You have made a sweeping and comprehensive comment that has made me think a bit more about the prison situation. Rarely do I want to write as much as would be required to fully flesh out my position on these types of issues. It would take too long to read, it would bore those who tried, and it may even bore me. That said, let’s expand these ideas a little.

Your comment goes again to motive and whether imprisonment works, and works towards what end? This theme (motive, correction of behavior) is consistent with us and discussions about COIN.

For the record, I do not believe in the healing, therapeutic or rehabilitative powers of imprisonment. More specifically, I do not believe that imprisonment can change a man’s soul (except perhaps for the worse). If it is claimed that imprisonment can modify behavior simply by impetus to avoid punishment, I agree, but still claim that this isn’t behavior modification from a change in moral constitution. It is little more than a Pavlovian experiment.

I believe in restitution and retribution. If a man steals, he has offended another man, not society. He should pay back two or three fold. Violent crimes warrant the death penalty. The concept of prisons for rehabilitative purposes is a concoction of mankind, and it is an inefficient concoction at that.

But given the litigious, post-modern society we live in along with the lawyers to gum up the works, we have what we have and must work with it. Let’s put this as simply as possible. For Iraq at the present, I do not believe that the “justice system” can handle the influx of prisoners, especially now that there is an offensive underway. The prisons are already overcrowded, and more will only make things worse.

But what more prisons can do is delay the release of the hardest of the insurgents. Note the phrase “catch and release.” It comes from fishing. When you don’t keep them, you catch them, take them off the hook, and then release them into the water.

This is how the solder and marine feel at the present. “Catch and release.” They are being released so quickly back into the environment that the environment hasn’t changed since they were last there.

The goal of imprisonment, in the case of Iraq, is to hold them long enough that the environment is vastly different than when they went into prison. This difference, hopefully, is one in which their violence is not welcome, one in which a stable Iraq has become a reality. This may take three years. Or it may take six more years. Either way, we must construct the prisons to hold them and have the courage to do it. Catch and release will not work to end the insurgency.

About insurgents who choose to die but to surrender I cannot but wonder what Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale would say about that? On my side, and as long as we are talking about insurgence and not kamikaze, I perfectly understand the point of view of those insurgents who choose death.

About prisons, I believe that their purpose is relevant to criminal law. About those who are jailed because they have been caught in flagrante delicto of insurgency I would consider other options which proved to be successful in Europe during WWI and WWII and elsewhere in the world during other times. I justify my point bellow.

Time after time in Korea, American prisoners of war were aced with challenges to their sense of themselves as Americans that threatened to crack the armor of moral superiority like an eggshell, and often American cultural insularity, as expressed in the inability or unwillingness to eat unfamiliar food, led to death from malnutrition. But in the Chinese communist effort to win over or mold minds, the indoctrination of prisoners of war in North Korea was helped tremendously by the political ignorance of most G.I.; and by their interrogator’ deep knowledge of American culture. Instead of having relative insurance about a clear adversity, as in WWII, soldiers in Korea were left adrift, wondering who we were fighting for and why, how American interests, let alone American value, were being threatened.

“The mind of the enemy and the will of its leaders is a target of far more importance than the bodies of his troops,� wrote Mao Zedong whose thoughts were largely inspired by Sun Tzu’s readings. And this applies to Iraqi insurgents as well; for they are human being as Americans are.

The U.S. Army did a study on the effect of communist indoctrination on those held prisoner of war in North Korea. This study includes reports on the collaboration of prisoners with the enemy and has constituted the basis of a valuable book whose title is In Every War but One, and which was written by Eugene Kinkead.

With an average of ninth grade education, remarks Eugene Kinkead, “not only the prisoners not know much about the history of communism, they didn’t know much about the U.S. either.�

How about the education level of those insurgents in Iraq?

Unable to understand how our system could be criticized, young enlisted men were vulnerable to criticism that took cherished ideals like freedom and self determination and argued that it was the United States, not the North Koreans or the Chinese, that was guilty of violating the basic political beliefs outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Just following orders was a different response to make after Nuremberg. Instead of fighters or freedom, pressed their interrogators, American soldiers were pawns of an undeclared war.

Good idea!

