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War in the Gray: Exploring the Concept of Dirty War

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10576100801980492

1521-0731

M.L.R. Smith, Sophie Roberts,

Military History and Strategy

Abstract This study explores the meaning of "dirty war;" a term that has been in increasing usage in popular and academic discussion. It endeavors to detach the phrase from its normative connotations, and using a strategic methodology along with supporting case studies, seeks to arrive at a theoretical exposition of the dirty war concept. The investigation attempts to provide a working definition that helps make sense of the term, and develops some notions of what dirty war might constitute in contradistinction to its antonym, clean war. It is argued that dirty war represents a form of strategic practice occurring in the gray area between the criminal justice and war models of counterinsurgency, and possesses its own distinctive escalatory path. Finally, the analysis returns to the ethical and normative features implicit in the term, pointing to the outstanding dilemmas that continue to permeate the study of war. The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments, criticisms and observations on this article. Notes 1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 89. 2. Quoted in Mathew Teague, "Double Blind: The Untold Story of How British Intelligence Infiltrated and Undermined the IRA," Atlantic Monthly, April 2006, p. 53. 3. See James F. Dunnigan and Austin Bay, A Quick and Dirty Guide to War: Briefings on Present and Potential Wars (New York: William and Morrow, 1996); D. R. Kohut, O. Vilella, B. Julian, eds., Historical Dictionary of the "Dirty Wars" (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003). 4. Habib Souaïdia, La Sale Guerre: Le Démoignage d'un Ancien Officier des Forces de l'Armée Algérienne (Paris: Découverte, 2001). 5. See Lucien Bodard, The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam (trans. Patrick O'Brian) (London: Faber, 1967), p. 172; Yves Gras, Histoire de la Guerre d'Indochine (Paris: Denoël, 1992), p. 293. 6. See Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962 (London: Penguin, 2002). 7. See Gregorio Sesler, El Guatemalazo (La Primero Guerra Sucia) (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Iguazú, 1961). 8. Iain Guest, Behind the Disappearances: Argentina's Dirty War Against Human Rights and the United Nations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Ordinary Evil, and Hannah Arendt: Criminal Consciousness in Argentina's Dirty War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 9. John Martinkus, A Dirty Little War (New York: Random House, 2001); Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (trans. John Crowfoot) (London: Harvill, 2001); Carolyn Nordstrom, "The Dirty War: Civilian Experience of Conflict in Mozambique and Sri Lanka," in Kumar Rupesinghe, ed., Internal Conflict and Governance (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 27–43. 10. Human Rights Watch, The Dirty War in Chechnya: Forced Disappearances, Torture and Summary Executions (New York: Human Rights Watch Report), 13(1) (March 2001). Available at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/chechnya/, accessed 25 September 2006. 11. The instrumentalization of civilians in armed conflict has been indicated by the rise in the notion of "Human Security." Two crucial developments in international relations mark this rise: First, the emphasis on human security as a "universal concern … no other aspect of human security is so vital as their security from physical violence," quoted in UNDP Report Human Development Report: New Dimensions to Human Security (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 24. Second, the re-conceptualization of the right to intervene—the key report that expressed this was written in response to the mass human rights abuses of the 1990s, an acknowledgement that the civilian had become an intrinsic part of conflict. See Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, Responsibility to Protect: Report on the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (International Development Research Centre: Ottawa, 2002). More information can be found at http://www.iciss.ca/report-en.asp and a distilled version of the ideas central to the report can be found in Foreign Affairs (November/December 2002), article entitled "The Responsibility to Protect" by the same authors. For a detailed history of how the UN structure has dealt with the issue of civilians in armed conflict see http://ochaonline.un.org/webpage.asp?Page=779. 12. Clausewitz, On War, p. 75. 13. Ibid., p. 75 (emphasis in original). 14. For a flavor of the diverse literature on failed states: Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Robert Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," Atlantic Monthly 273(2) (February 1994); Ken Menkhaus, "Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism," Adelphi Paper 364 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 15. Andrew Goldsmith, "Policing Weak States: Citizens Safety and State Responsibility," Policing and Society 13(1) (2003), pp. 3–21. 16. Robert Rotberg "The New Nature of Nation State Failure," Washington Quarterly 25(3) (2002), pp. 885–896. 17. See Christopher Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries (London: Hurst and Co., 2006), p. 62. 18. See Samir Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam's Iraq (London: Hutchison Radius, 1989). 19. See John Garnett, "Strategic Studies and Its Assumptions," in John Baylis, Ken Booth, John Garnett, and Phil Williams, eds., Contemporary Strategy: Theories and Policies (London: Croom Helm, 1975), pp. 3–21. 