Army's Prime Salesman of Counterinsurgency Manual Seeks to Defend Stolen Scholarship

http://www.counterpunch.org/price11032007.html

Weekend Edition
November 3 / 4, 2007

Refuting Lt. Colonel John Nagl
Army's Prime Salesman of Counterinsurgency Manual Seeks to Defend Stolen Scholarship
By DAVID PRICE

On November 1, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl posted a response to my recent CounterPunch article documenting unacknowledged use of other scholars' writing in the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Nagl contributed a foreword to the Chicago University Press edition of the Manual and was heavily involved in the Manual's production and promotion. I described him accurately in my first piece as "the Manual's poster boy, appearing on NPR, ABC News, NBC, and the pages of the NYT, Newsweek, and other publications, pitching the Manual as the philosophical expression of Petraeus' intellectual strategy for victory in Iraq."

Nagl's response can be found at http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/. A US Army spokesman, Major Tom McCuin, also posted this release on the Small Wars Journal website: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/11/

Nagl's response shirks the central points raised in my article. My primary aim was not, as he falsely claims, to continue an "assault on social scientists assisting national efforts to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan," it was to examine how the University of Chicago Press's republication of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual was part of the Pentagon's efforts to convince the American public that victory in Iraq would occur with a new academic approach to counterinsurgency. That some of this scholarship turns out to be fake scholarship exposes the hollowness of this sales pitch.

Lt. Col. Nagl wants it both ways. He was the Manual's public spokesman on the well oiled media circuit where he claimed that the new Manual was the product of high scholarship in the service of the state; yet when it became apparent that somewhere along the line in the production of the Manual the most basic of scholarly practices were abandoned, he now pretends that these rules do not apply in this context. He has to choose how he wants to pitch the Manual: scholarship or doctrine. He can't have it both ways anymore. I read U.S. Army Spokesman Major Tom McCuin's statement as military doublespeak declaring a mistakes-were-made-but-the-messages-remains-true admission that passages were indeed used in an inappropriate manner, so I guess what we have here is doctrine.

I am not applying inappropriate cultural standards to this work. As I wrote in my original CounterPunch piece, "To highlight the Manual's scholarly failures is not to hold it to some over-demanding, external standard of academic integrity. However, claims of academic integrity are the very foundation of the Manual's promotional strategy."