Earlier, the Bolsheviks used the Brest-Litovsk armistice and peace conference as a public forum for the propagation of their ideas, thus converting diplomatic relations with the enemy into a virtual Trojan horse.
Throughout the negotiations the Foreign Office under Trotsky, the press bureau under Karl Radek, and the bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda under Boris Reinstein turned the full blast of their power against the German army.
German newspapers, Die Fackel (The Torch) and Der Völkerfriede (The People’s Peace), were distributed to the soldiers of the centrals powers by the hundreds of thousands. Although themselves contemptuous of Wilson’s fourteen points, the Bolsheviks nevertheless distributed among German troops over a million copies of the speech in translation. German prisoners of war in Russia were harangued and indoctrinated so effectively that upon their return to the fatherland they were confined for thirty days in “political quarantine camps� and mentally “deloused� with patriotic literature. Nevertheless, throughout the spring and summer of 1918 prisoners brought back to Germany the infection bred of the revolution and propaganda to which they had been subjected in Russian prison camps since the November Revolution.

Hmmm.

They had drunk deeply of the heavy wine of freedom and sedition, they had seen the Russian army melt away before their eyes, and now they returned to their depots speaking a new language of peace and bred; and bringing with them a spirit of general insubordination. General Hoffmann said that the German army in Russia was so “rotten with Bolshevism� that he did not “dare transfer some of his divisions to the western front.�

Hmmm (again).

On the one hand, I acknowledge that insurgents in Iraq are ideologically committed people and not enlisted soldiers; but on the other we know that true believers and extremists are, in a large majority of cases, persons who are particularly receptive to political and religious ideas.

That’s why mass movements are subject to interchangeability. When people are ripe for a mass movement –this applies in the case of insurgency in Iraq, in my own opinion– they are usually ripe for any effective movement, and not solely for one with a particular doctrine or program. This explains why both Shi’a and Sunni, or example, are insurgents though they religious beliefs differ at some point.

In pre-Hitlerian Germany it was often a tossup whether a restless youth would join the Communists or the Nazis. In the overcrowded pale of Czarist Russia the simmering Jewish population was ripe both for revolution and Zionism. In the same family one member would join the Revolutionaries and the other the Zionists. In Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann. Dr. Chaim Weizmann quotes a saying of his mother in those days:

“(….) whatever happens I shall be well off. If Shemuel (the revolutionary son) is right, we shall all be happy in Russia; and if Chaim (the Zionist) is right, then I shall go to live in Palestine.�

This receptivity of all movements does not always cease even after the potential true believer becomes the ardent convert of a specific movement. Where mass movements are in violent competition with each other, there are not infrequent instances of converts –even the most zealous— shifting their allegiance from one to the other.
A Ali turning John is neither a rarity nor a miracle. In our day, each proselytizing movement seems to regard the zealous adherents of its antagonist as its own potential converts. Isn’t it?
Hitler looked on the German communists as potential National Socialists: “The petit bourgeois social democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a national socialist but the communist always will,� Hilter wrote.
Captain Röhm boasted that he could turn the reddest Communist into a glowing nationalist in four weeks. On the other hand, Karl Radek (him again) looked on the Nazi Brown Shirts (the S.A.) as a reserve or future communist recruits.

Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same type of humanity and appeal to the same type of mind, it follows that all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others; and that all mass movements are interchangeable. It’s a act that deserves our attention, I believe.

One mass movement readily transforms itself into another. A religious movement may develop into a social revolution or a nationalist movement; a social revolution into militant nationalism or a religious movement; a nationalist movement into a social revolution or a religious movement.

The religious character of the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions is generally recognized. The hammer and the sickle and the swastika are in a class with the Cross. The ceremonial of their parades is the ceremonial of a religious procession. They have articles of faith, Saints martyrs and Holly sepulchers.
The Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions –as mass and insurgent movements are in Iraq it seems to me– are also full blown nationalist movements. The Nazi revolution had been so from the beginning while the nationalism of the Bolshevik was a late development.

The loyal reader of The Captain Journal will certainly notice that all I am saying here entertains certain continuity with my previous comment about the “David Kilcullen’s controversy.�

But that’s not my point, yet.

It’s just happen, I find, that the subject of beliefs is equally relevant to the question raised in this latest article Herschel Smith wrote. The difference lies in the possible profitable application of our knowledge in psychology and crowd behavior in the frame of the matter at hand.

I am not a proponent of reeducation camps and brainwashing, but I question in revenge the usefulness or mere indefinite incarceration of insurgents for the sole sake of punishing and interrogate them while more interesting opportunities seem to be within immediate reach of our voice, if I may say so.