“We are winning militarily but losing politically” is the going word from those who continue to think that there might be brightness in the future of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.Footnote ¹ However, according to the 2007 U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, this is not a possibility. Where “the political and military aspects … are so bound together as to be inseparable” against insurgents—whether Al Quaeda, Mao's Red Army, the Taliban, the Irish Republican Army, or Hamas—to lose politically is to lose (p. 40). War of this sort is not politics by other means, as Carl von Clausewitz had it, nor is there aptness to Michel Foucault's infamous reversal of Clausewitz's maxim.Footnote ² Rather, both insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) involve extensively researched and coordinated orchestration and exploitation of military, police, economic, cultural, political, and religious powers.

Substantially expanding the principle applied too late in the Vietnam debacle, that of “winning the hearts and minds of the people,” and making it a central rather than a supplemental concern, the manual argues that triumph in a particular nation over today's insurgents requires nothing less than a combination of artful governance amidst violence and instability; provision of social welfare for the whole population (including meeting basic needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and medical treatment); the securing of civilian safety (from both insurgent and counterinsurgent violence); the establishment and maintenance of the rule of law and protocols for addressing grievances; and the building of political legitimacy for the regime being defended or installed. In short, it requires—from the U.S. military no less—a degree of political intelligence and foresight worthy of Rousseau's Lawgiver, a degree of provision for human needs worthy of the farthest reach of the communist imaginary, a degree of stabilization through governance worthy of Thomas Hobbes or perhaps Immanuel Kant, an ability to “decipher cultural narratives” (the manual's words) worthy of a trained ethnographer, and an ability to manipulate these narratives worthy of Plato. It also entails the paradox of fostering the strength and legitimacy of what are often puppet regimes, and doing so while the occupiers are still on site. And all of this in a milieu of upheaval, violence, and complexly riven societies with weak or nonexistent states.

Indeed, what is most striking about the manual is not its informational content or recommendations—these are surprising only if one expects to find old-fashioned techniques for victory on the basis of superior military technology, strategy, and force—but its relentless confounding of conventional boundaries among military, political, economic, and anthropological spheres of activity, on the one hand, and its upending of conventional military structure and protocol, on the other.Footnote ³ Consider, to start with, the intriguing phenomenon of war doctrine produced jointly by Ivy League and military experts, and specifically through a collaboration between the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard and the U.S. Army.Footnote ⁴ The text was produced (one cannot quite say “written,” since there is so much material lifted from unattributed sources) by teams consisting of scholars—mainly anthropologists and sociologists rather than political scientists, and no game theorists or formal modelers—and military personnel with heavily featured academic degrees.

The strangeness of a military manual that draws extensively on liberal arts scholarship is compounded by its republication with the imprimatur of a prestigious university press, a phenomenon especially noteworthy in light of the shabby scholarly practices.Footnote ⁵ Is there significance in the fact that the University of Chicago and its Press are home to Straussians instrumental in promulgating a foreign policy of regime change in the Middle East? Or in the enormous boost the book has evidently given to the Press's coffers? (The manual was on amazon.com's top 100 for several months in fall 2007 and remains a very strong seller.) Of course, the back cover informs readers that the Press “will donate a portion of the proceeds from this book to the Fisher House Foundation, a private–public partnership that supports the families of America's injured servicemen.” That is, in keeping with capital's latest ploy to garnish sales by promising to donate an undesignated and potentially minuscule amount of proceeds to charity, thus blurring the lines between profitable and nonprofit enterprises (producing profitability from the nonprofit world and corrupting nonprofits with corporate interests), the Press will bestow part of what it makes off the military to a project that mixes public and private funds as well as labor, and that compensates for inadequate public funding for military families suffering losses from a war itself increasingly outsourced and draining public coffers while filling private ones. If you had trouble following the fusions and flows in that last sentence, it is neither the writer's fault nor your own but consequent to the historically unparalleled lines of transit and boundary breakdowns between spheres formerly distinct from one another.

The publication story offers only a foretaste of the boundary crossings, substitutions of functions, and interlocking spheres featured within and contextualizing the Counterinsurgency Manual. If the manual can be reduced to a single didactic point, it is that successful wars against insurgents involve erudite and careful mobilization of every element of the society in which they are being waged. These wars will be won through a new and total kind of governance, one that emanates from the military but reaches to security and stability for civilian life, formal and informal economies, structures of authority, patron–client relationships, political participation, culture, law, identity, social structure, material needs, ethnic and linguistic subdivisions, and more (pp. 81–99). So the COIN military not only must coordinate closely with other agents of regime change, including in the host nation, but must itself apprehend and manipulate every aspect of a society if it is to bend the society to its cause rather than to the insurgent one.