20. Any assumption of potentially consequence free warfare—at least for one side—is a modern idea (associated with the "new wars" movement), in large part because of the advent of weapons that have the potential to cut the human agent out completely. This new humanism is contradicted by the existence of Just War Theory. For a discussion of these ideas see Christopher Coker, Humane Warfare: The New Ethics of Post-Modern Warfare (London: Routledge, 2003). 21. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (London: Penguin, 1980), pp. 34–37. 22. For a discussion see Kevin O'Brien, "The Use of Assassination as a Tool of State Policy: South Africa's Counter-Revolutionary Strategy 1979–92 (Part I)," Terrorism and Political Violence 10(2) (Summer 1998), pp. 86–105. 23. See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 127–222; and Theo Farrell, Norms of War: Cultural Beliefs and Modern Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005), pp. 1–18. 24. See United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Adopted on 12 August 1949 by the Diplomatic Conference for the Establishment of International Conventions for the Protection of Victims of War, held in Geneva, from 21 April to 12 August, 1949 entry into force 21 October 1950. 25. See United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Adopted on 12 August 1949 by the Diplomatic Conference for the Establishment of International Conventions for the Protection of Victims of War, held in Geneva from 21 April to 12 August, 1949 entry into force 21 October 1950. 26. See Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 44–106, and Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 138–175. 27. See United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 9 December 1948. 28. See Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of World Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 184–199; Robert Purnell, Society of States (London: Weidenfeld and Nicoloson, 1973), pp. 196–256; Martin Wight, Power Politics (London: Penguin, 1979), pp. 136–143. 29. Purnell, Society of States, pp. 227–232. 30. This does not preclude the possibility of non-authoritarian regimes from fighting forms of dirty war. Shades of dirty war behavior have been perceptible in liberal democracies such as Spain, Italy, and Northern Ireland where antiterrorist laws were used to reinforce the capacity of the state to pursue insurgents, sometimes resulting in the security forces acting above the law. For instance, dirty war rhetoric has been much used over the years in some literature on the Northern Ireland conflict, although some of this has tended to border on the conspiratorial. See for example, Frank Doherty, The Stalker Affair (Cork: Mercier, 1986); Paul Larkin, A Very British Jihad (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2004); Martin Ingram and Greg Harkin, Stakeknife (Dublin: O'Brien, 2003); Raymond Murray, SAS Operations in Ireland (Dublin: Mercier, 1990). 31. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (trans. Sean Hand) (London: Athlone, 1988), p. 2. 32. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (London: Routledge, 2005). 33. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 34. Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 33. 35. Ibid., p. 32. 36. Ibid. 37. Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, p. 32. 38. See Patricia Marchak, God's Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999), p. 124. 39. Quoted in Mark Osiel, "Constructing Subversion in Argentina's Dirty War," Representations No. 75 (Summer 2001), p. 124. 40. It could be further argued in this context that genocide is one of the endgames of dirty war, where it comes out of the shadows and into the open. 41. Enforced Disappearance, a strategy often deployed within the dirty war context, does exactly that. Indeed, it is part of its defining feature; see Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced and Involuntary Disappearance," General Assembly Resolution 47/133, 18 December 1992, available at http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/disappearance.htm 42. See Jo Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared (London: Zed Books, 1989); Marguerite Guzman, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo (Delaware: SR Books, 1984). 43. For a discussion of the Criminal Justice versus War Model of Counter-Terrorism see: R. D. Crelinsten, "Analysing Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: A Communication Model," Terrorism and Political Violence 14(2) (2002), pp. 77–122. 44. See James Salt and M. L. R. Smith, "Reassessing Military Assistance to the Civil Powers: Are Traditional British Anti-Terrorist Responses Still Effective?" Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement 13(3) (Winter 2005), pp. 227–249; Peter Chalk, West European Terrorism and Counter-terrorism: The Evolving Dynamic (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 91–116. 45. Paul Wilkinson, Terrorism and the Liberal State (New York: New York University Press, 1986), pp. 3–22. 46. Ibid., pp. 125–126. 47. Ariel Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984 (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, Monographs in International Studies, Latin American Series) No. 26 (1997), p. 6. 48. See Thomas Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1990); Peter Neumann, Britain's Long War: British Government Strategy in Northern Ireland, 1968–1998 (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 17–40. 49. The essence of the so-called British approach to COIN, as derived from the Malayan Emergency, for instance, is premised on the idea of proportionality and the rule of law. See Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966). 50. See Desmond Hamill, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969–1984 (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 159–190. 51. See Louis Fournier, FLQ: Anatomy of an Underground Movement (Toronto: NC Press, 1984). 52. David Pion-Berlin and George A. Lopez, "Of Victims and Executioners: Argentine State Terror, 1975–1979," International Studies Quarterly 35 (1991), p. 69 and Armony, Argentina, p. 10. 