Hearts and Minds at Gunpoint

There is no national security without justice.

Rafah. (Photo: Getty)

In The New Yorker this month, Anand Gopal writes about the lives of the people trapped in Al-Hol, a “detention camp” in Syria where thousands of refugees—some of them affiliated with ISIS by family connections—fled after the war in Syria. There is Ahmed, a kind husband who joined the Free Syrian Army, and was driven mad with grief by his friends’ deaths:

Ahmed received daily updates about the carnage in Homs from his best friend, Ali, who’d stayed behind. One day in 2013, Ahmed got a phone call: Ali had been bringing home a breakfast of eggs and yogurt when he was shot in the forehead by a regime sniper. Ahmed smashed his phone to pieces, sobbing, and locked himself in his room. Jihan had never seen him like this; she worried he would harm himself. He left home. Days later, his mother brought him back, but he had a new, distant look. “I’m sick and tired of this life,” he told Jihan. “I’m going to join the Islamic State.”

When Ahmed is killed, Jihan is left behind.

One day in 2018, a woman who lived next door to Jihan was stoking a clay oven on her roof. As the woman called to her four children down below to help their father load the car, an air strike rocked the house. Jihan raced over. The woman had been thrown from the roof. “Don’t check on me!” she screamed. “Check my children!” But her entire family was dead. Jihan stared at the children’s little bodies and was suddenly gripped by a rage she’d never felt before. She realized, for the first time, that she hated Ahmed—for his stubbornness, his zealotry, his bloodlust, his willingness to destroy her life.

---

---

There is Da’ad:

Jihan met Da’ad, who was also from Homs. Her family, which was not linked to isis, had fled regime air strikes for Raqqa, then kept moving east to escape U.S. bombs. One day, she and her children travelled to visit her parents; they returned home to find that a coalition air strike had blown up their house. Seventeen people were killed, among them her husband and her in-laws. Now she lives in a tent with her daughters, including a nine-year-old who has a blood disorder and requires transfusions to stay alive. Transfusions are performed at a hospital outside the camp, but an emergency furlough from the authorities is maddeningly difficult to obtain, and Da’ad, who works at a grocery in the souk, can’t always afford the treatments. She has appealed to neighbors and to aid organizations in the camp, without success. “I can’t watch my child withering away in front of me day after day,” she said. “This is a prison, not a camp. I don’t know what crime my daughter committed.”

And Asma:

Asma was from a stretch of Iraq that was overtaken by isis. When U.S.-backed forces closed in on her village, she and her husband, a taxi-driver, fled with their two daughters; her two brothers had joined isis, and she and her husband feared being branded sympathizers. They took refuge in Syria. Not long afterward, Asma’s husband was in a traffic accident. “I went running to the hospital crying,” she recalled. He died from his injuries. “I saw his body and hugged him and kept screaming.” Five months later, she went to visit a friend. When she returned home, she saw people gathered in front of her house. It was in smoldering ruins, from an air strike by pro-government forces. Both her daughters were dead. “I buried them in the dirt with my own hands,” Asma said. “They were little girls, the age of flowers.” Because a woman cannot live alone, Asma moved in with her brothers Mustafa and Saleh, the isis members, who, with their families, had taken up residence in Syria. She tried to suppress her grief, playing with her nieces and nephews and helping out around the house. One evening, she went to bed around midnight, and woke up in the hospital; Saleh was by her side, crying. He told her, “We are the only survivors.” Asma recalled, “I did not even feel the fractures in my hands and feet. I was screaming, ‘Where is Mustafa? Where are the boys and girls!’ ” Another air strike had wiped out the rest of her family, killing twelve people, nine of them children. She and Saleh fled to a different village, but two months later he was killed in a coalition air strike. In Al-Hol, Asma lived in a tent alone.

Again and again, we find in the story people who were not hardcore religious zealots, pursuing holy war at all costs, but rather normal people pushed into misery or insanity or rage as a result of being victimized by war. Now, they are in indefinite detention, because their rage makes them a security threat to the very states that caused it in the first place. It is easy, reading this, to think of the predicament of the people in Gaza. In the New York Times today, David Brooks, who is perceived as kind-hearted conservative, muses at length on the question, “If the current Israeli military approach is inhumane, what’s the alternative?” He spends most of his time playing military tactician: How to attack the Hamas tunnels, or kill Hamas fighters left in Rafah while producing a somewhat lower rate of civilian casualties. He gnaws on the humanitarian disaster only to the extent that it makes Israel’s campaign strategically and politically difficult—it is all, you can see, an amusing intellectual puzzle for Brooks. He concludes that Israel should go ahead and decimate Rafah, but also implement an unspecified campaign of humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians left alive. Only at the end of his piece does he gesture to this deeper point:

For her book “How Terrorism Ends,” the Carnegie Mellon scholar Audrey Kurth Cronin looked at about 460 terrorist groups to investigate how they were defeated. Trying to beat them with military force alone rarely works. The root causes have to be addressed. As the retired general David Petraeus reminded his audience recently at the New Orleans Book Festival, “Over time, hearts and minds still matter.”

The rubric of “winning hearts and minds” contains within it all of the callous, misguided, patronizing strains of thought that have powered all of history’s empires into their own pits of destruction. It suggests that injustice is a tactical problem; that pacification, not justice, is the goal of great powers; that people who are deprived of their humanity should be convinced that things are okay via the skillful application of candy and money and advertisements. The essential purpose of the Hearts and Minds strategy is to allow the strong to carry out their wishes in full without the resistance of the weak. Its weapon is propaganda rather than bullets, but its purpose is the same. The easiest way to win the hearts and minds of a brutalized population is to give them justice—to remove the brutality and repair its damage. To reverse the policies of the strong that got them thinking about this in the first place. This, of course, is a nonstarter in the world of geopolitical wise men. The fact that the great powers must have their way is assumed. The only real question is how to help them escape the consequences.