The difficulties of these requirements for the military cannot be understated. First, even as it recruits heavily from the uneducated strata of the U.S. population and is notoriously allergic to complex academic knowledge and cultural cosmopolitanism, the military engaged in counterinsurgency must become an intellectually astute and sensitive operation highly attuned to the complexities of governance, political economy, religious belief, cultural practices, and local mores. More than merely borrowing knowledge from the academy, the military has to supplant an emphasis on technological and tactical supremacy, manly strength and fortitude, and xenophobic patriotism with an emphasis on intellectual reflexivity, cultural sensitivity, and cosmopolitan appreciation of cultural difference. In short, it has to remake its culture and approach to war through the terms of the effeminate political liberalism against which its own identity has traditionally been crafted. Second, the military must largely shed its hierarchical and bureaucratic protocols to glean and operationalize the knowledge it needs. Commands emanating from distant Beltway generals and carried out by obedient grunts are irrelevant, if not damaging, to successful counterinsurgency—“effective COIN operations are decentralized, and higher commanders owe it to their subordinates to push as many capabilities as possible down to their level” (p. 47). Or, consider this from the Manual's Introduction: “Forces that learn COIN effectively

So the military is not only to become a comprehensive and finely tuned instrument of governance amidst infelicitous conditions of statelessness and violence but also to do so by replacing its hierarchical command and control structure with unprecedented boundary porousness inside and out—developing and affirming circulating flows between military and nonmilitary, research and policy, commanding officer and subordinate. At the same time, the military must reckon with the paradox (as the manual itself identifies it) that “political factors are primary” (pp. 39–40) and that what secures these factors is not only a deep appreciation of principles of varieties of government, power, and legitimacy but also a “thorough understanding of the society and culture in which COIN operations are taking place”—a quick read of The Arab Mind will no longer suffice (p. 40). Indeed, each of the nine “paradoxes of counterinsurgency” identified in the manual pertains to valorizing the mobilization of knowledge, governance, and culture over force; for example, “some of the best weapons do not shoot,” “tactical success guarantees nothing,” and “sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction” (pp. 47–51).Footnote ⁶

The boundary breakdowns and erasure of settled jurisdictions articulated and advocated throughout the volume, however, are also at the heart of a set of contemporary problems for counterinsurgency that the manual cannot address or solve. What happens when the military is no longer in charge of the wars it wages because the wars themselves are outsourced to private contractors, and when an occupier is no longer in charge of its occupation because the resources and enterprises of the occupied country have been sold off to the highest bidders in the world market? These are the problems signified today by proper nouns like Blackwater, Halliburton, Abu-Ghraib, and J. Paul Bremer. While the new manual clearly represents a serious effort at securing American hegemony through stabilizing and transforming rather than simply sacking the regions targeted as critical to this hegemony, insurgents are often the least of the forces exceeding the military's control. There are more than 180,000 private security employees in Iraq, substantially more than the total number of U.S. troops even after the spring 2007 surge. The deadly Blackwater shooting spree of September 2007 revealed the extent to which these private security forces are not only beyond the pale of American military command but also beyond the pale of law, any law. As nonmilitary personnel, they are not subject to the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice and, if fired, could not be court-marshaled in any event. Operating as combatants outside the boundaries of the United States, they are not subject to American constitutional law. International law would be awkwardly and ineffectively summoned in a context in which international justice instruments have been spurned from the outset.

Blackwater also operates outside Iraqi law: Order 17 of the Coalition Provisional Authority, issued by Bremer the day before the CPA was ceded to a formally sovereign Iraqi government but which remains unimpeachable by that supposedly sovereign body, states that “contractors shall not be subject to Iraqi laws or regulations in matters relating to the terms and conditions of their Contracts.” The Bremer orders, which also included the privatization of all public enterprises, full ownership rights and repatriation of profits by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, opening Iraqi banks to foreign ownership and control, and the elimination of most labor protections, were designed to facilitate a radically neoliberal legal, political, and economic order in Iraq. This is a neoliberalism so relentless in its subordination of local legal and political power to the appetites of world capital that it undermines the very capacity of the United States to control or master the Iraqi occupation.

So the manual represents something of a tragic irony, in which the American military has grasped the importance of conducting counterinsurgency on all fronts and with a transformed military culture at the very moment that it is neither capable of controlling most of these other fronts nor in charge of outsourced military operations. The deliberate facilitation of capital's superordination in the new Iraq radically undermines the possibility of coordinating and controlling the elements of counterinsurgency identified as critical in the manual. Similarly, even as the manual repeatedly stresses the importance of unity of effort in counterinsurgency struggles (Chapter 2 is wholly concerned with this), such unity is rendered impossible by the ubiquitousness of privatized security forces, privatized resources, privatized infrastructure building and rebuilding, privatized industry, and privatized prisons and water supplies.Footnote ⁷ How is unified and coordinated effort to be expected among agents produced and governed by a neoliberal rationality whose ruling principle is lack of regulation, restriction, or control by anything outside the private enterprise? And what motivation could there be for investors and contractors involved in these operations to organize their efforts around any end other than profitability, an end that might well collide with “successful” counterinsurgency? It is hard to know why the private enterprises lured to Iraq specifically to sustain an occupation would aim to conclude that occupation. It is even harder to know why any of the foreign capital that flooded post-Saddam Iraq would become invested in national sovereignty and substantive democracy there.

If the COIN manual updates the military's approach to counterinsurgency, it remains premised on a severely outmoded figure of sovereign power, one in which American powers within the theater of war are imagined to be under the direction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.