  
dprice at stmartin.edu