“Abolishing liberty did not bring Russia security,” the editorial board of the Washington Post wrote today, following the ISIS attack that killed 133 civilians at a Moscow concert hall. This is the sort of point whose truth is much easier to perceive when it concerns a nation that we do not like. When it concerns us, or our allies, it disappears into a fog of complex strategic considerations. Yet does its thesis—that increasing totalitarian control did not create security—not apply to Israel and Gaza, just as much as it does to Russia? Does it not apply to the actions of America in many nations in the Middle East, where we spent decades sowing the seeds of the 21st century’s terrorist attacks? Of course it does. But the fix for these obvious parallels would be to demand that strong nations stop oppressing the weak, and such demands are not going to get you taken seriously in Washington’s national security think tank world. The United States and Israel and their vast “security” apparatuses are looking not for justice, but for what slaveholders wanted when abolition came: To be free from retribution for what they have done. To bomb entire families in Syria, and then herd the survivors into forlorn detention camps, because they might lash out; to bomb entire families in Gaza, and then herd the survivors into forlorn detention camps, because they might one day seek revenge. This is what the bulk of foreign policy discussions on the subject of “security” amount to. They are all an effort to avoid the uncomfortable demands of justice, through trickery or sleight of hand or, if necessary, through force.

---

---

Places and cultures and histories are different all around the world. But people are the same. Where I live, in New York City, the craven governor has deployed the National Guard to subway stations to playact at protecting the public from a crime wave that does not exist. Even if we allow that crime does happen on the subway, and that something about the nature of the confinement of subways makes crime there hold a special terror in many people’s minds, we still must say, in the interest of honesty, that there are not enough police and soldiers in the State of New York to make a difference in the safety of the millions of daily subway riders. Here are the people who most commonly make trouble on the subway: Homeless people, mentally ill people, people who have become mentally ill as a result of being homeless or being poor and under great stress, young people who are poor and are not well supervised. Beyond the ineradicable baseline of “jerks doing dumb things,” which will always exist, the majority of scary crimes that occur on the subways would be most effectively eradicated by providing affordable housing and living wage jobs and good education and good health care and good social services for the people of New York. To deny those things to the public while spending vast resources to flood the subways with police and soldiers is to pursue the same approach that Israel does when it denies Palestinians equal rights and then traps them behind border walls and military checkpoints. It is the same approach that America pursues when we aid friendly dictators and help overthrow governments hostile to our own interests and then deploy the world’s mightiest military against anyone pissed off enough about those things to lash out at us directly. It is unjust, and even if you don’t care about that or find that naive, it also won’t work. Not in the long run. Oppressed people will be angry. Victims of injustice will not be pacified forever. Even the richest and strongest nations cannot kill everyone else in the world until the end of time. It is absurd. Yet our public conversation on topics of safety and security tend to start at a point that has already granted the premises that ensure that we will be having these same pointless conversations for many generations to come.

David Brooks, the human embodiment of a sweater vest, feels perfectly comfortable advocating targeted assassinations and brutal bombing campaigns that will unquestionably kill thousands of innocent people in the pages of the most respected news organization in the Western world. Why is that? It is because such positions are blessed by the gods of Acceptable American Discourse. To advocate building an enormous and lethal military and deploying platoons of armed men to kill anyone who threatens to upend the normal daily lives we enjoy is the baseline, median, and utterly unexamined foundation of all respectable mainstream discussion of questions of “security.” Implied, accepted from the beginning, is the idea that security is owed to those of us who have things, and that obeisance is demanded of those who have nothing. The job of the oppressed is to not harm the rich, on pain of death. This is an accurate description of the point from which American political discussions of these issues proceed. I do not have any illusions about changing this any time soon, but it is incumbent on all of us to understand that the lunacy of all of this is baked in from the very beginning. If we start instead from the idea that everyone on earth is owed justice, is entitled to their own humanity, then these discussions can play out in very different ways. Until then, we will just continue to solemnly tell the suffering people of the world: We are here to win your hearts and minds, or to kill you. The choice is yours.

---

Also

—Previously: How to Absolve America of Everything; The Point of Politics Is to Stop This; The Sin Eraser.

—My book about the labor movement, “The Hammer,” is available for purchase wherever books are sold. I believe you would enjoy reading it. Les Leopold (who himself has a very worthwhile new book) wrote a review of it this week. I am on book tour, and it has been fantastic meeting so many readers—thank you to everyone who came out to the recent events in Philly, with Kim Kelly, and in New Orleans, with Sarah Jaffe. I’m headed to Boston next week. Upcoming events:

• Wednesday, March 27: Boston, MA— At the Northeastern College of Professional Studies at 101 Belvidere Street. 6:30 pm. Free tickets are here.

• Tuesday, April 9: Sacramento, CA—At Capital Books. 6 pm. Event details here.

• Monday, April 15: Los Angeles, CA—At Stories LA, 7 pm. In conversation with Adam Conover.

• Sunday, April 21: Chicago, IL— “The Hammer” book event and Labor Notes Conference after party at In These Times HQ, 2040 N. Milwaukee Ave. 5 pm.

I hope to announce events in San Francisco and Minneapolis soon. Stay tuned. Come out and see me if I’m in your area. Talking about the labor movement with interesting people is, genuinely, a great thing. If you’re interested in bringing me to your city to speak, email me.

—Thank you to all of you for reading How Things Work. This site can exist—and remain paywall-free—only with the support of paying subscribers. If you like it, please consider take a few quick seconds to become a paid subscriber today. Independent media can survive and thrive, if we all do our little part to help.