Star Wars and History

by Nancy Reagin

  If Lucas ever returns to Star Wars and completes the final cinematic trilogy that was to follow the events of Return of the Jedi, one hopes he will develop this theme further. For there will be future perils for Luke, Leia, and Han: the perils of victory, as they strive to adjust to their new status as leaders and power-brokers of an inherently disputatious and disordered galaxy. In the unavoidable reality of the messiness of life, the Sith desire for total dominance in the name of “order” and “security” will never be extinguished, whether in a galaxy far, far away or right here and right now on planet Earth.

  A Coda: The United States in Iraq and Afghanistan

  In the aftermath of the attacks by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, are subsequent actions by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan more consistent with an “Old Republic” advised by Jedi or with an Empire motivated by hatred and revenge? Interestingly, U.S. troops have themselves adopted the Jedi label to describe both their military skills and their noble intent. In the 1980s, field-grade officers who graduated from the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, became known within the U.S. Army as Jedi Knights.28 These officers designed the invasion plans both for Desert Storm and the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and for Operation Iraqi Freedom and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 (the apparently decisive success of the latter leading to celebrations of their military and specifically their “Jedi” prowess).29 Eight years later, Navy SEAL Team Six’s mission in Pakistan in 2011 that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden led the New York Times to gush that the SEALs were “America’s Jedi Knights.”30

  Yet the rapid collapse of Iraq into chaos and civil war from 2004 to 2008 and the stalemate (as of 2012) of Afghanistan raise questions whether the American military can accurately describe itself as being guided by an elite corps of Jedi-like masters. Indeed, since 9/11, the American way of war has often seemed more imperial than benevolent. Consider the U.S. military strategy of the moment in Afghanistan. It is designed to put down Taliban rebels or insurgents, hence the descriptive term counterinsurgency or COIN. Yet its goal is also to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people by protecting them from violence, as well as by offering them hope, usually in the form of billions of dollars in aid. It further involves moving heavily armed and armored troops into close contact with the locals (who are not always pleased with what they see as a foreign and potentially menacing presence in their midst) and of partnering with them in ways that are intended to be attuned to local cultural concerns and priorities.

  Such an approach seems tailor-made for U.S. Special Operations forces, one of those branches of “Jedi Knights” the U.S. military fancies it possesses. At the same time, however, the United States has adopted a far more aggressive and destructive approach to “winning” in Afghanistan. Call it the imperial or “Death Star” approach. How else to describe the building of a colossal U.S. embassy in Kabul and a sprawling network of steroidal military bases?31 These are arguably American analogs to the Imperial Death Star and Star Destroyers of Star Wars. The United States proceeds to garrison these bases with “warriors” and mercenaries, while at the same time isolating them (in the name of “force protection”) from the majority of the Afghan people.

  Imperial stormtroopers; (inset) American forces in anonymizing body armor. (A New Hope)

  Amazingly, few Americans sense the tension—indeed, the contradiction—inherent in these approaches. In places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States seems to believe it can be both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, both cunning and courteous Jedi Knight and kinetic Dark Lord of imperial power projection. Whether the aggressive jackboot of imperial military action is consistent with the “knowledge and defense” actions of skilled Jedi advisers remains to be seen. Yet it is difficult to envision how a country can have it both ways. Over time, the elite skills and good deeds of the U.S. military’s “Jedi” will likely prove insufficient to erase the looming and darker presence of its militarized embassy, its sprawling network of bases, and the destructive power of its weapons among the Afghan people.

  As the U.S. military engages in what is now euphemistically termed kinetic operations (deadly combat, in plain speak) in Afghanistan, the Afghan rebels have demonstrated a surprising ability to weather American firepower, while employing indigenous knowledge and homegrown technology of their own. American war-making relies heavily on high-tech weaponry and the profligate expenditure of ammunition and munitions, from .50-caliber machine gun rounds to grenades to 30-mm cannon and heavier mortar and artillery rounds to 2,000-pound bombs dropped by B-1 bombers, all in support of platoon- and company-level operations.

  Pacification by massive firepower, however, inevitably leads to noncombatant casualties and collateral damage that undermine the counterinsurgency strategy of winning Afghan hearts and minds. In his book War, the celebrated journalist Sebastian Junger recounts how, after one such instance of unintended civilian casualties, the Afghan elders of Yaka Chine met to declare jihad against American forces in the valley, despite apologies and appeals made by the U.S. commander at the scene.32

  In countering this massive use of firepower, Afghan rebels make do mainly with rifles, even World War I–vintage bolt-action Lee-Enfields, the Afghan equivalent to the Rebel lightsaber, together with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and a few machine guns. Like the Ewoks, however, the Afghan “primitives” have “force multipliers” of their own, as Junger, who was embedded with U.S. combat troops, recounts:

  For every technological advantage held by the Americans, the Taliban seemed to have an equivalent or a countermeasure. Apache helicopters have thermal imaging that reveals body heat on the mountainside, so Taliban fighters disappear by covering themselves in a blanket on a warm rock. The Americans use unmanned drones to pinpoint the enemy, but the Taliban can do the same thing by watching the flocks of crows that circle American soldiers, looking for scraps of food. The Americans have virtually unlimited firepower, so the Taliban send only one guy to take on an entire firebase. Whether or not he gets killed, he will have succeeded in gumming up the machine for yet one more day.33

  In the eyes of the Afghan people, one might imagine that U.S. troops, with all of their heavy weaponry, ordnance, and armor, recall the heavy-handed presence and trigger-happy cockiness of Imperial stormtroopers in Star Wars. For the self-anointed American Jedi, such an image would naturally be difficult to perceive.

