Addenda to yesterday’s post:
(1) Commenter Christiane pointed out (from Switzerland) that the shocking recent report from the UN’s Jean Ziegler on the near-doubling of child hunger in Iraq since the start of the US occupation should also be put into the general picture of US priorities. I completely agree.
(2) I had originally meant to make a reference in the post to the old saying that, “If the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem will look like a nail.” I forgot to do that. Okay: “If the only tool you have is a hypercharged military then every problem will look like….”
(3) I always love having Dominic’s inputs from South Africa that strengthen the parallel I have increasingly been identifying (and trying to allude to in my writings) between the US’s current position with regard to the rest of the world and that of the old apartheid regime in SA to the rest of the SA citizenry…
In his comment on yesterday’s post he said the Pentagon’s planned “Future Combat System” looks like the apartheid bosses’ old “Total Strategy”. I question that a bit, though. The “Total Strategy” was the intellectual framework (intended to be both justificatory and motivational) that the apartheid-era securocrats erected and used in their brutal and demented fight against all their perceived enemies. It wasn’t the hardware of the Casspirs, the fighter planes etc, that they actually used in the fight. I think the better analogy for the TS is the “Global War on Terror”– an “intellectual” construction that is also intended to be both justificatory and motivational.
If anyone can provide a hyperlink to some text that served as the seminal or otherwise authorittative expression of the “Total Strategy” it would be interesting to do a textual comparison between that and the September 2002 “National Security Strategy” document in which Prez Bush seminally articulated the intellectual framework of the “GWOT”.
Okay, I’m not necessarily volunteering to DO the textual comparion… But once we have URLs for the two texts, we can ask for volunteers.
By the way, I think the term “securocrats” was originally a South African coinage. It is one that we should certainly seek to “globalize” and use with regard to the authors and implementers of the GWOT these days!
The irony inherent in the term itself– from my perspective– is that though “security” is the announced justificatory be-all and end-all for the basket of policies in question, actually, these policies are extremely counter-productive and have the effect of majorly undermining the security not only of their immediate targets but also of the community that spawned and supported the so-called ‘securocrats’ in the first place.
6 thoughts on “US military $$, part 2”
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The best I’ve found on the SA “Total Strategy” is at http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/classroom/pages/projects/grade12/lesson18/06-security-council.htm because it has an organogram.
What I was looking for was either a speech by P W Botha announcing the thing, or a manual for a Joint Management Committee. I suspect something like that will only be found in a book, or in the TRC records.
Here’s a link to the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America.
Hey thanks both of you! However, I don’t think we’re quite there yet on the “Total Strategy”. Interesting though the organogram looks, the web-page there doesn’t really have much description of how the securocrats actually described the threat they saw, and laid out their response to it.
I think there’s a fairly good section in Hermann Giliomee’s “History of the Afrikaner People” but I don’t have it to hand… Dominic? Anyone else?
(I can’t get it till early next week. Tomorrow I’m going to DC for some meetings, then more meetings here Sunday. Busy days.)
At the end of the web-page you cited, Dominic, there’s an excerpt from this work: Robert Schrire
Okay, Vol.2, Ch.1 of the TRC report has some pretty good stuff in it.
Especially paras 108-139 (with an interesting source in Afrikaans cited at para 139), and 152-165.
Actually, maybe I can also consult a S. African political scientist I interviewed once on this period: Rupert Taylor. But I don’t have time for all this!
If anyone else does have time and wants to make a quick first stab at the textual analysis– or, can suggest a better even more “primary” source for this project… Please go ahead!
I can post the textual analysis as a main post if you send it to me by email.
I’m glad we have the “definitive” NSSUSA link, thanks to No Pref!
I’m convinced this is a very good project to undertake, i.e. a comparative study of the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, with the historical development of the South African old regime’s “Total Strategy” and its many spin-offs.
This study can be very illuminating. It is likely that it will reveal roots and personalities common to the development of both systems, for example. It will reveal a high degree of political commonality.
I have just re-read the book “Brutal Force” by Gavin Cawthra, now a professor at the Wits University P&DM in Johannesburg. The book was published in 1986 by International Defence and Aid Fund in London. Pages 21 to 38 give a thorough exposition of the history of the development of the South African ‘Total Strategy’ in theory and practice. I have made a detailed summary of the relevant part of the book for Helena Cobban and sent it to her by e-mail.
I’ve looked at the TRC document Helena quotes above. The problem with it is that it mixes ANC and old-regime history and it mixes time-periods. The ‘Total Strategy’ had its roots in the 1950s and developed strongly from the time P W Botha became Defence Minister in 1966 to 1989 when he was replaced by F W de Klerk, and even after that. It needs to be looked at historically, which is how Gavin Cawthra deals with it.
As for Giliomee’s book, I haven’t read it but I doubt it will be a lot of use, judging from the reviews it got when it came out. But you never know. Any of these works can give you leads back to primary sources. Especially if they are well footnoted and indexed, as Gavin Cawthra’s book is.