53. See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Crimes de L'Armée Française (Paris: Fayard, 1975); Rita Moran, Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French-Algerian War (New York: Praeger, 1989); and Jo McCormack, "Torture During the Algerian War," Modern and Contemporary France 10(3) (2002), pp. 392–395. 54. According to Claude Ranfaing: "It was necessary to use it [torture], without hate, without perversity. It was not just a game, neither was there any pleasure; it was simply to obtain a result that enabled people's lives to be saved." Quoted in Patrick Rotman, L'Ennemi Intime (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 199. 55. Pion-Berlin and Lopez, "Of Victims and Executioners," p. 63. 56. Quoted in Jerry W. Knudson, "Veil of Silence: The Argentine Press and the Dirty War, 1976–1983," Latin American Perspectives 24(7) (1997), p. 95. 57. Pion-Berlin and Lopez, "Of Victims and Executioners," p. 82. 58. Clausewitz, On War, pp. 75–78. 59. Marchak, God's Assassins, p. 112. 60. Frederick H. Gareau, State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2004), p. 97. 61. Quoted in Guardian, 6 May 1977, cited in Richard Gillespie, Soldiers of Peron: Argentina's Montoneros (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 250. 62. Deborah L. Norden, Military Rebellion, Military Rebellion in Argentina: Between Coups and Consolidation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 54. 63. María José Moyano, Argentina's Lost Patrol: Armed Struggle, 1969–1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 34–41. 64. The main right wing death squad, the Alianza Anticommunista Argentina (AAA) was estimated to have killed up to 50 people a week in 1975. See Jennifer Holmes, "Political Violence and Regime Change in Argentina: 1965–1976," Terrorism and Political Violence 24(6) (2001), p. 145. 65. Paul G. Buchanan, "The Varied Faces of Domination: State Terror, Economic Policy and Social Rupture During the Argentine 'Proceso' 1976–81," American Journal of Political Science 31(2) (1987), p. 341. 66. Donald C. Hodges, Argentina's Dirty War: An Intellectual Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 182. 67. Osiel, "Constructing Subversion," p. 128. In this respect members of Argentina's Jewish community were also designated targets, and it was estimated that as much as 10 percent of the victims in the dirty war were Jewish. See Gareau, State Terrorism, p. 97. 68. Daniel Frontalini and María Cristana Caiati, El Mito de la "Guerra Sucia" (Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, 1984), p. 22. 69. Statement by Gen. Roberto Viola and Brig. Gen. L. A. Jáuregui at a press conference in April 1977, quoted in Hodges, Argentina's Dirty War, p. 181. Original citation, from Frontalini and Caiati, El Mito de la "Guerra Sucia," p. 75, original emphasis. 70. In Chile it was also alleged that the military regime would deliberately set the army tests in order to "bloody" its forces. In one incident in October 1973 it is claimed that the army was sent to deal with supposedly violent unrest in the Northern mining regions. Some officers saw no disturbances and left the region alone but were later censured for excessive leniency. Later, helicopter-borne troops were sent to the Northern towns to round up suspects and execute them. It is claimed that such incidents were as much to scare the army into compliance with the policies of the regime as it was to create terror in the population or indeed deal with any real subversive threat. BBC World, Correspondent ("Caravan of Death"), broadcast 10 July 2001. 71. Pion-Berlin and Lopez, "Of Victims and Executioners," p. 63. 72. Ibid., p. 70. 73. A potential dilemma popularized by Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 131–163. 74. For a general survey see Martin Dillon, The Dirty War (London: Hutchinson 1988), esp. pp. 188–397. 75. Quoted in Paul H. Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals: Dirty War in Argentina (Greenwood, CT: Praeger, 2002), p. 147. 76. Ibid., p. 157. 77. Gillespie, Soldiers of Peron, p. 250. 78. Richard Gillespie, "A Critique of the Urban Guerrilla: Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil," Conflict Quarterly, No. 1 (1980), pp. 39–53. 79. Pierre Faillant de Villemarest, The Strategists of Fear: Twenty Years of Revolutionary War in Argentina (Geneva: Voxmundi, 1980), p. 123. 80. Quoted in Knudson, "Veil of Silence," p. 95. 81. Michael Walzer, "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands," Philosophy and Public Affairs 2(2) (Winter 1973), pp. 160–180, reproduced in Sanford Levinson, ed., Torture: A Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 61–75. The "dirty hands" dilemma also strongly informed Walzer's seminal Just and Unjust Wars. 82. Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge 1991), p. 123. 83. Michael Walzer, "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands," in Levinson, Torture, p. 65. 84. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. XV. 85. Jean Bethe Elshtain, "Reflections on the Problem of 'Dirty Hands'," in Levinson, Torture, p. 87. 86. Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), p. 63. 87. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses (London: Penguin, 1983), 3: 41. 88. See Amartya Sen, "Identity and Violence the Illusions of Destiny," 2006, available at http://www.slate.com/id/2138731/ 89. The campaign of elements of the Italian secret services against the Red Brigades in the 1970s and early 1980s, it may be argued, fall into this category. See Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (San Jose: Authors Choice Press, 2002). 90. See Mark Urban, Big Boys Rules: The Secret Struggle Against the IRA (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), pp.187–237. 91. See Paddy Woodworth, Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001).