  A menacing Tusken Raider. (A New Hope)

  I have also heard, from U.S. officers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, of a tendency for U.S. troops to refer to Iraqis and Afghans as “Sand People” (the violent and vicious desert nomads of Tatooine in Star Wars) and to comment disparagingly about their dirty homes and disgusting habits.34 For troops hailing from the material comforts and the antiseptic luxuries of twenty-first-century America, such comments are predictable, if not exactly expedient. More important, such comments (and there are far worse) reveal a certain contempt that is more consistent with a high-handed and hegemonic empire than it is with an enlightened corps of Jedi.

  As U.S. troops deploy across the “galaxy” of planet Earth (and estimates suggest that in 2011, U.S. Special Forces were deployed to an astonishing seventy countries, with plans to expand to a further fifty), seeking ostensibly to combat terror and to spread freedom and democracy, will they use their considerable “force” for knowledge or defense, or will they forever be on the attack?35 In the increasing production and use of robotic aerial drones (with such nicknames as “Predators” and “Reapers”) on assassination missions, so eerily reminiscent of the replicated clones of Star Wars, will they succumb to the temptation of the dark side in a febrile quest for “full spectrum dominance” of the globe, however it may be couched in benevolent terms?36 Or will they come to recognize, in the wise words of Yoda, that “wars not make one great”?

  Yoda tells Luke that “wars not make one great.” (The Empire Strikes Back)

  Such questions, stimulated by the rich
ness of the Star Wars galaxy, are not easily answered, even as they grow ever more vital by the day.

  Notes

  1. Sanchez, quoted in Andrew J. Bacevich, “The Petraeus Doctrine,” Atlantic Monthly, October 2008, 17–20.

  2. Photo by 1352 Photo Group AAVS, Number 1274, Detachment 5, Unclassified, dated 1965, in the author’s possession.

  3. The fictional wars of Star Wars and the real wars of the American Revolution and Vietnam are not perfect analogs, of course. In the Star Wars universe, both sides were fighting for keeps, whereas in the United States in the 1780s and in Vietnam in the 1970s, one side could choose to withdraw across the ocean and go away. Thus, after Yorktown in 1781, the British decided that the cost of defeating the American revolutionaries was simply too high; ditto the United States in the early 1970s, whose leaders decided that the war in Vietnam was no longer winnable at a reasonable cost.

  4. Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). Instrumental in his selection as a presidential candidate, Lincoln’s brilliant speech, which further decoupled slavery from federal authority and sanction, antagonized supporters of slavery, sowing yet another seed for Southern secession and Civil War after Lincoln won the election later that year.

  5. Militarily, the Tet Offensive was a clear defeat for the North Vietnamese and especially for the Viet Cong. The general uprising they sought to provoke did not materialize, and VC cadres were mauled by superior American firepower. Strategically, however, the extent and violence of the Tet Offensive shocked Americans at home, who had been told by the military that the war had already nearly been won. The U.S. media also tended to exaggerate—if not sensationalize—the effectiveness of the offensive. See Don Oberdorfer, Tet!: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1971], 2001); and Peter Braestrup, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, 2 vols. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977).

  6. See Samuel B. Griffith II, Mao Tse-Tung on Guerrilla Warfare (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1978); and Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War, People’s Army (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962).

  7. Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985).

  8. As one American military adviser noted, “Charlie [the Viet Cong] doesn’t need advisers when he conducts a sapper attack. He doesn’t need Tac[tical] air [support], or gunships or artillery. He’s hungry and he’s got a cause and he’s motivated. Therein lies the difference. On our side [the South Vietnamese army] nobody is hungry and few are motivated.” Quoted in Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 172.

  9. French general Jacques Hogard, who fought in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s, spoke of five stages of people’s (or revolutionary) warfare: (1) Reconnaissance of the population by propagandists and agitators; (2) the creation of nodes and networks of sympathizers, while simultaneously intimidating opponents and neutrals; (3) the deployment of armed cells to commit acts of terror to weaken the government’s legitimacy; (4) guerrilla warfare to gain control over portions of the countryside, to include setting up a parallel rebel government; and (5) a conventional offensive to overthrow the government. Hogard’s stages 1 to 3 are commonly collapsed into “Phase One” of People’s War, with stages 4 and 5 becoming Phases Two and Three, respectively. See Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria (New York: Praeger, 1964).

