Thank you for this wonderful interview. There are many very decent and brilliant soldiers and social scientists in Human Terrain (I guess now Minerva). For the most part, I agree that anthropology (and many social sciences) have a ridiculous, sniveling superiority complex when it comes to dealing with institutional power. Why is it OK or even lauded to run with, shelter, house, and abet violent insurgent movements, but not institutional militaries? Are we so simple-minded that we think we can easily locate evil in our simplified view of power hierarchies? We end up looking like militant vegans wearing leather jackets, pretending that we are somehow outside institutional power in our comfortable university homes.

Enough already, let’s open our eyes!!!

Ryan

Have you ever read ANYTHING about imperialism? Do you know anything about its political economy, its long term impact, its footprints, the cultural holocausts it wreaks? I bet not.

For example: why is it better to have an unoccupied, autonomous nation? For whom? Sure, I like deliberative democracy (my personal predilection that a lot of people do not share), which means I think people should be able to decide what happens to them. My problem with the shape of Iraq today is not that the Americans are there. Why would that bother me, per se, more than Saddam? What sort of nineteenh-century view is this? My problem is that people’s choices in leading their lives are, in many ways, more constrained than they were under Saddam (though in other ways less so).

I don’t think India should be grateful to the British, as Britain acted not out of charity but what is perceived as self-interest and common sense. But certainly, Indians do acknowledge the things Britain did right. The analogy with Iraq does not stand, however, since the US does not run anything there. It seems to wish to have no influence on, and takes no responsibility for, internal or even foreign affairs, as long as they do not concern “security” and energy. So this is not a colonial situation, but something in some ways worse.

This is also literally the case in Iraq (and perhaps in nearly every colonial situation). The point, however, is that Burma experienced something like a period of economic growth *after* the British managed to settle things – which is only to say that brutal counterinsurgency operations *do* work, and one nation *is* able to turn another nation into a stable, wealth-producing colony. Treating this transition as a moment of liberation seems naive and short-sighted.

The greater point is that, as with Burma, after ravaging a country for several years, the occupier then builds it up – because it’s an investment and that’s why they’re there. So, let’s say it’s 1890 and the Burmese insurgency is pretty much crushed and a sense of calm and stability has finally prevailed, would you support British ‘reconstruction’ and ‘administration’ efforts, the very ones all that killing was done for in the first place?

It’s a trick question, obviously – because the Burmese, too, probably supported these efforts to an extent, but isn’t that only because they had no choice and for them anything stable was better than the alternative? It’s a cruel situation to be offered a little help from the very ones who made you need it.

So all I’m saying is that people should be a little more cautious in their support of the new humanitarian/administration phase of the occupation, because this phase is not a “post-occupation” moment: on the contrary, it’s the whole reason *for* the occupation, the invasion, the bloodbath, etc.

So, when you say,”That was good” that the British rebuilt schools “and the fate of postcolonial Indian education (compared to, for example, Indonesia, where the Dutch did not build schools for natives) attests to that”, you should realize that you’re offering a disturbing proposition (that many Indians would find outrageous). I mean, the alternative you give is simply *another* colonial experiment, where the colonizer wasn’t as “generous” to its subjects. That, in my opinion, is the colonial sentiment par excellence. (I mean, should India be grateful to the British?) Perhaps the better, more obvious alternative would be to simply be an unoccupied, autonomous nation.

In any event, I don’t think we should be thinking of these efforts as generous, a gift to the Iraqis; it’s really just the hardening of their subjection, a transition to an American colonial administration that is more permanent and more juridical.