[NYTr] Counterinsurgency Manual: Col. Nagl Tries to Defend Stolen Scholarship

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Price's orginal article: "Stolen Scholarship Discovery Devastates
Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual" - Oct 30, 2007
http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20071029/071059.html


Counterpunch - Nov 3, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/price11032007.html

Refuting Lt. Colonel John Nagl

Army's Prime Salesman of Counterinsurgency Manual 
Seeks to Defend Stolen Scholarship

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 ]