  10. Literature on guerrilla warfare is vast. One might start with Lawrence of Arabia’s classic entry on “guerrilla warfare,” written for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1929), reprinted in Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (New York: Viking, 1992). For an extended treatment, see Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975).

  11. Lucas’s original script for Star Wars includes an extended scene with Luke’s best friend and fellow pilot on Tatooine, Biggs Darklighter. Prior to Luke’s decision to follow Ben and join the Rebellion, Biggs entrusts Luke with his own secret: that he’s leaving the Imperial Academy to join the Rebels because he wants “to be on the right side—the side I believe in.” In the extended canon of Star Wars, Biggs’s principled decision to join the Rebel Alliance surely influences Luke at this pivotal moment in his life. Carol Titelman, ed., The Art of Star Wars, including the Complete Script of the Film by George Lucas (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 28–29.

  12. Richard M. Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). In destroying the Empire’s “ultimate weapon” and defeating its ultimate enforcer (Vader), the Rebels show they are a force to be reckoned with—and they show the Empire’s supporters there is no place safe for them.

  13. John M. Gates, “People’s War in Vietnam,” Journal of Military History 54 (July 1990): 325–344.

  14. Certainly, the most powerful cinematic depiction of People’s War remains The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, Rialto Pictures, Italy/Algeria, 1966.

  15. Cited in Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 97.

  16. See, for example, Robert Cowley, ed., What If? The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (New York: Berkley Books, 2000).

  17. Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Robert Grainger Ker Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1966); Anthony Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948–60 (London: Frederick Muller, 1975). The insurgents in Malaya and the Philippines were effectively isolated from external support, whereas the American rebels of the 1770s had extensive help from France, and the North Vietnamese had considerable support from China and the Soviet Union.

  18. For the events that ended with the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, one might say that both the United States and South Vietnam lost faith with each other. Put differently: perhaps they never fully understood each other, a cultural and communication gap that proved unbridgeable precisely because it was so poorly perceived. See, for example, Stephen T. Hosmer et al., The Fall of South Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders (New York: Crane, Russak and Co., 1980), esp. 82–83.

  19. Bernard B. Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1967); and Johnson, quoted by George C. Herring, “‘Cold Blood’: LBJ’s Conduct of Limited War in Vietnam,” in Dennis E. Showalter and John Albert, eds., An American Dilemma: Vietnam, 1964–1973 (Chicago: Imprint, 1993), 63–85. Such overconfidence was seen in the earliest days of American involvement in Indochina. In 1953, for example, when the United States was aiding France in its long and debilitating war, a U.S. Marine colonel boasted that “two good American divisions with the normal aggressive American spirit could clean up the situation in the Tonkin Gulf in ten months.” Cited in George C. Herring, “The Legacy of the First Indochina War,” in John Schlight, ed., The Second Indochina War Symposium: Papers and Commentary (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1986), 9–34.

  20. Obviously, the Ewoks in their primitive innocence are nowhere near as nasty as the real-life Viet Cong, who as insurgents were quite skilled at using torture and terror to advance their cause. It is hard to imagine Ewoks terrorizing villages to extort loyalty, for example, tactics that the VC employed on a regular basis in the vicious war that was Vietnam.

  21. I am indebted to Peter Carr for this analysis.

  22. “Southeast Asia” includes the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, as well as Vietnam. The “Little Boy” uranium bomb used at Hiroshima exploded with a force of roughly 16 kilotons, or 16,000 tons of TNT. So many bombs were dropped in so many rural areas that the death toll
of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians remains impossible to measure accurately; reliable sources suggest casualties from aerial bombing alone in the hundreds of thousands. For example, citing U.S. military estimates, PBS records that Operation Rolling Thunder, a “graduated” bombing campaign from 1965 to 1968, killed 182,000 North Vietnamese civilians. See “Battlefield: Vietnam” Timeline, entry for November 1, 1968, http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/timeline/index2.html. Together with the dead and the wounded, of course, were all of the civilians who lost their homes and livelihoods in the bombing.

  23. See Stanley Karnow, “Vietnam War Commander Westmoreland Dies at 91,” NPR Morning Edition, July 19, 2005, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4760273.

  24. Many would disagree with this conclusion, of course. For a range of opinions on the Vietnam War and its meaning, see Gil Dorland, Legacy of Discord: Voices of the Vietnam Era (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2001); and Norman A. Graebner, “The Scholar’s View of Vietnam, 1964–1992,” in Dennis E. Showalter and John Albert, eds., An American Dilemma: Vietnam, 1964–1973 (Chicago: Imprint, 1993), 13–52.

  25. In some ways, the Death Star is reminiscent of the V1 and V2 “vengeance weapons” of Adolf Hitler in World War II. In spreading terror through destruction, they were meant to be decisive, war-winning weapons. In its sheer destructiveness and massive expense, the Death Star also echoes the Manhattan Project of World War II that led to the atomic bombs of 1945 and later to the hydrogen (or thermonuclear) bombs that haunted the world during the Cold War. For more on the Death Star, see chapter 8, “Fear Is the Path to the Dark Side.”